The web is undergoing a fundamental change. It is moving away from its current structure of documents and pages linked together, and towards a new structure that is built around people. This is a profound change that will affect how we create business strategy, design, marketing, and advertising. The reason for this shift is simple. For tens of thousands of years we’ve been social animals. The web, which is only 20 years old, is simply catching up with offline life. From travel to news to commerce, smart businesses are reorienting their efforts around people – around the social behavior of their customers and potential customers. In order to be successful, businesses will need to understand how people are connected, how their social network influences them, how the people closest to them influence them the most, and how it’s more important for marketers to focus on small, connected groups of friends rather than looking for overly influential individuals. This book pulls together the latest research from leading universities and technology companies to describe how people are connected, and how ideas and brand messages spread through social networks. It shows readers how to rebuild their business around social behavior, and create products that people tell their friends about.

Want to make your instruction more equitable and effective, more interesting, and more fun? It's time to try flexible grouping. Unlike traditional grouping, which typically puts like with like or combines students without regard to the best way to promote their individual growth, flexible grouping is both purposeful and fluid, regularly combining and recombining different students in different ways to pursue a wide range of academic and affective goals. In this comprehensive guide to flexible grouping, author Kristina J. Doubet shares a staged implementation approach that takes students from simple partner set-ups designed to build cooperative skills to complex structures ideal for interest and readiness-informed academic exploration. She covers the key factors to consider when forming groups and highlights how this approach to organizing learning can help you disrupt rigid tracking, deliver targeted instruction, connect to student interests, boost collaboration, and build community. Focused, practical, and written for teachers of all subjects and grade levels, The Flexibly Grouped Classroom provides * Dozens of strategies to expand your instructional repertoire, along with links to additional models and resources; * Guidance on setting the tone and expectations for group tasks, ideas for student role distribution, and tips for monitoring progress, noise, and time; * A planning template and sample grouping plans for an elementary and secondary classroom; and * Specific troubleshooting advice to help you navigate common complications. Choosing to make your classroom a flexibly grouped one means positioning every student to learn better—without feeling superior or inferior, without being overburdened or underchallenged—and to discover for themselves how much farther they can go together than they ever could alone.

Master flexible grouping and differentiation strategies to challenge every learner, every day. Grouping learners purposefully throughout the school day based on their needs and the curriculum remains the single best way to differentiate instruction. This award-winning guide will help teachers expertly use flexible grouping and differentiation strategies to respond to students’ diverse learning needs, abilities, and interests. Included are methods for creating groups based on assessment data, planning group lessons and tiered assignments, engaging learners at all levels, supporting personalized learning, grading collaborative work, and communicating with parents about the benefits of groupwork and productive struggle. Digital content contains all forms from the book and a PDF presentation. A free online PLC/Book Study Guide is available at freespirit.com/PLC.

The purpose of the study was to examine if there was a significant difference between first-grade English Learners (EL) who constitute a majority (>50%) of the English language mainstream classroom (homogeneous grouping) and first-grade EL who constitute a minority (

This report describes an application of a hierarchical grouping procedure to a problem of grouping test profiles to maximize the homogeneity of profiles within the same clusters, taking account of all profile variables and all clusters at the same time. The data are 25 test profiles to which Sawrey, Keller, + Conger applied a different grouping technique. The results of the two grouping techniques are compared. Desirable characteristics of the hierarchical grouping technique are demonstrated.Any measure of profile similarity can be used. It is unnecessary to specify in advance the number of groups to be formed or to select nucleus groups. The cost of grouping can be evaluated in terms of any criterion expressed as a functional relation, or objective function. The resulting hierarchical structure of k profiles is that which, at each stage (k, k-1, ..., 1), least impairs the objective-function value. hus the hierarchical grouping technique shows not only the order in which profiles must be grouped so as to yield the optimal value of the objective function when the number of profiles is systematically reduced, but also the costs of the grouping at each stage of the hierarchy.