Disadvantages Of Multi Grade Teaching

Introduction

According to Berry (2010), “Multi-grade teaching occurs within a graded system of education when a single class contains two or more student grade levels.” In an article it states that, “Multi-grade teaching is a situation in which one teacher has to teach many grades, all at the same time.” In other words what these two definitions are saying is multi-grade teaching can be defined as a class consisting of students from different grade levels, ages with various learning abilities and is managed by one teacher. In a multi-grade classroom the student’s ratio is usually small because of the inadequate enrollment of students in each grade to make up a single class. For example, a school might integrate grades 2 and 3; grade 2 might

According to Mariano & Kirby, “students in the multi-grade classes do not appear to learn more or less than their counterparts in the single-grade classes.” However, teachers who teaches in a multi-grade school will argue that their job is doubled and more technical been that they have received no training on such task. In addition, they said the curriculum does not cater for students in a multi-grade setting. Thus, when selecting teaching strategies they have to be mindful of the type of learners in the class, available resources which includes materials and the amount of time needed to do activities that are in the lessons. Even though teachers in single grade classes will oppose to the notion since they have to do the same thing when preparing lessons for their students. However, it is much more difficult in a multi-grade setting because one teacher has to attend to more than one

According to Gardner (1983), “All human beings possess nine intelligences in varying amounts. Each person has a different composition.” Even though students possess nine intelligences they are not exerted at once and majority of the time one is always active than the others. In any classroom teachers have to try and indentify student’s intelligence and make activities that are geared towards those intelligences. For example, teachers have to ensure that they are catering for all the learning styles which are visual, auditory, and kinesthetic when preparing lesson. They have to use teaching aids such as charts, manipulative, videos, projector just to name a few to help students understand content and to also let each students have fun while