Before each unit of Math Workshop, my teaching partner and I pre-test the students to determine their prior knowledge about the concepts in the unit we are about to teach. Using that information, we create three groups (high, medium, low).

The students obviously are not told what group they are in, and the groups do change throughout the year as we move through each new unit. Students are assigned to a group with a name that goes along with our theme. We are careful to make sure that the group names change after each unit so that, for example, the low group was not always "The Titanic" when doing math workshop in our nautical-themed classroom.