Best MVC design practice?

[eluser]mddd[/eluser]
Your way is also perfectly valid. There is no one true solution. Separation also has its advantages.

I try to combine related things because they are often queried together. In your example, you would first have to load the rotation info : $this->rotation->get($id) which takes a database query and then you look up the students like you showed.. that's another query. If you do that a lot it is less efficient.