Multiage Portraits: Teaching and Learning in Mixed-Age Classrooms

by Anne Bingham, Peggy Dorta, Molly McClaskey

185 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1993

Reviews

[Charlie Bone]

I wrote this book along with Anne, Justine, Molly, and Peggy. It was an attempt to describe what good multiage teaching practices looks like. We did it two ways: I did a participant observation study of Anne's k-4 multiage classroom (Part 1. of the book) and each of the teachers wrote multiple essays describing how they approached their teaching day Part 2. of the book). Part 3. put Parts One and Two together through a reflection on the writing of Lev Vygotsky. The book sold 1300 copies. It is beautiful teacher writing, and the moment to moment interactions I describe in Part 1. aren't so bad either. The teacher-authors taught multiage in the old fashioned way. One class with a group of children who happened to be of different ages. This is not about how to teach "combined grades" or "combination classrooms" organized because of mismatched numbers of children at different grade levels. It's about teaching heterogeneous, family-grouped, collections of children, organized because of a philosophical commitment to good developmentally inspired teaching. Period.