Creating teamwork and collaboration through the use of Popsicle sticks

While working in classroom, I found that students gravitated towards friends to create their team or learning community.  This behavior created "clicky" groups in the classroom and I noticed silos of learning taking place.  What I decided to implement in my classroom was randomizing the groups with Popsicle sticks.  Each time we had a learning activity I used these sticks (that had a student name per stick) to randomly place the students into groups.  Each time we met in class, we had some sort of collaboration occuring and now the students were working with the entire class in these assigned groups.  What I found happened over the semester......  the class became a family.  All students worked together in a seamless manner.  I found that the classroom became a safer environment, students knew one another and felt supported.  In the fall of 2017, I will be doing a qualitative pre/post evaluation to see if the students agree with my observations.