Tighter education budgets have brought an old concept back into schools in SAD 17: multi-grade classrooms.

When people think of multi-grade classrooms, it is often in the context of an American classroom from the early 1800s, which saw one-room schoolhouses handling the entirety of a child’s education.

In fact, multi-grade classrooms have been a common facet of education, around the world, and throughout history. Over the past two years, they have come back to the Oxford Hills.

“We were driven to examine this because of the numbers,” said SAD 17 Superintendent Rick Colpitts, who noted that combining certain grades has helped to even out skewed class sizes.

“Multi-grade is where you literally take two grades and they’re based in the same classroom,” he said. “We don’t have enough first graders to fill a first grade classroom, so we’re going to mix them with second graders.”

The resultant classrooms look the same as traditional classrooms. They have a single instructor, and an average class size, but there is more variety to the student ages.

In Waterford Elementary School, for example, seven first-graders learn alongside 12 second-graders. In the same school, nine third-graders and 12 fourth-graders are combined into a single classroom.

This year, Oxford Elementary School combined 21 students from grades two and three into the same classroom.

“We had three teachers teaching second and two teachers teaching third, and we ended up with class sizes of about 27 or 28, and we thought that was way too high,” Colpitts said. “That relieved some of the pressure from one grade level, and brought class sizes down to between 20 and 23.”

The phenomenon is not new to the area.

“All of the schools had multiage in the ’80s,” Colpitts said. “We got away from it in the ’90s, and now, because of the budgets, we’re looking at it again.”

Educators are paying particularly close attention to the impact the situation will have on the development of those students.

Colpitts said the situation presents a significant challenge to teachers, who must balance the needs and capabilities of two grades instead of one.

“It’s not easy for teachers,” he said. “It’s really a challenge for teachers because they truly have to zero in on individual student growth.”

So far, Colpitts said, the teachers have proven to be up to the challenge.

“The teachers who are currently in it are trying it and liking it,” Colpitts said, “but it would be hard to force someone into that kind of situation.”

He said the initial move was a way to gain efficiency, but that the next step was to make it work well for students.

“Once we were in it, we said, ‘How do we work with it and use it as an advantage?'” he said.

Academic researchers say multi-grade classrooms may not be a bad thing.

An academic review of research published in the Review of Educational Research by Simon Veenman suggests that students fare no worse in multiage classrooms.

“The students in the multi-grade classes do not appear to learn more or less than their counterparts in the single-grade classes,” Veennman wrote. “No consistent differences were found with respect to reading, mathematics, language, or composite scores.”

Colpitts said that this matched the experience of the district’s Waterford multi-graders from last year.

“Our results were very positive,” he said. “They did as well as their peers, if not better, in some cases. There was no negative impact.”

The sole exception, Colpitts said, is math, which is difficult to adapt to a multiage learning concept.

“Math curriculum and the materials that we use do not lend themselves well to have first-graders and second-graders (together), because they often rely on material that has not been introduced yet. We haven’t found a way to teach them combined.”

However, there are several reasons that multi-grade students can expect to meet or beat expectations.

In fact, Veenman suggested that there could be some advantages to such a structure.

“In … areas such as attitudes towards school, self-concept, and personal and social adjustment, students are sometimes better off in multi-grade classes than in single-grade classes,” he reported.

Bright younger students are motivated to learn the lessons that their older peers are getting, and are exposed to new, challenging concepts early. Meanwhile, older students who failed to absorb a lesson in one year gain a second chance to be exposed to the material.

“It provides greater flexibility,” Colpitts said.

The idea is championed by those who support a multi-age learning theory, which Colpitts said is a model that has been adopted in isolated instances all across the state.

The model of multiage learning challenges conventional, rigid notions of the classroom.

“If you put all the students together, all boats will float,” Colpitts said. “Why is it that you say when a child turns 5, that all children who are 5 are fully developed and ready to do the same level of work? Why can’t you rather group kids based on their work capabilities and development level? Some may be ready at 4, and some may be ready at 6.”

In Lovell, SAD 72 operates the New Suncook School for grades one through five. Two multiage classrooms combine fourth- and fifth-graders.

“Different school districts have different reasons for doing it,” Colpitts said. “Suncook school has had multiage classrooms for a decade or more. It’s a choice.”

Students at Suncook each work at their own level in reading, writing and math during their two years in the multiage classroom.

There are also multiage teaching models in the high school and middle school, where students from different grade levels come together to participate in experiential or alternative learning programs.

Colpitts said the district is trying its best to make do with an abbreviated budget, which is expected to undergo another $1 million reduction this year.

As with other budget-driven efficiencies, Colpitts said the effort is to implement teaching strategies that will turn a perceived negative into a positive.

“Our motivation was driven by class size,” he said, “but our practice was to do it with multiage concepts of learning.”

If the mixed-age students in Waterford and Oxford continue to do well under the program, multi-grade classrooms may become a much more common feature of the Oxford Hills educational system.

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