Grouping and Activation

A class of thirty children may have ten or twelve distinct support plans among them, but many children will share the same plan, the same main focus, the same level of support, and the same preferred delivery format. Those children can be taught together. Grouping finds them. Activation is the step where the teacher reviews those groups and commits to a plan for each one.

How grouping works

The platform computes groups automatically when the teacher opens the grouping view, or when a nightly recompute runs for active classes. The computation is deterministic: given the same recommendations and the same configuration, it produces the same groups every time.

To be placed in the same group, children must share five things:

The same recommended support plan.
The same primary anchor skill within that plan.
A compatible scaffold level. For teacher-led delivery, Foundation and Targeted levels can be merged into a single group because a teacher working with a small group can differentiate within it; Independence is kept separate. For non-teacher-led formats, Foundation and Targeted remain separate groups.
A compatible delivery format across all group members.
Enough evidence to have a recommendation at all.

These five criteria define the group identity. Children who share all five can be taught together. A group is addressed by this identity, not by a database number, so the teacher’s view is always grounded in what the group actually has in common.

Minimum group size is two children. A single-child group is not displayed as a group; that child is instead shown to the teacher individually, where the teacher can decide how to support them separately.

Children excluded from grouping

Two categories of children are always excluded from group placement, regardless of what their plans say.

The first category is children with an open alert indicating a sharp recent drop in performance. A drop of 20 percent or more in two comparable sessions triggers an alert that requires the teacher’s attention before any plan proceeds. These children are pulled from the group pool entirely and shown separately. They are never bulk-assigned as part of a group action.

The second category is children whose data is still incomplete: no profile has been resolved yet, or the evidence on a key skill is flagged as “not enough data yet.” These children also appear separately so the teacher can see what data is still needed.

Both exclusions are firm. There is no override that moves an excluded child back into a group, because the reasons for exclusion require direct teacher review, not a batch action.

What the teacher sees before activating

Before the teacher commits to anything, the platform shows a preview of the proposed groups. The preview includes:

Which children are in each group and what their shared plan is.
How the scaffold levels distribute across the group. For a group of eight children in the Foundation and Targeted merge band, the preview shows how many are at each level, so the teacher understands the range they would be working with.
Which children are in the excluded buckets (sharp drop and incomplete data) and what the next step is for each.

The teacher can adjust group membership at this point. If a child has a circumstance that makes them a poor fit for a particular group, the teacher can move them out, with a reason selected from the provided list.

The activation step

Once the teacher is satisfied with a group’s composition, they confirm it. The confirmation is explicit: the teacher submits a list of the children they intend to activate as a group. The platform validates that list against the current state of the class before writing anything. If the class situation has changed since the preview was generated, the teacher is notified and the preview is refreshed before they can proceed.

A group activation creates one support plan assignment per child. The assignments are written through the same path as individual assignments. There is no separate bulk write path; the same rules, checks, and audit records apply.

Per-child adjustments can be applied at the moment of activation. If one child in the group has a scheduling constraint, or if the teacher wants to start a specific child at a different scaffold level, those adjustments are entered at this step with a reason code from the available list. No free-text fields are accepted.

The guided workflow

The full activation process has seventeen defined steps, grouped into five phases:

Review (steps 1 to 4): the teacher loads the class’s current recommendations, guardrails check each one, and the recommendation panel is displayed.
Grouping (steps 5 to 8): the platform computes groups, shows the scaffold distribution preview, and the teacher has the opportunity to adjust membership.
Activation (steps 9 to 11): the teacher reviews each group, applies any per-child adjustments, and confirms the group for activation.
Monitoring (steps 12 to 15): once plans are running, the teacher returns to this phase to see current status and respond to alerts.
Decision (steps 16 to 17): the teacher continues, modifies, escalates, or exits a plan based on the monitoring picture.

A draft is saved throughout. If a teacher closes the view and returns later, the draft restores to where they left off. Drafts expire after seven days of inactivity.

What activation records

Every activation records the teacher’s decision, the time, the reason for any adjustments, and the step in the workflow where the decision was made. This record is permanent and append-only. No activation decision is ever silently overwritten.

Intervention Plans: how a plan is matched to a child and what the plan is made of.
Task Delivery: once a plan is active, how the platform picks tasks for each session.
How Amal Works: where grouping and activation sit in the full teaching cycle.