Multi-Grade Teaching
Multi-Grade Teaching
Key Words & Ideas:
Multi –grade teaching is a term used to
describe the teaching in primary education of children from a number of grades
usually in every subject and at each grade level. ’Multi’ means plenty, many or
more than one. The word 'grade’ means level.
Multi-grade, therefore means many grades.
Multi-grade teaching involves the
teaching of children from two or more grade levels simultaneously in one
classroom or different classroom. This requires considerable preparation.
Depending on the quality of teachers’ workbooks and worksheets, a teacher may
be with grade one for ten minutes, away with grade three for fifteen minutes
and then absent from that class for thirty minutes. Such teaching requires very
sound preparation especially considering the time spent by students in
independent study.
Challenges in Multi- Grade Teaching:
1. An
average primary school teacher is ill equipped to handle a multi-grade
classroom situation.
2. The
nature of the curriculum and textbooks, which are prepared almost entirely in a
mono-grade context create further problems.
3. One
of the greatest difficulties in promoting multi-grade teaching is the
inflexibility of grade-based curriculum. In some small multi-grade teaching
classes or school, the teachers are required to cover all the material for any
one year for all the students.
4. Teacher
training programmers’ have not focused on practical issues and techniques for
handling multi-grade teaching studies.
5. Timetables
are not flexible enough.
6. Teachers
of multi-grade class should have extra preparation time.
7. Teachers
assigned to multi-grade class should preferably be those who are most willing
to teach.
8. Information
concerning appropriate groupings, classroom organization, instructional
strategies and curriculum modification should be provided to principals and
teachers.
9. In
a multi- grade class there is time to recognize that a child’s social and
emotional needs are an important as academic needs.
10. In
a classroom where all children are learning at different rates and are not all
the same ages there is a little competition.
11. Multi-grade
classroom take the focus of meeting the needs of the whole group of learners
instead meet the needs of each individual student.
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