Raider Pod Generator

Paste your class list

One name per line, or separated by commas. Then pick how to sort them:

How do I get my class list from myRJ or Canvas?

Get all your classes from myRJ at once:
1. In myRJ, open any class and go to Roster → Run Roster/Student Reports → Manual Attendance Sheet - By Teacher And Section.
2. Set Section to All, then choose View/Export → Excel.
3. Open the downloaded file. Click the letter A above the first column to select the whole column, then press Ctrl+C.
4. Click in the box below and press Ctrl+V.
5. Your classes appear as a list. Tick the ones you want, rename them if you like (for example 2RW), and press Save. Each one becomes its own class; everyone is never loaded as one big list.
Step-by-step guide in the Canvas PD course

Or copy from Canvas or myRJ instead: open one class's Canvas People page, its Canvas Gradebook, or its myRJ Roster tab. Scroll to the bottom so everyone loads, press Ctrl+A and then Ctrl+C, and paste below. Only student names are kept.

🔒 Names never leave this computer.Why it’s safe

This protects student privacy. Your roster never leaves your computer. There is no account and no upload — the names stay in this browser, on your machine. RJ Ed Tech never receives them, never stores them, and cannot see them. Pasting your class list here does not share student PII with anyone. If you would still rather not use full names, first name plus last initial works just as well.

Split the class into quarters by how well they understand the material

Put your class in order by how well they understand this material, then drag them across in four even chunks: the top 25% into Group 1, the next 25% into Group 2, the next into Group 3, the bottom 25% into Group 4. Judge it however you normally would — grades, the last test or quiz, recent assessment scores, a pre-assessment for the unit, or your own read of where they are. It does not have to be exact, and it describes this unit rather than the student. Anyone left in the pool does not get a seat in a pod.

Unsorted Pool

Every pod takes one student from each quarter, so every pod holds four different levels of understanding instead of four students sitting in the same place. A pod where everyone already understands it has nothing to explain; a pod where nobody does has nobody to ask.

Here is how a pod of four sits. The students who need you most are nearest you, and the pairings fall out of the seating:

↑ Farthest from you

Group 1Top 25%

↔ FACE ↔

Group 2Upper middle 25%

↕ SHOULDER

Group 3Lower middle 25%

↔ FACE ↔

Group 4Bottom 25%

↓ Nearest you

Face partners are one quarter apart — Group 1 with Group 2, Group 3 with Group 4. That puts the top half of the room together and the back half together. Shoulder partners are two quarters apart — Group 1 with Group 3, Group 2 with Group 4, so the explaining travels further. Group 1 and Group 4 never work together directly, because that gap is usually too wide: the explanation goes over the other student's head and it turns into one doing the work while the other copies it down.

That cap is the whole design — every pairing is close enough that an explanation can land. But seating is only proximity. What turns it into talk is the structure you run on top, and that is what raises achievement — the Cooperative Learning Toolkit has those, and Why pods of four below the buckets has the research.

Group 1 · Top 25%0

Drag students here

Group 2 · Upper middle 25%0

Drag students here

Group 3 · Lower middle 25%0

Drag students here

Group 4 · Bottom 25%0

Drag students here

Split the class into quarters by how well they understand the material

Put your class in order by how well they understand this material, then paste it in four even chunks — top 25%, next 25%, next 25%, bottom 25%. Judge it however you normally would — grades, test and quiz scores, recent assessment results, a pre-assessment, or your own read of where they are.

Group 1 · Top 25%

Group 2 · Upper middle 25%

Group 3 · Lower middle 25%

Group 4 · Bottom 25%

Save the class so you only sort it once

Sorting is the slow part — do it once. Give the class a name like Period 1 and it becomes a button at the top of this page that brings back the groups, the unsorted names, and the never-pair rules in one click.

Back it up — or move it to another computer

Download one small file that holds every saved class. Keep it in OneDrive, or restore it on your laptop, your classroom computer, or a new browser to get all your rosters back in one step.

⬆ Restore from file

Saved classes live in this browser only. Clearing your browsing data, using a different computer, or switching browsers will lose them. A backup file takes two seconds and keeps them safe.

Never-Pair Rules

≠

No rules — all pairings allowed

Builds your pods and opens the seating chart

Why a pod needs a range in it

Four students who all understand the material have nothing to ask each other. Four who are all lost have nobody to ask. So the class is split into quarters by how well students understand the material, and every pod takes one student from each quarter — that is what guarantees the mix. The seating is deliberate rather than random. Shoulder partners are two quarters apart (Group 1 with Group 3, Group 2 with Group 4) and face partners are one apart (Group 1 with Group 2, Group 3 with Group 4). Group 1 and Group 4 never work together directly — putting them together sounds like the helpful thing to do, but that gap is usually too wide: the explanation lands over the other student's head and it becomes one student working while the other copies. Capping every pairing at two quarters keeps all of it close enough for an explanation to get through.

If you just want groups, stop here. Generate the pods, read them off the board, and you are done — the rest of this is for teachers who want to seat the pods and use the partner pairs.

Pod of 4 — the default layout

↑ Far from teacher

Group 1

Already mastered it

Group 2

Mostly there

↕ shoulder↕ shoulder

Group 3

Partway there

Group 4

Just starting on it

↓ Near teacher

Shoulder partners — Group 1 with Group 3, and Group 2 with Group 4. Two quarters apart.
Face partners — Group 1 with Group 2, and Group 3 with Group 4. One quarter apart: the closest pairing in the pod.

Nobody is ever paired with someone too far away. Group 1 never works directly with Group 4 — that pairing only exists on the diagonal. The widest pairing in the pod is two quarters and the narrowest is one, and that cap is the entire point: every conversation in the pod is close enough in understanding that an explanation actually works. The seating gets them near enough to explain; the structures do the rest.

Face partners give you two conversations at once — the top half of the room working together, and the back half working together. That makes it a check on your teaching as much as a grouping. Say "Face partners, explain step three to each other." If your Group 1s and 2s cannot explain it to each other, the top half of the room has not got it and you need to reteach before you go on. At the same time Groups 3 and 4 are talking at their own level instead of sitting quiet while somebody well above them narrates.

Shoulder partners cross the halves — Group 1 with Group 3, Group 2 with Group 4. Two quarters apart, so this is the pairing where one student has genuinely more to unpack for the other. Use it when you want the explaining to travel further, and alternate it with face work so the same student is not doing all of it.

Then use a structure. Neither pairing produces talk on its own — proximity is not a task. Name the pair and give them a job with a required output: "Face partners, explain step three, then I am asking one of you at random", or "Shoulder partners, compare answers and write the one sentence you both agree on." One instruction moves the whole room and nobody negotiates who they are working with.

What to do once they are seated: the Cooperative Learning Toolkit has the structures — a library of collaborative methods, an Activity Designer for building the task, and a Question Designer for the prompts you put in front of the pair.

Pod of 3 — when the numbers don't divide evenly

↑ Far from teacher

Group 1

Already mastered it

Group 2

Mostly there

Group 3

Partway there

↓ Near teacher

When the class doesn't divide by four, whoever is left over forms pods of 3. One student sits farthest from you and the other two sit nearest, so a pod of 3 has one face pair on each side and a shoulder pair across the bottom. In practice, three students are close enough that everyone works with everyone — you can call a pair by name or just say "in your pod of three."

One thing to know: leftovers are taken from whichever groups still have students in them, so a pod of 3 will not always hold three different quarters the way a pod of 4 always does. Glance at the badges before you set a task on it, and drag names between groups if you want a different mix.

How to sort your class

Go by how much of this material each student has already mastered. Any evidence you already have works: their grade in your class, performance on tests and quizzes, what they earned on recent assessments, a pre-assessment for the unit, the last few assignments, or simply your read of where they are. The students who have it go in Group 1, the students just starting on it go in Group 4, and the rest split between Groups 2 and 3 — about a quarter of the class in each. It does not need to be precise; a reasonable read is the whole point. Drag anyone to a different group the moment your read changes.

What the research actually says

Worth being straight about this, because it changes how you use the tool. Putting students in small groups, on its own, does very little. Across 145 studies the average achievement effect of small-group work over whole-class teaching was about +0.17, and head-to-head comparisons of mixed-level against same-level grouping came out roughly even — in that same review, slightly in favour of same-level (+0.12). Hattie puts within-class grouping at d = 0.18.

What moves achievement is the cooperative structure laid on top of the grouping. Hattie reports d = 0.55 for cooperative versus individualistic learning. Slavin's review is sharper: team learning where the group's success depends on every individual member learning it has a median effect of +0.32, while informal group work with no such accountability sits at +0.07.

The mechanism is explanation. Students who give and receive elaborated explanations gain the most, and trading bare answers is negatively related to achievement gain. Mixing the quarters is what makes a real explanation possible — it does not cause one.

So the pods are the setup, not the intervention. Give each pod a goal it can only reach if every member learns the material, hold individuals accountable for their own understanding, and ask for reasoning rather than answers. One more finding worth planning around: Webb found that in mixed groups the higher-attaining students do most of the explaining — so the students who would gain most from explaining are the ones least likely to do it. Assign who explains rather than leaving it to the pod.

Lou et al., Within-Class Grouping: A Meta-Analysis (1996) · Hattie, Visible Learning effect sizes · Slavin, What Makes Groupwork Work? · Webb, Explanation Giving and Receiving

When to reshuffle

Reshuffle every 5–6 weeks so students work with different people across the semester. Your sort stays put — only the pod combinations change. And because the groups describe where someone is with the current material, expect the sort itself to shift between units: move a student to a different group before you regenerate, and the pods follow. The tool keeps your sort between visits.

Group 1 · Top 25% Group 2 · Upper middle 25% Group 3 · Lower middle 25% Group 4 · Bottom 25% · Click to lock 🔒

You have your pods — now make the explaining happen

Cooperative Learning Toolkit

Seating students together does not make them explain anything — a structure does. That is the whole finding: groups only outperform when the task makes every student accountable for their own understanding, and when students trade reasoning rather than answers. The Toolkit is where those structures live.

Library — collaborative structures you can run tomorrow, each with the pairing it needs
Activity Designer — build the task so every pod member has to learn it, not just finish it
Question Designer — the prompt you put in front of a face or shoulder pair
Activity Architect — an AI planning assistant for the whole lesson

Open the Cooperative Learning Toolkit →

Your seating chart will appear here

Nothing to show yet. Sort your class into the four groups on the Setup tab, then press Generate Pods — you will be brought straight here, and this is where you come back to reshuffle, copy the list, or check who is sitting with whom.

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