As Ken Robinson once put it, “students are educated in batches, according to age, as if the most important thing they have in common is their date of manufacture”. In our daily life, both at work and in our personal life, we constantly connect and collaborate with people of different ages. Yet, children in most K-12 schools are prepared for their future lives by being divided by age.
?Beyond the benefits from an organizational point of view, what mainly drives this age separation is the idea that learners of the same age share needs, abilities, and interests, and should receive “age-appropriate” knowledge.
??However, we might argue that our interests in a certain moment are not the same as the interests of all the other people of our age, and that we each have a personal learning pace that also varies across topics. Another argument against the separation of students in grades is that in 2018, across OECD countries, 11% of students reported that they had repeated a grade at least once in either primary or secondary school.
??The one-size-fits-all model of age separation has thus been questioned in the last decades and models with multi-grade grouping have emerged. In fact, multi-age grouping is not new. 200 years ago, when the population was smaller, one-room schools in which students of all ages were taught by a single teacher were common. And multi-age grouping is still common in schools with too few students to create groups for each age. We should however distinguish between multi-age classes formed out of numerical constraints and multi-grade classes that aim at providing specific teaching approaches.
THEN HOW CAN WE GROUP STUDENTS IF NOT BY AGE?
?Some schools now group students by ability. They generally assign students to non-fixed groups depending on what they already know and what they must learn next. Skills can be divided into small units that students study until they reach a certain level of mastery, before moving to the next unit. With this type of system, learning at a faster or at a slower pace in some subjects doesn’t lead to the heavy consequences of grade repetition or grade skipping.
?Other schools group students by interest, for example by letting them choose when they want to study each subject. The main cited benefits are an increased motivation of students, socialization with people of different ages, and an opportunity for leadership given to older students in the group.
❓We could also think of other grouping strategies, which one do you or would you like to use?
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