Creating Active Learning Strategies

In summary, the improvement of student learning is your central challenge as a multigrade teacher.
Active, child-centred learning is the best way to achieve desired student learning outcomes – academic
as well as social and psychological. You can promote active learning by making a few specific changes in
your teaching methods, such as:

 placing children at the centre of your attention and helping them progress through their own
milestones and stages of learning at their own pace and speed
 providing learning opportunities through multi-age and multigrade activities in the same room
to ensure that each student participates in the learning process
 encouraging each student in a group to explore, ask questions, show inquisitiveness to learn
something new, and learn by doing and through play
 building a culture of collective learning in the class by choosing activities that suit the
composition and maturity of each group
 using flexible methods such as cooperative learning, peer tutoring, teacher-led instruction, and
self-reading and study
 building a classroom environment filled with group activities, information sharing, and
opportunities for individual learning through the classroom library and reading corners
 working out a detailed weekly, monthly, and yearly plan for scheduling activities, subjects, and
teaching methods
 keeping a checklist to follow how students are spending their time during school hours and the
activities that waste the most time
 linking all learning with competency-based assessment

Assessing Learning and Teaching Performance in Multigrade Classes

As you know, the evaluation of the learning outcomes of the diverse students found in your multigrade
classroom is not always easy. But assessment is essential to find out how well your students are
performing and whether your teaching is going in the right direction. This section looks at two important
uses of assessment: (i) learner assessment, and (ii) assessment of your own teaching.

Focusing More on Learner Assessment Than on Evaluation

As a multigrade teacher with students of many different ability levels, you must decide what information
to collect on each learner’s progress and how to collect it. Individual learner assessment is just as
important as comparative evaluation across students. The latter is useful to evaluate one student’s
progress against his/her peers, but too much and too public evaluation around performance can lead to
negative labelling of some students as “clever” and others as “slow”.

Like all children, students in a multigrade classroom learn in a continuum, moving from easier to more
difficult material and from simple to more complex learning steps. They follow a path of progress at their
own pace. Since such self-paced learning, as an integral part of multigrade teaching, promotes social,
emotional, physical, aesthetic, and cognitive development, one goal for you is to focus not only on
cognitive/academic achievement (e.g. reading and writing skills) but also to consider psychomotor skills
and the psychological and emotional development of your students.
Another goal you should have is to develop a positive attitude among students about teachers and about
learning. You can do this by assessing and rewarding other aspects of your students’ development such
as their willingness to assist in doing classroom tasks, share resources with friends, and organize their
own work. These outcomes deal with attitudes, values and behaviours, but they are not easy to measure
despite their importance.

The assessment of students may be done daily or on a periodic basis depending on the size of the class
and your capacity as a teacher to work with each student in the classroom individually. What is
important is that 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.

 It is always helpful to reflect on the purpose of assessment and to plan for it at four different
times during the teaching and learning process:
 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

It is therefore important for you to adopt a cyclic process of assessment as illustrated in Figure 5. The
process may begin with the identification of grade- and age-specific competencies expected to be
mastered by your students.

In a multigrade teaching situation, you will have to use several methods for assessing learner
performance and learning outcomes:

 Individual assessment – select activities that help measure the learning of each student. This
may include collecting basic information through administering a test, checking individual
assignments and projects, using checklists, observing each student’s activities and reading
his/her written work, and keeping anecdotal records of each student’s development. Keeping a
portfolio for each student is an especially rich resource that will help you assess the progress of
your students over time and maintain a more permanent record of their work.
 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. What did each individual student contribute to the results and how?
 Self-assessment – ask your students about their favourite and most difficult subjects. What
additional help do they think they need to do better?
  Peer assessment – ask the peer tutors you have selected about the progress each of the
students they are working with is making. Should different peers be assigned to work with
students who are having problems?

In addition to measuring specific learning outcomes such as reading and arithmetic knowledge, you may
wish to observe and assess the following skills and attitudes:

 Reporting, narrating, drawing pictures, picture reading, filling in maps, etc.

 Listening, talking, expressing opinions
 Expressing oneself through body movements, creative writing, etc.
 Reasoning, making logical connections
 Questioning by expressing curiosity, asking questions
 Analyzing and drawing inferences
 Learning by doing
 Expressing concern and sensitivity towards students who are disadvantaged or have various
kinds of disabilities
 Showing cooperation by taking responsibilities seriously and sharing and working together

Multigrade Program in Philippine Education (MPPE)Multigrade teaching as a Philippines national strategy

to improve access to and the quality of primary schooling was formalized with the launching of the
Multigrade Program in Philippine Education (MPPE) in 1993. The MPPE aims to improve quality by
increasing teachers’ abilities to work with more than one grade simultaneously through training and
instructional materials. The programme works in five areas: curriculum and materials development, staff
development, physical facilities, community support, and research, monitoring and evaluation. It has
developed a guide for minimum learning competencies for multigrade classes, a budget of work and
lesson plan for multigrade teachers to follow, a handbook for teachers with sample lessons, materials to
be used at different grade levels within the same classroom and other instructional materials such as a
100-book library, drill cards, and other teacher-made materials. Efforts have also gone into training in the
form of a handbook for pre-school teachers and a workbook for pre-school children. Throughout the
programme teachers build elements of the local area into the instructional materials used. The emphasis
on local experience is continued by encouraging each student to report on individual and group
investigations and by exhibiting examples of students’ work throughout the school year.

Summary: Ten Lessons

1. These experiences in multigrade teaching help to reinforce the major lessons discussed above
which should be useful to you, as a multigrade teacher, in ensuring the best quality learning for
your students. These lessons include:
2. As a multigrade teacher, you should try first to understand the diversity and complexity of your
students – by gender, age, family and socio-economic background, language, ability, and special
education needs – and see this diversity not as a problem to be solved but as an opportunity to
be used to produce better learning.
3. Given this diversity, you need to personalize your teaching(and eventually your assessment
methods) to respond to the different backgrounds and learning styles/needs of each of your
students. This includes identifying early on children who are at risk of failing and giving them the
extra attention they need to make sure they succeed and stay in school.
4. You need to make your classroom “child-friendly”, especially for new students coming directly
from their families to the school; this means not only teaching what needs to be taught but also
ensuring that the classroom is healthy, welcoming, inclusive and protective of children of all
different backgrounds and abilities and that your teaching is sensitive and responsive to the
needs of both boys and girls and promotes student participation in the classroom.
5. If it has not already been done, you will need to adapt the standard national curriculum to both
the local culture and context and to your multigrade situation. This may require breaking down
the curriculum into themes that can be taught across grades while ensuring that students in
each grade level learn what the system expects them to learn.
6. In implementing this adapted curriculum, you should try to be creative in your management of
the multigrade classroom, arranging whole grades, mixed grades, large and small groups, pairs
and space for individual work. This requires special attention to establishing routines for
students to work and study independently through activity-based learning.
7. You need to be flexible in your use of time, moving from one kind of group to another and
balancing the attention you give to strong students acting as peer tutors and weaker students
needing extra attention.
8. You should try to be innovative in the development and reproduction of teaching and learning
materials - use locally available resources and make them relevant to the local context and
culture. As far as possible, you need to bring teaching closer to local conditions and available
resources. The involvement of students from higher grades in designing workbooks is always
helpful in making the curriculum more relevant to the local culture.
9. Where permitted and possible, you should use the students’ mother tongue as the medium of
instruction, ensuring initial literacy in that language (e.g. by Grade 3) and then, where
appropriate, helping students transfer the literacy skills in that language to the national
language(s).
10. Since you are often working in remote and isolated places, you should take advantage of
whatever resources there are around you to help you in your work – your principal/head
teacher, parents and the local community, and other schools relatively close to your school
which can form a cluster and share useful experiences, materials and lesson plans.
11. You must try to master the other skills needed to help a small, remote, often poor (and poorly-
supported) school succeed. Multigrade teaching is a challenge in itself, but working with your
teaching colleagues to make your small school “work” requires other skills as well: making do
with limited resources and trying to raise more; carrying out a school self-assessment of its
achievements and its needs and developing a school improvement plan; mobilizing support from
impoverished and often disempowered and disinterested parents; and gaining the support of
local community leaders – all of these are skills useful in schools with multigrade classrooms.