Giving Compass' Take:

• Multi-grade classrooms are helping advance student learning by encouraging peer review, tutoring, and mentorships between students of different age groups. 

• How can teachers facilitate newer learning styles such as social-emotional and project-based learning into multi-grade classrooms? 

• Read about rethinking grade levels and school design for personalized learning. 

Woodbrook Elementary School in Albemarle County, Virginia, renovated classrooms to make them large enough to accommodate multiple grades, District Administration reports.

Multi-age classrooms, the article notes, allow students to move at their own paces, leading students not to worry about falling behind the rest of their peers as if they were in a single-grade class. Plus, students who learn more quickly are able to support their classmates, further embedding their own learning.

To combine multiple grades into one classroom, curriculum designers need to pay attention to ensure all pupils receive the educations they require and are not slowed down or sped up beyond their abilities. Peer learning can help with that by fostering children to turn to each other for support or offer their help to a fellow classmate.

Student or peer tutoring, sometimes referred to as mentoring, involves one child who has mastered a lesson helping another work through the details. By teaching what they’ve learned, children more deeply embed their own learning. But, experts say, there’s an emotional component to peer learning, too.

While math achievement increased in children from multi-grade classrooms, the bigger impact was in the development of social skills. Children in multi-grade classes ultimately felt more positive and developed higher senses of self-esteem about their academic achievements.

"Finding of this research suggested that, as expected, there is a considerable positive effect of multi-grade classes on children’s social skills,” wrote the authors.

Read the full article about multi-grade classrooms by Lauren Barack at Education Dive