Multiage

We lose so much when we divide students by age… We lose peer mentoring, we lose the aspirations to be “like the big kids,” we lose the ability of younger kids to become leaders, and we lose the ability to let kids grow at their own rate. We also lose the shared public space which lies at the heart of community, culture, and democracy.
SpeEdChange: The Multiage Magic

In our not too distant past, we grew up in families with many children, in communities with many children, with the older supervising, teaching, supporting, the younger. In the neighborhood of my childhood perhaps 50 kids, in a 12-year-or-so age spread, played together. When I lived in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, I would look down from my third floor window on South Oxford Street, and see the youngest kids playing on the sidewalks, protected from traffic by the parked cars, and watched by the young teenagers – who played in the street, and the older teens who watched from their gathering spots on the stoops of the block.

But now, if I suggest that younger children should learn from and with older children, many parents – especially American parents – re-coil in fear. They expect, well, they expect all kinds of corruption, which is part of our belief in adolescents, and even “almost adolescents,” as dangerous aliens.
SpeEdChange: The Multiage Magic

Students mentored each other. Students relied on each other. Students cared for each other. James Gee has long written and spoken of the value of video game multiage groupings in building the expert vocabulary of students and their interests in a wider world – and how those informal groupings triumph over our age-segregated schools.
SpeEdChange: The Multiage Magic

Children are children. Individual human children. Learners are learners, and all are different. They grow best in a diverse ecosystem which allows the greatest level of cross-pollination, not in artificially limited, engineered monocultures created by testing and mandated curricula.
SpeEdChange: The Multiage Magic

…members of a learning community created a culture in which children learned to support each other as learners, and when connected in a multiage community, intentionally supported children to develop deep agency for their own learning and to communicate their thoughts to others. In other words, she purposely created situations in which children’s voices mattered:
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

They realize that children of any age working together can learn so much more than when they are age-based in grade levels.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

In this multiage space, it’s hard to tell where “instructional” time begins and ends. What is even more intriguing is that multiage work and space redesign has spread across the entire school. More walls are coming down, more collaborative opportunities for children are being created, and the fixed nature of learning time is shifting.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Time flows differently when children work together, the older becoming aspirational peers for younger children, no bells demanding that they stop what they are doing to move in short blocks of time from math to reading to science to history in a repetitive daily cycle. Instead, they work on projects that engage them in experiences across content areas and extend time as they see the need.
Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

I find the advantages of multiage groups to be:

Increased sense of community as learners bond through discussing and participating in interest-driven activities.

Increased socialization skills as the kids learn to navigate the learning tasks in their multiage groups.

More variety and perspectives. At times, even the youngest kids offer unique ideas of which the older kids hadn’t thought.

Older kids helping the younger kids which leads to feelings of importance and responsibility.

Decreased behavior problems as the kids become engaged in learning activities they would choose to do outside of school.

In addition, the Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI) lists the following benefits of multiage classrooms:

Children are viewed as unique individuals. The teacher focuses on teaching each child according to his or her own strengths, unlike in same-grade classrooms that often expect all children to be at the same place at the same time with regard to ability.

Children are not labeled according to their ability, and children learn at their own rate.

Children develop a sense of family with their classmates. They become a “family of learners” who support and care for each other.

Older children have the opportunity to serve as mentors and to take leadership roles.

Children are more likely to cooperate than compete. The spirit of cooperation and caring makes it possible for children to help each other as individuals, not see each other as competitors.

Older children model more sophisticated approaches to problem solving, and younger children are able to accomplish tasks they could not do without the assistance of older children. This dynamic increases the older child’s level of independence and competence.

Children are invited to take charge of their learning, by making choices at centers and with project work. This sense of “ownership” and self-direction is the foundation for lifelong learning.

Children are exposed to positive models for behavior and social skills. (http://www.uwyo.edu/ecec/_files/documents/multi-age-benefits.pdf)

Why do we group students by manufacture date? | User Generated Education