Mixed-Age Classrooms
It will probably come as no surprise to anyone if I say that the best way to make sure a student learns something for the long term is to make sure said student is interested in the material presented, and ready to learn it, both developmentally and because they have already acquired the necessary previous knowledge. Presenting material that is just challenging enough without being frustrating is really the key.
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Most schools, however, seem to make it impossible for this situation to arise. Age grouping of students by grade assumes that all students of a certain age are at the same level of intellectual (and emotional) development and have similar skill levels. If that were the case, presenting material that is the right amount of challenging for everyone shouldn’t be too difficult. But this idea is nothing more than an averaging trick. In reality, the middle 50% of students may be in somewhat similar developmental circumstances (although I would make that percentage a lot smaller), while the ones above and below that
In an average classroom, only a handful of students are actually paying attention and working on material that is right for them.
will find that the material being taught is not right for them. It also creates unnecessary divisions within a classroom, where some students are seen as the “dumb” ones, and some as “geniuses” that can only work by themselves. It’s a system that puts being average in an exalted position and paints every deviation from average as a problem that needs special attention and consideration from the teacher.
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Composite, multi-grade classrooms are the solution
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In contrast, a composite, multi-grade classroom allows the teacher to avoid these problems altogether. Since the classroom includes children who are explicitly at many different skill levels and developmental stages, it is simply expected that different students will be working on different topics, at different speeds, and also with different degrees of interest or even success. It allows students to move on to the next topic when they are ready, instead of when the majority of the class is ready, or when the curriculum dictates it’s time to move on. It makes for smooth transitions for those who can go through material very fast, allowing them to work on material that is at their level without having to worry about whether placing them in a higher grade is good or bad for their emotional development. It allows students who need more than a year to complete one grade’s worth of material to simply take longer, without having to worry about the damage to their self esteem that being in a lower grade can exert. In short, it allows students to work on what they’re ready to work on, rather than on what the majority of their classmates is ready to work on.
Learning from one's peers can often be much more rewarding than learning from an adult.
Learning from our peers can be very valuable
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There are also other, less obvious advantages to being in a composite classroom. Most students will first hear about a topic not when they’re learning it themselves, but rather from a classmate that is further ahead. When the time comes to learn the topic themselves, it won’t be a new, unheard of thing, which will make the actual learning happen more easily. Eavesdropping is actually a very valuable pedagogical tool! It is also very much the way we learn other, non-academic skills. As children, we surround ourselves with cousins, neighbors, the children of our parents’ friends, and a host of other kids that are not necessarily exactly our same age. And we learn a lot from them! They teach us not only games and new forms of mischief, but also about justice, social relationships, and often even more academic skills such as counting or even reading. Their unique position as peers but also forms of authority over us makes the learning from older children seem very different, and even more pleasant than from adults.
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One-room schools used to be the norm for educating our children, and indeed they still exist in many rural areas. Large cities and easy modes of transport to get to them, and thus large concentrations of children, gave way to our current standard of separate-grade schools, since these also include many more children than their one-room ancestors. But today we are moving towards more and more personalized education, with more and more schools trying to keep their students-to-teacher ratio as low as possible. In this context, bringing back this traditional method of educating our children not only works, but actually makes the most sense.