Ability Grouping

You ask a special education teacher her thoughts on ability grouping. ha! That is my world. However, I believe most classes should be as heterogeneous as possible. Children learn from each other. Those that aren't as skilled or as intelligent as others are able to gain skills from those who are. And the higher level students have opportunities to learn tolerance and patience. I do believe those children should be challenged however, and not given busy work. They need to be provided with opportunities to grow and work to their full potential.
While I believe classes should be heterogeneous, I also do believe in small group instruction where students are grouped based on abilities. This way, instruction is tailored to the needs of the students. According to the text, Jeannie Oakes has taken a stance against tracking. She believes it is, "Wrong to deny access to deeper academic content and opportunities based on ability". (I'm not formally citing this as it is a blog post - and I don't know if you want APA or MLA or NFL...wait...). I must say I disagree with this statement. It is unfair to move ahead of a student's ability level expecting them to understand the content which is being taught and at the same time, I believe it is unfair to hold back a gifted or higher level student in order to wait on the other students to catch up. I wonder if this woman ever taught!?! I'm clearly not the influential spokesperson though, so what do I know?
In response to the stigma theory, I do believe children are aware of the levels of groups. I recall the way we were tracked in middle school. Each group had a name, and they were all cool names (I guess), but everyone knew which group was the lower group and which group was the higher group. But these were entire classes that were grouped. Not small groups set up in a classroom.
And while we can group homogeneously in the classroom for direct instruction, we should also be grouping heterogeneously for projects and assignments. Just because a student isn't gifted doesn't mean he or she won't have something to contribute. And while a student may be gifted, it doesn't mean that student will be the one with all the great ideas and running the group. But I guess I'm getting off topic here and moving on to cooperative learning. So I'm calling it quits for this blog.