PRACTICAL TIPS FOR TEACHING MULTIGRADE CLASSES

Multigrade teaching
 is an important and appropriate way to help nations reach their
internationally-mandated Education for All targets and national Millennium
Development Goals by providing good quality education to children who
are often neglected by their education system because they live in small,
poor, and remote communities.
 It is an approach that can help schools in these communities and teachers
in these schools serve their students better by providing them an education
that is both good quality and relevant to the community in which they live.
 teaching classes of students not only of different ages and abilities but also
at different grade levels.
 is not always easy, but doing it well means that you are educating children
who otherwise would not be able to go to school and therefore helping
them gain the knowledge and skills they need for a more promising future.
 multigrade teaching is somehow “second class” – the last choice of poor
systems and something to move away from as quickly as possible by
building more classrooms and hiring more teachers, or closing small schools
and forcing children to go long distances to larger ones.
 is the first choice for managing a classroom.
 It helps children, especially those in remote and isolated areas, realise
their right to education and therefore learn what they need – and want – to
learn.
 It is a cost-effective approach to providing schooling to children often
excluded from your education system.
 It encourages children from different backgrounds to learn with the help
of their peers and therefore promotes cohesiveness, cooperation, and
healthy competition among students, strengthens interpersonal and
leadership skills and develops a positive attitude towards sharing
 It benefits you as a multigrade teacher by helping you to plan your work
better and be more efficient in your use of time
  Through the variety of teaching practices used in multigrade classrooms, it
contributes to your students’ cognitive development.
 is all about classroom organization, student management, and, ultimately,
the successful transmission of grade-specific curricula.
 It is your responsibility as a multigrade teacher to plan and organize your
classroom to get the best results from the space and resources available to
you.
 In a multigrade classroom the curriculum is best delivered in this sequence
of learning activities.
Three Dimensions of Classroom Management
 Teacher, Classroom, Students
Taking advantage of diversity within and between groups
 This should be seen not only as a challenge but also as an opportunity for
providing better quality education for all your students.
 This requires not only specialized content knowledge and teaching-
learning methods but also personal values which respect and welcome
diversity in the classroom.
Seeing Challenges as Opportunities
 All teaching offers challenges, and as a multigrade teacher you have
specific things to think about to ensure you get the best out of the students
in your class.
Multigrade teacher
 He/she is the key to planning, designing, and managing a range of both
grade-appropriate and mixed-grade activities for children to keep them
engaged in learning.
 Your efficiency and effectiveness rest on creating a classroom conducive to
learning by developing exciting and stimulating activities ranging from
group work to independent study.
 is the chance to prepare a wide range of teaching and learning materials
for the grade levels and subjects you teach.
Flexibility
 It is the ability to move students and desks around inside the classroom to
create the kind of learning spaces you desire.

multigrade classroom
 several simultaneous activities go on at the same time.
 need to arrange the classroom for activities that engage students with
minimum disturbance and with adequate direction and supervision.
 the curriculum is best delivered in an integrated sequence of learning
activities.
 It is also important that you are systematic in planning lessons and
developing teaching and learning materials relevant to each of the
curriculum units.
Time flexibility
 Since there are many tasks to be performed during the course of a school
day, this kind of flexibility must be a norm for a multigrade classroom.
Lesson planning
 For multigrade teaching, this depends on the number of grades combined
in the classroom.
 there are three stages of planning to consider: planning activities before
the lesson, during the lesson, and after the lesson.
Peer tutor
 begins by asking general questions to assess the younger student’s
understanding of the topic; then gradually moves on to more difficult
questions.
Peer tutoring
  This has been found to be an effective strategy in multigrade situations as
it trains students to use a sequenced series of questions and helps scaffold
their learning to higher levels.
 is used on a regular basis to reinforce concepts which you have already
presented at the beginning of class or in a previous lesson.
Cross-age tutoring
 is based on the pairing of students and is used extensively in most
multigrade classrooms so that older children can help younger students
with their lessons.
Teaching and learning materials
 These are required in large quantity due to the diverse grades studying in
one classroom.
 should be developed keeping in mind flexible grouping across grades.
 can be developed using locally available materials that are of low cost and
relevant to the local culture.

In many multigrade contexts, girls may be relatively disadvantaged in education

compared to boys.

teaching strategies
 We need to develop and implement these to enable us to address the
needs of each child linked to his or her age, maturity, interests, capacities,
and capabilities.
Group strategically
 For some activities, divide your students into mixed-ability groups.
 This will encourage students of different backgrounds to include each
other in their work.
Prepare flexible and appropriate materials
  For grouping to be effective, materials and teaching must be varied and
made challenging to accommodate the learning needs of students with
different levels of ability.
Promote self-paced learning
 This should help them achieve the set learning objectives for each grade’s
curriculum.
 While helping students to perform activities together, at the same time
ensure that they are allowed to move through the curriculum at their own
pace.
Integrated
 These approaches assume that multiple resources will be used by students
during the course of the lesson.
Higher grades or older students
 These graders or students can sometimes be left on their own to
investigate and gather information by themselves.
Traditional seating arrangement
 It is the type of seating arrangement with a teacher facing all students in
rows with a chalkboard on the wall.
worksheet for primary grades
 is a good example of a resource that is student-friendly and helpful in
developing skills both in reading comprehension and in the naming of
animals and plants.
Teach one subject to all grades and at varying levels of difficulty
 This strategy allows you to group children of different grades, ages, and
abilities together and teach them the same curriculum theme at the same
time.
Teach one grade while others work independently
  It may be useful to decide on a time during the day to devote to each
separate grade group.
Relating a topic
 you are teaching to your students’ daily lives, traditions, and culture helps
them understand a concept more clearly than any other mode of teaching.
Mother tongue
 it is very important to begin instruction and promote literacy in their
mother tongue.
 Something that is much more difficult to do when learning in a language
they do not understand well.
Child-centered learning
 is the best way to achieve desired student learning outcomes – academic as
well as social and psychological.
Individual learner assessment
 is just as important as comparative evaluation across students.
Assessment
 is not a one-time event but is cyclic and continuous. It must also be adapted
to the type of activity on which your students are being assessed – group or
paired work, individual work, etc.
before a new topic is introduced
 to determine what experiences or understanding students already have
about that topic
 this information will help you decide what new information they need to
be taught
during a lesson
 to find out if your students are learning the concepts being taught;
 if you note problems for the class as a whole or for individual students you
may be able to solve them during the lesson.
at the end of a topic
 to assess mastery prior to progression to the next topic, decide if further
remediation is required for some students, and provide feedback to you
about your own teaching methods.

at the end of a term or the school year

 to assess if students have retained their understanding of the lessons
delivered
Individual assessment
 select activities that help measure the learning of each student.
Group assessment
 observe how well each group works as a team – who are the leaders, who
needs encouragement to participate, who prevents others from taking part
– and the quality of the group’s results.
Self-assessment
 ask your students about their favourite and most difficult subjects.
Peer assessment
 ask the peer tutors you have selected about the progress each of the
students they are working with is making.
student assessment
 to improve your teaching and develop new and better practices is your
continuous and routine reflection on your own teaching skills, strategies,
and methods – and on any other school responsibilities you may have.
Escuela Nueva
 which originally began in Colombia and has now been adapted in many
other countries in Latin America and elsewhere.
  Some of the essential features of this approach are: teachers are facilitators
to guide and orient learning and students learn at their own pace using self-
instructional materials.
Teachers
 are facilitators to guide and orient learning
Self-instructional materials
 are shared among three students and are able to last for several years
Multigrade Multilevel (MGML) Approach
 in India reflects a variety of models adopted by schools under different
kinds of private management which are committed to a qualitative
improvement in the multigrade primary schools.
Institute for Educational Resources (RIVER)
 has been adapted in several states in India. RIVER started as an attempt to
develop a set of materials appropriate to the language and local customs of
the community.

TRUE tanan
 The educational background of parents also enhances or decreases the
interest of their children in learning at school.
 Putting students of more than one grade together in one classroom that
already has limited space can sometimes create problems.
 Teachers must ensure that students with disabilities, learning difficulties,
and other needs can achieve milestones as others do.
 Combining more than one grade in a multigrade context is quite
challenging.
 Multigrade teaching is an important and appropriate way to help nations
reach their internationally-mandated Education for All targets.
 It is therefore important for you as a multigrade teacher to understand the
family and individual backgrounds of each of your students and manage the
resulting differences in their interest and ability to learn.
  Activities in a multigrade classroom should be both meaningful and intense
enough that nothing distracts your students from their work when different
grades are sitting in the same room and carrying out other activities at the
same time.
 In many multigrade contexts, girls may be relatively disadvantaged in
education compared to boys.
 Many education systems, teachers, and even parents, think multigrade
teaching is somehow “second class” – the last choice of poor systems
 For grouping to be effective, materials and teaching must be varied and
made challenging to accommodate the learning needs of students with
different levels of ability.
 Multigrade teaching is a cost-effective approach to providing schooling to
children often excluded from the education system.
 A crucial part of planning an effective multigrade classroom is organizing its
space so that it allows free movement and can be used for different
activities by individual students, individual grades, small groups, and the
whole group.
 Multigrade teaching means teaching classes of students not only of
different ages and abilities but also at different grade levels.
 Not all students are the same and like all teachers you must be aware of
and respond to their differences

FALSE tanan
 Give less attention to children with special education needs.
 Few teachers in Asia and the Pacific need to teach students from more than
one grade in one classroom.
 It is the responsibility of the school administrator to plan and organize the
classroom to get the best results from the space and resources available.
 The learners are the key to planning, designing, and managing a range of
both grade-appropriate and mixed-grade activities for children to keep
them engaged in learning.
 The secret to being a successful multigrade teacher is to prioritize the
younger learners.
  Management of teaching calls for the teachers to poorly plan activities to
engage the students through direct teaching, with a peer tutor, in a small
group, or in independent study.

Monograde teaching
 It is when the teacher teaches only one grade.
Below can be done by teachers to support multi-grade teaching EXCEPT:
 Seldom thank parents for their help.
Below are the challenges of multi-grade teaching EXCEPT:
These are factors contributing to the establishment of multi-grade teaching
EXCEPT:
 Cost-effectiveness of the scheme
Below are the reasons why multi-grade classes exist EXCEPT:
 It is a trend in highly industrialized countries.
Below are the resources that teachers need to support multi-grade teaching
EXCEPT:
 smart television
2/3
 This is the percent of classrooms in the public school system that are single
grade.
1990
 It is the year when the Department of Education, Culture and Sports (DECS)
started to consider the organization and operation of multi-grade
classrooms to provide Education for All.
Cost-effectiveness of the scheme
 It is one of the most frequently cited reasons for the effectiveness of multi-
grade class.
Multi-grade teaching
 This is a situation in which one teacher has to teach many grades, all at the
same time.
 It happens in all schools where there are more grades than teachers.
Teach one grade while others work independently
 This strategy highlights that it may be useful to decide on a time during the
day to devote to each separate grade group.
at the end of a term or the school year
 It is when assessments are given to assess if students have retained their
understanding of the lessons delivered.
Develop activities for non-taught groups
 This strategy leaves you with more time to work with students who need
more support
Latter / Individual learner assessment
 It is useful to evaluate one student’s progress against his/her peers.
MPPE
 This approach aims to improve quality by increasing teachers’ abilities to
work with more than one grade simultaneously through training and
instructional materials.
MGML
 This approach addresses issues in curriculum, teacher training and the
development of teaching and learning materials, quality teaching in difficult
situations and contextualization to local conditions.
‘Multi’
 means plenty, many, or more than one.
Grade
 means level.
Multigrade
 means many grade
development / Self-directed professional growth
 should be encouraged by providing distance education material at resource
centers.
The school
 is part of the community and the school is established to serve the children
of the community.
Cost-effectiveness
 is also related to the cost of administration and management of a
multigrade class.
The multi-grade classroom
 is more receptive and suitable to the essential tenets of the ‘new
curriculum’ that is child centered, activity based, discovery methods, and
group work.

TRUE
 Google classroom can be accessed using a desktop computer, a laptop or a
smartphone.
 Email notifications are sent to the students every time a teacher posts
something in the Google Classroom
 Students can leave a public or private comment on Google Stream.
 The teacher will be notified of late submissions in Google Classroom.
 The teacher can set a due date for classworks.
 The students can add a video or picture on a comment posted on Google
Steam.
 A student can delete his/her comment on a post on Google Stream.
FALSE
  A student can remove another student from the Google Classroom
 There is no time limit in taking all quizzes.
 A student cannot see the other students in the Google Classroom.
 The teacher can restrict students to comment on an announcement on
Google Stream.
 You can join a class in Google Classroom if a teacher invites you to join
through an email invitation.
 A QR code is required for you to be able to join a class.
 Google classroom can be accessed only through website in google chrome
or in any other browser.

What is google classroom website?

 www.classroom.google.com
Where can you see the teachers announcement?
Where can you see the Google Calendar?
 Stream
Where can you see the assignments?
Where can you see the quizzes?
Where can you see the graded or returned works?
 Classwork
Where can you see the list of students in the GC?
Where can you see the teacher and co-teacher is there is any?
 People
What are the ways to add an attachment for a classwork?
 Pasting a link
 Selecting a youtube video
 Selecting file in google drive
 Uploading a file from computer