The Class Passport
Assigning Students to Diverse Teams


Instructor Guide:
I use a class passport to help me learn my student's names, learn a little bit about them, and to help me assign them to teams.  The instructions for creating the class passport are below.  When students bring these to class, I order them (highest to lowest) by the total number of points they assigned themselves in the 6-question survey.  When I have determined the number and size of the teams I want for the class, I go through the stack of passports one at a time, assigning students to each team.  So let's say I have 50 students in my class and I want to have 10 teams of 5 students.  The 1st student in the stack of passports is assigned to team 1, the 2nd to team 2 etc...until one student has been assigned to each of the 10 teams.  The next ten students in the stack of passports are then assigned to each of the 10 teams, one at a time until each team has 2 students.  This continues until all 50 students have been assigned to the 10 teams.  The value of this method of assigning students to teams is that each team member has at least one student that has scored high on the survey, and one student who scored low.   Therefore teams end up being a diverse mix of students. 

Class passport assignment