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You are the superintendent of a small, rural school district of about 1,300 students (100 per grade level K-12). Your elementary school has four teachers per grade level for class sizes of about 25. As families are registering for next school year, you notice that your kindergarten is projecting anomalously large, about 120 students. So you have to add a kindergarten teacher to keep class sizes manageable.

Why Multi-grade Classrooms?

Here鈥檚 the problem, as that grade level moves through the elementary school over the years, you have to constantly move a teacher to a new grade level to follow them. What if you have another anomalously large or small grade a few years later? Now there is much less consistency among your grade level teaching teams.

What if there was a way to keep your class sizes and grade level teams stable through enrollment fluctuations?

This happened in the Corbett School District in Corbett, Ore., in the 1990鈥檚. The solution was multi-grade classrooms. Eight K-1 classes could much more easily absorb twenty extra students than four kindergarten classes.

Multi-grade classrooms became the norm throughout K-5 in the Corbett School District, and it wasn鈥檛 long before other, unanticipated benefits started to occur.

Unanticipated Benefits

The kindergarten students began to develop and learn faster, having the direct influence of the Grade 1 students. 

Recently a K-1 teacher told me that she would never go back to teaching only Kindergarten, because of the positive influence the Grade 1 students had on the class dynamic. The Kindergarten students were reading sooner and better than before. The K-1 teachers who were the Kindergarten teachers the year before noticed they had a much better rapport with the students and families they had previously. They were also able to spend much less time teaching classroom procedures at the beginning of the school year, allowing them to move much more quickly into teaching grade-level content

After only a few years, the positive effects were so obvious that the middle school followed suit with multi-grade classrooms taught by one core teacher. For a few years, they attempted three grade-level bands in each classroom (K-2, 3-5, 6-8), but found the maturity level between the upper and lower students was too great, and teaching content to that varied ability levels was a disservice to the students. The positive aspect of three grade levels per class is that it evenly divides the nine grade levels K-8. We still have one K-8 school who continues with three grade level classes for this reason. The rest of the district is using two grade levels per classroom, which has forced one grade level to be on its own. We have chosen that grade to be sixth, since students in Grade 6 are kind of in-between in their developmental stage between elementary and middle school.

Even the high school has gotten on board. Grades 9 and 10 English and World and US History are being taught together, as well as Grades 11 and 12 English and Geography and Economics.

How Does It Work?

You may be asking the same question I asked when I first learned about the multi-grade classrooms, 鈥淒on鈥檛 students get bored learning the same thing for two (or three) years in a row?鈥� 

All of our teachers utilize project-based learning in their classrooms, so all content is taught through thematic units. Each grade band of teachers has two (or three) years of thematic units that they rotate through, so students are never learning the same thing more than once. Within the thematic units, the standards taught are scaffolded for the different grade levels so students are always learning at their grade level.

You may also be asking, 鈥淚sn鈥檛 this a lot of extra work on the teachers?鈥� In reality, because the number of teachers in the grade-band are double (or triple) what a single grade level team would be, there are more teachers who collaborate and share the unit construction. Also, because the units are fun for the students, teachers enjoy creating and tweaking them.

I would be remiss if I didn鈥檛 mention that Mathematics is the only class separate from the core. Mathematics classes are leveled based solely on ability level, so classes often include students from many different grade levels.

Personal Experience

When I was a high school Mathematics and Computer Science teacher, I often taught multi-grade classes or the same students for multiple consecutive years. I experienced most of the same positives the Corbett teachers express. After the first year with a group of students, we knew each other and I knew exactly what they were taught the year before, so we were able to jump right into the content, which was very helpful when teaching high level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate classes.