How Multi-Age Groups Changed My Teaching Forever

This story was published by a Voices of Change fellow. Learn more about the fellowship here.

This summer, my kids spent time hanging out with their cousins who were visiting from out of town.

My kids range in age from 11 to 19 years old. Their cousins are between 6 and 9 years old, but age wasn’t a barrier to them learning together. Listening to them talk and play — at the pool, the science museum, making friendship bracelets and stop-motion videos with old toys — there was an incredible exchange of knowledge and skills flowing back and forth between them. Their interactions and my own experiences in multi-age learning environments have convinced me that mixed-age groups are powerful vehicles for learning.

From extended families to hunter-gatherer societies, even on street corners or suburban cul-de-sacs, young people naturally gather in mixed-age groups for socializing, play and learning. Researchers and academics, including Peter Gray, Alison Gopnik and Jonathan Haidt, have documented the importance and power of learning from peers of different ages. We are wired to be social learners, and mixed-age groups have always been one of the key ways that young people learn about the world, themselves and living in community with others. It’s only in modern schools that we regularly segregate kids by age.

While it’s conceptually more efficient to batch kids this way to teach them a sequential curriculum and have age-based standards, it denies the fact that children aren’t standardized, and that diversity is an asset to learning and society. The lack of opportunities for mixed-age interaction removes a natural pathway for meaningful learning that may actually be harming kids today.

As we look to evolve schools for the future, we should reduce age segregation and increase opportunities for age mixing and multi-age grouping as a way to harness cognitive diversity and further engagement and learning.

Cooperative Learning Over Comparison

Teaching a combined class of fifth and sixth graders for 12 years has shown me the value of multi-age learning and convinced me that it’s simply our ideas about school that stand in the way of making this approach more widespread.

There was a tremendous amount that my students learned from each other in our multi-age classroom. Students were there for two years, and during that time, older students took the lead to teach routines and expectations, model discourse and deepen learning for their peers. Opportunities to interact with their younger peers allowed them to practice leadership and strengthen their understanding by teaching. There was an expectation that not everyone was in the same place with their learning, and that was OK. Students knew that they would learn from each other, and eventually, everyone would become both the student and the teacher.

Learning from someone just a bit more advanced than you is often easier than learning from an expert, because they remember the steps, difficulties and misconceptions that go into gaining a new skill or knowledge and can teach accordingly. Similarly, teaching someone just behind you helps solidify what you know and deepens your understanding and confidence with the topic.

These opportunities don’t exist in single-grade spaces where everyone is the same age and there for the same amount of time. Instead, we have absorbed the belief that kids of the same age should all learn and be able to do the same thing at the same time, despite ample evidence that young people are wildly diverse, even at the same age.

When isolated with only same-age peers, kids focus on comparison, competition and who is better at what. Figuring out who is the best at math, basketball or drawing is the social currency of a single grade class in elementary school. The assumption that there has to be a hierarchy of abilities comes from being in a standardized environment where they are all part of the same age-graded “batch” and the expectation that they should all be able to do the same things at the same time. This leads to students thinking their abilities are fixed, and that they are either naturally good at something or not.

When my son was in fourth grade in a Montessori class that included sixth graders, the friends he talked about most were those sixth graders whom he sought out for advice on coding, solving a Rubik’s cube or improving his soccer skills. He wasn’t bothered that they were more skilled than he was; their expertise was inspiring. He knew they had more experience and was eager to learn from them.

Comparison and competition stifle the open exchange of information that I would see in my multi-age class. They discourage the risk-taking and curiosity needed for learning. When we think about the schools we want for our children, we need to consider how we organize them and how they impact what happens within them.

‘When Can We See Our Buddies Again?’

Buddy time is a cherished routine in elementary schools. Older and younger students gather to read, play games or do crafts. It tends to be an add-on, something to do when we need to fill some time or can’t plan something else. But there is untapped potential in students of different ages learning together that could be transformative.

In particular, it was often my students who struggled academically who most looked forward to buddy time. While they might not have excelled in the traditional subjects, they often had the social skills or caring instincts that made them excellent older buddies, and they got to have the experience of being the expert. If we created more opportunities to learn academics in those environments, with some of the same-age pressure off, students who struggle might find more success. Why not encourage an older student who needs additional reading or math practice to work with younger students who are learning similar skills as a regular part of their learning? We often reject these ideas as impractical or not aligned with standards. Still, they can be far more meaningful than what we put in place, which is usually working alone through a screen-based reading intervention or receiving more adult support.

In schools, we have to justify everything we do based on some standard, target, or objective, especially if it might take away from our mandated minutes of ELA or math instruction. I justify buddy time as an opportunity for my students to practice leadership, empathy and giving their whole attention to someone else while using their reading, writing, and math skills. What matters most, though, is the joy of that time: kids laughing together, sharing the joys of learning together; the olders getting to be a little bit younger, sillier, more playful, but also responsible; the youngers getting to be more mature, more sophisticated, seen and valued for who they are.

A Model Transformation

As schools continue to struggle with student absenteeism and disengagement, increased student mental health challenges and ongoing gaps in learning outcomes, we need to look past our nostalgic ideas of what schools are like and reimagine them using what we know about what kids need. This model may have made sense 100 years ago, when kids got to mix freely outside of school through extended families and free play in their communities. Today, the environment around schools has changed tremendously, and those types of experiences are less the norm than they used to be. Families are smaller, there is less community interaction and extracurricular activities are often highly structured and age-segregated, as well.

Montessori, Democratic, and Sudbury schools that offer mixed-age learning show that it’s possible to structure schools differently, replicating some of what has been lost outside of school and giving students an environment rich with natural learning opportunities. However, the traditional, standardized approach to schooling and the perception that it’s too complicated for teachers to serve students of different ages simultaneously limit its wider adoption.

As teachers, we tend to define ourselves by the grade or content we teach. While there is value in possessing specific knowledge and skills in a discipline or age group, we should be able to expand our talents to a broader range of students. The current model facilitates teacher ease by allowing us to rely on repeating the same lessons to sequential batches of children as they pass our station on the educational assembly line. Still, it does so at the expense of alternative avenues for learning that could be more powerful.

The Butterflies Know

As their summer visit came to an end, my kids and their cousins all gathered around to watch a butterfly we had raised as a caterpillar the prior week emerge from its chrysalis. Their faces crowded around the container; it was evident that the wonder of the experience was shared equally by all ages. The questions were flying, and you could hardly tell a difference between who was asking what: What part is that? Why are the wings so small? When will it be ready to fly?

Likewise, the experience was unique for each of them, based on their different ages. The older cousins could practice care by helping to make sure everyone could see, and the younger cousins could get affirmation about an idea they had about what they were seeing. Clearly, there was something for each of them to learn, and the fact that they could share it with those of different ages deepened the experience. We can transform learning for young people in the same way by creating more opportunities for them to learn with and from students of different ages.