Multi-grade teaching refers to the teaching of students of different ages, grades and abilities in the same group. Educational policy highlights its drawbacks but multi-grade teaching remains a reality in hundreds of thousands of schools in developing countries. What do we know about multi-grade teaching and which gaps in our knowledge should future research seek to bridge? A recent Institute of Education (London) study sought frank answers to these questions. The study report highlights developing country cases and lists (with comments) key research studies to date.

Multi-grade teaching may be more common than many realise or care to admit. Any school with more grades than teachers must organise learning for some of its students along multi-grade lines, part of the time. Yet few Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Agencies or Teacher Education Institutions acknowledge this reality. None of these institutions offers much advice on how teachers can work effectively in multi-grade settings. It is a problem faced mainly by teachers and students in rural areas who can command little recognition or support from educational administrators.

Even texts that focus on schooling in developing countries implicitly assume that most teaching is mono-grade. Multi-grade teaching is assumed either not to exist, or to exist but be invisible, or to exist at the margins and be non-problematic, or to be problematic but non-resolvable * and therefore best not mentioned. Where multi-grade teaching has been a focal topic for research, the findings are not generally reported in mainstream educational journals.

The report in hand presents innovative approaches to multi-grade teaching pioneered in developing countries over the past two decades. The first four of these benchmark examples come from Zambia, Colombia, Peru and Sri Lanka. The fifth is a multi-country project that began in Indonesia and the Philippines and expanded subsequently to include Liberia, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Jamaica. A number of common attributes emerged from comparisons between these initiatives, notably that they:

• all sought to solve educational problems in disadvantaged rural settings with low populations
• all involved training teachers in practical techniques of multi-grade teaching at the local level
• all were inspired by the need to expand access to basic education, rather than to reduce cost

As to support, some of the programmes featured in the study had succeeded in winning government recognition for multi-grade teaching as a legitimate area of expertise for teacher educators and teacher trainees at the national level. Others had to rely on the support of charities and teachers' self help groups. Besides specific training provisions, effective multi-grade teaching and learning often meant:

• developing and distributing self-study materials for individual, peer and small group learning
• developing systems for evaluating and monitoring learning progress and achievement
• changing organisational routines to enable students to learn independently of input from teachers.

The report calls for more research into multi-grade teaching and more open recognition of this fact of life within disadvantaged education systems. It lists tough questions policymakers and educators at national, regional or district levels (and administrators and teachers in schools) should ask themselves.

Source(s):
Multi-grade teaching: a review of research and practice. DFID Education Research Monographs 12, A. Little (1995)

Funded by: Education Research Board, DFID (1994)

id21 Research Highlight: 1998-May-21

Further Information:
A.Little
Institute of Education
University of London
London
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 171 580 1122
Fax: +44 (0) 171 612 6632
Contact the contributor: a.little@ioe.ac.uk

Institute of Education, University of London, UK

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