Our first day of school was last week Wednesday. I love the first day of school. I love meeting all my new students. I love all the excitement and the nerves. I love to remember first impressions during the year as I get to know my students better. Usually, the first day is a whirlwind. I’ve planned twice as much to cover in a day. Students are somewhat shy and nervous. Not this year. I still planned much more than was needed – we covered about a quarter of what I had ready. My students were aggressive attention seekers, with six boys competing for the role of the “class clown”. Not to mention other students enjoying the unplanned entertainment and encouraging more. After a late evening of phone calls home and a few subsequent meetings with parents, I began to wonder… what happened to the multi-age classroom?
This will be only the 2nd year that I will teach a straight grade level in all my ten years of teaching intermediate students. My school administrators made the decision to do away with “split classes” (a term I never liked) because they wanted teachers to have a grade level team for collaboration. They also wanted to end the “walk to math class” or reshuffling of students so that they could get grade-level specific math instruction. I was saddened by the decision, as I had seen the benefits of having a mixed group of ages in the classroom on both my students’ behavior and their learning.
I remember a time when multi-age classrooms were the rage. It was radically different from the traditional model of grade-level segregation. Research showed the academic and social benefits of mixed-age groupings- younger students learned from older students and vice-versa. Students were more flexible in their friendship groupings with a greater diversity of ages. Slower and faster learners were not isolated in the classroom and did not stand out as much from their peers. And, when behavior dynamics were such that a group of students needed separating, there were more options. Today in my school, there are two options for a fifth grader- my classroom and Mr. P’s.
Since the rumors have circled the school about my difficult first day, I’ve had many of my students’ former teachers stop in for a visit to commiserate. The third and fourth grade teachers were the first to visit, all of them saying something like this: “Tracey, let me give you a hug. That was my worst class in all my years of teaching. Anytime you need a hug, just let me know.” While I appreciate the sympathy and hug offers, I wonder why we’ve allowed a group of students to set the culture and tone of a classroom. It’s not the entire 5th grade; it’s a handful of students with above normal social needs. They’ve taught the rest of the 5th grade what a “normal” classroom environment is. And since they’ve been together since they started school in kindergarten, most of the students don’t know anything different.
As I add classroom culture and what a positive learning environment looks like to my list of subjects to teach, individualize my behavior plan, and make time for more learning of routines and expectations, I’m left wondering, is this model best for children or is it just easier to administrate?
I think the argument for ability grouping looks very different in the primary grades than in the secondary grades. I honestly have no idea how an elementary teacher can do all of what they are asked to do each and every day!
Thanks for the ideas, Bob. I will add them to my list of things to try with this group. I am hopeful that we will also have some fun – it just might be a bit later in the year. 🙂
I’m a little surprised at how rare multiage classrooms have become. It explains the reaction I usually get when I say I teach (or taught) 4th and 5th grade. People wonder how I can effectively teach the content of two grade levels in one classroom. I find teaching language arts to two grade levels fun. The range of abilities in any given class is bound to be broad. When there are two grade levels, there might be a broader range, but I think kids are more accepting of it. The lower kids can see where they’re headed. We all practice the skills, just at different levels. I have a harder time advocating for ability grouping, however.
I haven’t yet figured out how to teach two grade levels in math. A colleague of mine who teaches an accelerated program for 3rd and 4th graders has been asked this year to teach both the 3rd grade math curriculum and the 4th grade math curriculum. The irony of that is that last year she taught the 4th grade math to both grades – the 3rd graders performed wonderfully on the WASL, the 4th graders didn’t. So, now, after she’s launched the lesson and sent her 4th graders to do the work, instead of observing them to see how well they’re understanding the concepts, she’ll be telling them to work independently so that she can pull the 3rd graders aside to teach them their curriculum.
Great post, Tracey, and good luck with your “aggressive attention seekers.” I’ve taught 2nd through 4th for the last twenty-five years, and I’ve actually never had a multi-age or split class. I’ve always had a broad range of abilities, however.
I’ve also been lucky enough to “loop” with kids for two years in a row on three separate occasions. I loved it, but our school recently decided to end the practice for the same reasons that have caused some of your discipline problems: with two classes at each grade level and several teachers looping for two grades, many of the kids were basically together for most of the grade school years. And as you’re finding out, that’s not always a good thing.
Snarkiness aside, as a high school English teacher who has only taught straightforward grad requirements, I’ve never had the chance to teach in a multi-age classroom. My kids come to me pre-sorted by age, and aside from the occasional kid repeating the class (perhaps one per year) they’re all uniform in age.
They are not, by any stretch of the imagination, uniform in skill or capacity. While I understand the arguments for the heterogenous classroom, I’ve never witnessed the supposed magic of a lower student magically growing as a result of proximity to a higher student. If anything, I would assume that in many classrooms the higher students are stifled by the lower ones…who often demand greater energy and management than the higher students, and toward whom the level-of-difficulty of curriculum tends to skew.
Though the word is evil to some, I think at the secondary level there should be more aggressive tracking of students based on literacy ability levels. I believe it would better serve all the kids within our ranks. We certainly wouldn’t group in the same math class a 17-year-old who can do calculus with a 17-year-old barely mastering fractions… why do will still do this in the Language Arts and History, with only rare exceptions? You can throw the self-esteem claim at me…kids would be “labeled.” Well, they are anyway…they could be labeled as the dumbest one in the class and not be provided the services they need, or they could be in a classroom separate from those would call such names and be with others who can all move forward together because they are all starting at the same place.
I guess, if we want to change education, we ought to consider what is best for instruction and student learning rather than what is easiest for administration.
An education truism to tweak J. Broekman’s comment:
________ is for ease of administration, not to benefit instruction.
(insert any number of present practices in the blank)
Age segregation is for ease of administration, especially grade-level test administration, way more than for instruction…
I too like multiage instruction including for some of the reasons you mentioned. Assignments by chronological age is just one of many ways to homogenize a classroom.
You offer a great descriptor, “aggressive attention seekers.” More sophisticated than “behavior problems.” Here’s what I did with a handful of them in a multilingual 5th grade classroom with IQs and achievement scores ranging from -2sd to 2+sd. It’s a 5th grade classroom version of what happens to people in Tier 1 programs, sports, business, etc. It ain’t PC:
Gave the class an intro to dense instruction; told them they were responsible for keeping up with me; they must learn to ignore distractions in order not to earn lower grades than they want. It only took a few unannounced/pop quizzes and prompt on the spot grading (students exchanged papers for grading, etc.) to demo what I meant about having to ignore nonteacher directed classroom activities.
Assigned seating so they were distributed across the classroom and could not see each other without straining. Seated them among the smartest students I thought most likely to want high grades, for whatever reasons.
Told them they all start the class with A grades and earn down from there.
Broke up the attention seekers activities immediately as they started happening, no discussion, no explanation, sometimes by swapping them out of the classroom with other teachers for a class period, sometimes by giving one or more separate assignments with a time deadline, say 7 minutes; etc.
Went on to another part of the assignment that I planned to instruct according to clock time. That means, all of the class missed some instruction, so I gave them a quiz on the parts they missed.
In another class, after trading one student permanently with a 4th grade teacher, the other 36 students in the class stopped giving attention to the other distractors.
These classes completed 5th grade assignments by about April; about half of them completed half of 6th grade assignments by the end of 5th grade.
And, we all had fun! Best wishes to you, Tracey.