ABSTRACT This article concerns issues of classroom management in heterogeneous classrooms.
Although research in the field of learning styles has yielded mixed results, there is a call for information
about how they could be used to individualize instruction, especially in primary schools. This article is
part of an ethnographic study aiming to examine teacher collaboration in a primary school and it draws
strongly on field notes and on interviews with teachers. The intention was to discover how the two
teachers in the classroom studied categorized pupils according to the learning styles model they had
invented, and how the resulting groups were used for the purposes of classroom management. The
study revealed that, first, learning styles seem to work as a grouping method and, second, that flexible
grouping can diminish problematic situations traditionally related to heterogeneous classrooms