Multiage Classroom
definitions to help you understand our terminology:
Differentiated Instruction: We know that there are different learning styles, abilities and interests. Research about how children learn includes work from Piaget, Vygotsky and Gardner, the main theorists used in differentiated instruction.
The child is an active learner. They have to do it on their own, they can’t be told. Piaget’s theory of child development came to be called the Constructivist Theory of learning. Basically, as human children grow, their life experiences stimulate a natural progression of intellectual capabilities. As they complete planned activities, their brains construct knowledge from the experience. Think of a child learning some new task. They become engrossed, repeating the activity (a puzzle, riding a bike) over and over until they have mastered it. That is constructionist theory. The capacity to construct new knowledge is innate, all a part of being human. Let’s look at the stages of human intelligence.
Four Stages
Underlying Assumptions
1. Sensorimotor Stage (birth to 2 years) A child comes into the world knowing almost nothing, but they have the potential that comes in the form of:
Infants use these potentials to explore and
gain an understanding about themselves and the environment.
They have a lack of object permanence, which
means they have little or not ability to conceive things as existing outside
their immediate vicinity. For example. When you place
a barrier, such as a piece of wood, in front of an object an infant will
believe that the object is non existent.
2. Preoperational Stage (2 to 7 years) Preoperational intelligence means the young child is
capable of mental representations, but does not have a system for organizing
this thinking (intuitive rather than logical thought).
The child is egocentric – which is they have
problems distinguishing from their own perceptions and perceptions of others.
A classic example is, a preoperational child
will cover their eyes so they can’t see someone and think that that person
can’t see them either.
The child also has rigid thinking, which
involves the following.
Lack of Reversibility – can’t reverse the steps they have taken. Don’t realize that one set of steps can be cancelled by another set of steps.
Lack of Conservation – realizing that something can have the same properties even if it appears differently.
3. Concrete Operations (7 to 11 years) Intelligence is now both symbolic and logical. The
child acquires ‘operations’ = a set of general rules and strategies. The most
critical part of operations is realizing ‘reversibility’ = both physical and
mental processes can be reversed and cancelled out by others.
The concrete operational child will overcome
the aspects of rigidity apparent in a preoperational child. These are:
The tasks of concrete operations are:
Thinking is abstract, which is a child/adolescent can formulate all the possible outcomes before beginning the problem. They are also capable of deductive reasoning.
4. Formal operations (11 to 16 years) Child is capable of formulating hypotheses and then testing them against reality. Thinking is abstract, which is a child/adolescent can formulate all the possible outcomes before beginning the problem. They are also capable of deductive reasoning.
Summary
Piaget saw children as independent learners – ‘lone scientists’. Other theorists have studied childhood development and came up with different theories, such as Vygotsky, who acknowledged Piaget's views but placed different weight on aspects such as the role the adult plays. Where Piaget saw the child as a ‘lone scientist’ Vygotsky saw the child as a "little apprentice” (Stephanie White, 2004). http://evolution.massey.ac.nz/assign2/SW/References.htm
Lev Vygotsky believed that children learn through a process of mediation, usually with the assistance of adults. He believed children learned through social discourse, that is, talking with teachers, adults, other students, and through self-talk. By interacting during activities, and with the material of the activities, children developed intellectually. Students are effective not simply be the process of maturation, but by interacting with the society or culture in which they lived. His process came to be called a Social Constructivist Theory of development.
Vygotsky thought that the personality of developing humans was simultaneously socially dependent, and individually independent, with both parts of the whole being mutually interdependent (Valsiner, 1998, p.1).
What that means is that children did not just mature into new, more complex and abstract ways of thinking (the way Piaget thought), but were supported to higher order thinking skills by their interactions with others in the process. Teachers, or other adults, would mediated (or scaffold) those educational experiences into higher order thinking skills. In educational theory made into practice, that would create a classroom where the richer the planned activities and the social culture for discussion of the thinking generated by those activities, the greater the opportunity for children to learn from the process. A teacher’s role is to plan units around essential questions, worthy ideas for students to grapple with and come to understand. A classroom based on a Social Constructivist Theory would have lots of active learning, which is often noisy and busy. Evaluation would take the form of performances of understanding, portfolios, and the use of scoring guides known as Rubrics to guide the production of a final product.
A good website for further reading is:
http://www.funderstanding.com/vygotsky.cfm
A great website is:
http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/concept2class/month1/#6
The Multiple Intelligences are:
· Verbal-Linguistic Intelligence -- well-developed verbal skills and sensitivity to the sounds, meanings and rhythms of words
· Mathematical-Logical Intelligence -- ability to think conceptually and abstractly, and capacity to discern logical or numerical patterns
· Musical Intelligence -- ability to produce and appreciate rhythm, pitch and timber
· Visual-Spatial Intelligence -- capacity to think in images and pictures, to visualize accurately and abstractly
· Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence -- ability to control one's body movements and to handle objects skillfully
· Interpersonal Intelligence -- capacity to detect and respond appropriately to the moods, motivations and desires of others.
· Intrapersonal Intelligence -- capacity to be self-aware and in tune with inner feelings, values, beliefs and thinking processes
· Naturalist Intelligence -- ability to recognize and categorize plants, animals and other objects in nature
· Existential Intelligence -- sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about human existence, such as the meaning of life, why do we die, and how did we get here.
Summary: Differentiated Instruction: Teachers are used to the complexity of teaching children from vastly different backgrounds and abilities, languages, capacities, ages, and emotional development all in the same room. What Multiage Classrooms do is allow the teachers to plan for these differences firmly in mind. Before ever beginning a unit of study, the teacher knows that every end product will be unique, individual, focus on differing perspectives and build different strengths. Planning is for Project Learning, carefully designed so that students’ are able to connect in their own, best way. Most of the planning is completed before the students’ begin. Input from students, parents, other staff, and the teaming teachers helps define the essential question and develop the enduring understanding to be gained from the project. Therefore instruction is not teacher directed but teacher assisted, and the teacher is free to mediate instruction during the learning process. Teaching is differentiated, or tailored, to suit individual learning needs.
Social Collaboration: As we discussed earlier, social collaboration is a part of Vygotsky’s theory of Social Constructivism. Students working cooperatively in small groups discuss the process as they are learning. Teachers, or other adults, assist with mediating those discussions to scaffold the students’ into higher order thinking. In the Multiage Classroom, units or activities are planned so that students must work cooperatively, thus increasing the opportunity for scaffolding.
Flexible Grouping: Placing student learners together for cooperative, small group work is an important kind of social collaboration. These groups can be heterogeneous (all different levels) or homogeneous (similar levels). There are advantages to both. If a teacher wants to focus on a particular skill, homogenously grouping the students who need instruction in that particular skill is an efficient way to handle curriculum delivery. However, when the students would benefit from having built-in tutoring, heterogeneous grouping fulfils that need. For some instruction, flexible grouping may mean that the students may progress at their own rate through some leveled material, for example, as in learning the multiplication facts. Flexible grouping can also mean that when a student experiences an academic growth spurt, he or she is not held to a particular group, but may change as needed.
Student Interest: Students sometimes benefit from self-selecting a part of their academic work. For example, book groups are often formed around an interest in reading a particular book, rather than by skill or reading level. Units of study can come from class suggestions. Teaching for understanding requires some degree of student choice, as the essential questions forming the basis of the study are often student questions. If a student or group of students is curious about a science or social studies topic, they may decide to focus an information search cycle around that specific topic. The subject itself is less critical than the process of learning to conduct and complete research.
Rubrics: Rubrics are a tool for assessment that set the criteria for more appropriate learning targets for students.
Portfolio: Portfolios are a culmination of student work using all types of media, such as written work, paintings, drawing, video, computer presentations, audio tapes, and any other medium the teacher, or student may find beneficial in expressing knowledge of the subject(s).
Performance of Understanding: The evaluation portion of a unit of study. To
evaluate a unit, there can be a paper and pencil test, an oral test, or some
type of authentic evaluation, where the students show mastery by actually
performing their understanding. Usually an audience, such as another class,
parents, or other teachers adds to the authenticity of the performance. Materials
can be saved to a portfolio of the student’s work.
Unit: A set of integrated lessons organized around a theme, an idea, a performance or a text. A unit is big enough to help avoid micromanaging our lesson plans by including only direct teaching. It also helps set performance goals that are more inclusive of diversity. A unit is small enough to help us focus our planning, so that we do not end up only covering the surface of curriculum rather than allowing students to explore the subject in depth.
A useful website: http://www.uwlax.edu/sotl/tutorial/gatheringandevaluatingevidence.htm
Wiggins and Mc Tighe Understanding
by Design
Teaming or Team Teaching: In Multiage classrooms teaming can be accomplished in various ways. Teachers can get together to plan units of study, then each select a section to teach, and plan joint evaluation. Or, two teachers can share a group of students, placing them into smaller heterogeneous or homogeneous groups in order to focus instruction on a particular skill. Teaming may, and often does, include parent partnerships where parents are involved in planning, teaching, documenting and evaluating student work.
Essential
Questions: These are the questions that have no easy answers. They
are usually interdisciplinary; they may require thinking about science, math,
and literature in order to answer them. They usually are on the edge of what is
known and what is not known, or have no definitive answer. These questions are
the one we can engage in for a lifetime, requiring us to take complex, often
conflicting information and come to a totally unique answer. For example,
students can be requested to conduct research on the comparative standard of living
in the
Some good websites explaining Essential Questions are:
http://www.galileo.org/tips/essential_questions.html
http://www.fno.org/sept96/questions.html
Constructivist Philosophy: A constructivist classroom is one where students and involved adults are engaged in making, or creating meaning from experiences. Schooling is the process by which we challenge our mental models of our society and world. We look at the whole picture and try to fit what we know into the patterns of what we are experiencing. If our mental models do not fit, we are forced to think about why they do not fit, and we have to change our minds about something. That analysis and synthesis of new information creates a tension in our minds, called cognitive dissonance. In order to resolve that dissonance, we come to understand something in a new way.
A good website for further exploration is:
http://www.funderstanding.com/constructivism.cfm
Higher Order Thinking Skills: Schooling is the attempt to engage students through the process of Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of thinking. The higher order thinking skills are required to end cognitive dissonance, which leads to new understanding.
Levels are:
· Knowledge
· Comprehension
· Application
· Analysis
· Synthesis
· Evaluation
A good website for further reading is:
http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learn/program/hndouts/bloom.html