Key Resource: Working with multigrade classes

Introduction

What counts in teaching is not the size of the class, nor the age or grade of the pupils in it, but the quality of the teaching. In this key resource document are some suggestions for teaching classes with pupils of different grades. You might also find it helpful to see the Key Resource: Working with Large Classes.

Active learning strategies for multigrade classes

The following teaching strategies are for whole class or mixed-grade groups:

• Round: Each pupil has a two- or three-minute opportunity to express his or her point of view on a given topic while others listen. For older pupils, the topic can be controversial or thought-provoking, such as ‘Education is valuable for my daily life.’ For younger pupils, choose a simple topic, such as ‘What I like about school.’ This activity will provide you with a range of viewpoints to consider when delivering your lessons, as well as building a sense of ‘safe participation’ and confidence among your pupils.
• Brainstorming: Ask pupils to think individually about an issue or problem – for example ‘Why is water becoming scarce?’ or ‘How can we improve our school?’ – and to list its possible causes. Stress that people working together can create more than an individual alone.
• Simulations and games: Ask pupils to role-play a situation; for instance, ‘What would you do if you were confronted by a bully?’ By creating situations that are momentarily real, your pupils can practise coping with stressful, unfamiliar or complex situations.
• Peer teaching: Randomly select pupils to find out about a specific topic and then teach the basics of the material to a partner, group or the entire class.

Involve your pupils

• The classroom is for everyone. Pupils can be very helpful in managing the classroom’s physical space, and it helps them to develop a sense of responsibility.
• Involve your pupils in developing classroom rules! Ask your pupils to identify what behaviours are acceptable and what behaviours are not acceptable. Make only a few rules that emphasise appropriate behaviour. Remember that penalties should be consistent with the nature of the misbehaviour and based on positive discipline to help your pupils to learn good behaviour
• Encourage ‘experts’ from the community to come to class to talk about special skills and knowledge. You can even ask older pupils in the class to act as peer teachers and to work with different grade-based groups.

Group exercises and cooperative learning

• In a large class, pupils working in pairs or larger groups can help each other and learn from each other. Have pupils from the same grade working together – but also mix up the grades to encourage peer learning
• Group exercises give pupils an opportunity to meet and work with one another, a good step towards building a sense of community. In the ‘real’ world, working with others is an important skill. Giving your pupils more opportunities to work together can help them develop this skill and releases you to work with groups of pupils of different grades.
• Small-group work encourages pupils who may be reluctant to participate in a large- class setting to participate more. Cooperative learning also helps to hold pupils’ attention – a special concern for large classes – and to increase pupil thinking.

Multigrade teaching and group work

• When designing your group exercises (or even individual exercises), the task that the pupils are to complete should be specific and clear to the group. This does not necessarily mean the group is all of the same grade. Variations of a similar task such as completing some or all of a worksheet, solving a similar problem but of different levels or answering specific questions selected from a range on the chalkboard, will keep your pupils focused
• Development exercises. Place a group of pupils in a real or simulated situation and ask them to solve a problem. This can be the same problem for all grades but the response might be different. Alternatively, write a question or statement with mistakes in it on chalkboards around the room. These mistakes can be structural (such as grammatical errors) or mistakes in interpretation (such as errors in judgement or in the use of facts) specific to a grade group. In mathematics, for example, you can give different groups of pupils a ‘story problem’ to solve; in science, you can ask all the groups, whatever the grade, to classify a group of seemingly unrelated objects into categories and justify why they chose these categories.
• Topic exploration exercises. Assign each grade group a specific topic to study (research), and give them access to resources they can use to learn about it. These resources can be books, or they can be people in the community who have knowledge about how to do a special activity.
• Simple exercises. These exercises focus on developing a particular skill, such as drawing, editing, quick problem solving, etc. In mixed grade groups, the pupils practise and are given feedback by their fellow group members. At the end of the exercise, volunteers demonstrate their new skills for the class.

Evaluation of group work

• Require some type of group product for exercises that can be graded. (Remember: grading ten papers or projects is much easier than grading 60.)
• Carefully observe the groups and their members. Praise individual participation as well as the quality of group work.
• Occasionally, require an individual product based on group work, such as a one- minute paper about an issue learned from the exercise, a short quiz or an oral presentation by randomly selected group members. This rewards pupils who were actively involved in group learning and discourages ‘freeloading’ or the non- participation of some group members.
• Sometimes, use self and peer evaluations at the end of an exercise; for instance, give each pupil in a group a ‘score card’ and ask him or her to give a grade to themselves and to each of his or her group members. This method is especially helpful for judging how well the members of a large class participate, where it can be difficult for you to evaluate all individuals personally.

Assessment Strategies for multigrade classes

The following assessment strategies help give effective feedback and summative evaluations within a manageable workload for mixed-grade classes: