Mary Sullivan's experience teaching in multi-age classrooms

¶ … Classroom -- with an additional 600 words

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The Multi-Age Classroom

A personal interview was conducted between me, the interviewer, and Mary Sullivan, a teacher with multi-age classroom experience. The questions were prewritten, asked, and answered during the interview. The interviewee's answers are as follows:

How long have you been a teacher?

"Well, more than 20 years. I started teaching in 1987 just after I graduated from college. I worked full time for a few years then, when we started our family, I was a substitute teacher and did some homeschool consulting. When the kids were in grade school, I went back to full time."

When did you begin teaching in a multi-age classroom?

"I started teaching in a multi-age classroom in 1999, when I went back to full time teaching. When I first started teaching, I worked at a large grade school in the suburb of a large city. Then our family moved to a small town and I got involved with some homeschooling families. I offered my experience as a teacher to do some tutoring and educational planning. It worked out well because my two were 2 and 4 [years old] at the time, and they just came along with me. Homeschooling almost always involves multiples ages, since one mother will be teaching 3 or 4 or 5 children, each in a different grade. I helped the families map out the school week, set goals, choose curriculum, and things like that. Sometimes the children would have their own schedule and books and other times several children, of different ages, would study the together, but each at his/her level. For example, the whole family might read the same book, like "Stuart Little," but the youngest would have an assignment to draw a picture of the story, and the oldest would write an paragraph about it.

"I learned a lot from this experience and found that kids from different age levels really benefited from one another. The older kids learned to help the younger. I saw the concept as being more natural and attractive than teaching 20 kids all the same age.

"When I went back to full time teaching, I found a small local school that had multi-age classrooms due to the need to share resources. This school had just four classrooms K-1, 2-4, 5-6, and 7-8. I taught in the 2nd-4th grade classroom for about 8 years."

Describe a typical multi-age classroom, number of students, age range.

"Ok. In our school, the class size was 12-15 students that spanned 2 or 3 grade levels. Each classroom had one teacher with some support staff, such as a PE teacher and a reading specialist."

What did you think about it when you first started?

"Well, if you asked me about multi-age classrooms when I was in college, or when I worked at my first school, I would have said, "Are you nuts?" By the time I started teaching full time in a multi-age classroom I was more than eager and fully ready to put into practice some of the things I had learned from my homeschooling