Attempt at differentiating foiled by students

On Friday I taught a lesson in the humanities class using segments from the book, The Overachievers. I copied sections from Frank, Julie and CJ and gave a different part to each student. The students read them individually and then met in small groups depending upon which character they had. I made discussion questions for the class based on the current humanities' theme, "conflict." After small group discussion, everyone participated in a whole class discussion. The discussion went so well that my co-op asked me to teach the same lesson to our 11th grade tech section.

We decided to make some changes prior to teaching the lesson: I shortened the reading, made a handout with more specific discussion questions, and we went through the class list and assigned parts based on reading ability. Some of the students in the class read at a very high level, while others are consistently scoring below basic and really struggling to complete assignments in the class. When the students entered the classroom, my co-op handed them a packet to read based on our assessments of their reading ability. After everyone read silently for thirty minutes, they broke into their small groups. As my co-op and I walked around the classroom, we noticed that the groups were not what we had arranged. The students had switched packets so that they could be with their friends!

Unfortunately, many of the students became frustrated because the reading was too difficult or too long for their skill level. I was pretty frustrated too because we had made an effort to differentiate the assignment so that everyone would only be stretched a little, not completely out of their comfort zone. The discussion groups didn't work out well because the students that were frustrated and didn't understand the reading started to distract the other students, and pretty soon everyone was off task.

At the end of the day, my co-op and I processed the differences between the humanities section and the 11th grade tech section; we both ended up feeling disappointed with the way the activity turned out in the 11th grade class. I'm not sure how to structure this activity differently so that it is more appealing to the 11th grade section...I'm going to keep thinking about it because I know those kids like reading nonfiction texts about teens, so this should be something that interest them.