By Cindy Mindell

WEST HARTFORD – One good educational turn deserves another. That’s the philosophy behind an announcement this week that the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Hartford (SSDS) would be introducing the multi-age classroom model to its elementary school starting in the 2017-18 academic year. The educational approach, implemented in Schechter’s middle school grades last year, has been embraced by students and teachers, according to Head of School Andrea Kasper.

A multi-age classroom is designed to enhance individualized learning by meeting the developmental needs of each child. While a traditional classroom will group students according to age, a multi-age setting blends students from a two-year age span to accommodate variances in their academic, social, and emotional development. In this setting, learners are recognized for their unique place on the learning continuum and receive personalized support to reach their full potential. Students stay with the same teaching team for two years, allowing for deeper teacher-student relationships.

The SSDS Lower School will be organized into three groupings – kindergarten and first grade, second and third grades, and fourth and fifth grades – each led by a secular studies teacher and a Hebrew/Judaic-studies teacher.

According to Kasper, research shows that in the multi-age classroom, students develop a deep understanding of the academic content thanks to the blend of individualized and group instruction, the ability to work at one’s own pace, and the delivery of course content in repeated and varied forms. Teachers in multi-age classrooms report fewer behavioral problems as students work cooperatively with each other on a daily basis. In addition, students are taught to be self-motivated, self-reliant, and enthusiastic learners.

“Our birth years don’t indicate that we share the same cognitive, social, and emotional development,” Kasper says. “On the individual level, the cognitive, social, and emotional development doesn’t move in lockstep, nor are these things linear. So you could be cognitively in one place and socially in another, and this kind of environment allows students to find their place as best as possible across all those different domains, and it can continue to shift.”

This model of multi-age “instructional groups” will also help Schechter teachers enhance the school’s focus on individualized learning, according to Kasper.

“As teachers, you’re applying a lot of observation and assessment of where these kids are in their knowledge and in their skill development to make sure that we’re giving each one what they need,” she says. “Instructional groups can include whatever number of students that is appropriate at that time. If you contrast that to the more traditional classroom, where the teacher has a lesson to teach and she teaches to what I call ‘the mythical middle’ – because it doesn’t really exist – and then she does her best to help the kids on each side of that mythical middle.

“Rather than saying, ‘I have one lesson to teach all of you,’ the teacher can say, ‘I have a lesson to teach this group and a lesson to teach that group and a lesson to teach that third group.’ It may be around the same skill area, but where the students are and the pace of their learning can really vary.”

The multi-age classroom is not a new model. Many adherents throughout the U.S. and the world choose the approach not only for its educational benefits, but for its closer parallel to the real world; after all, workplaces, families, and social environments are usually multi-age settings.

“There’s a surge right now in the multi-age classroom because of the emphasis and care around 21st-century skills – which have to do with empathy, collaboration, critical thinking, creative problem-solving – and we want to make sure that our classrooms and our schools reflect the world much better than they currently do,” Kasper says.

“Current schooling structures were developed in the early 1900s and were based on certain needs and beliefs at the time. You wouldn’t want to be in an operating room from 1980, let alone 1910, so you should want your schools to also reflect that education has changed, what we know about students and their learning has changed, and the ways we need to engage students have dramatically changed. I think we owe it to our schools and our communities to reflect those and to also prepare our students,” she says.

In her 2011 book, Now You See It, Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, cites that 65 percent of current elementary-school students will hold jobs that don’t exist today.

“We don’t even know what those jobs are and yet we’re tasked with preparing them for that world,” says Kasper. “The purpose of schooling used to be to prepare children to work in factories. That’s not what we’re doing anymore so we can’t use the same model. By high school, you’re taking the classes that you need to take, regardless of your grade level; you’re not only with your year. Those same principles apply to younger students.”

The multi-age classroom is part of the strategic-planning process that Kasper and the Schechter board have been implementing since her arrival in 2014.

“Even before I was hired, what the board had been looking for very specifically was a transformational leader, somebody who would rethink our school and what it was doing,” Kasper says. “The strengths of Schechter have always been clear: individualized instruction and a love of community, so during the strategic-planning process, the question became, how do we hold dear to those strengths and build to the next step? I’ve always been a proponent of the multi-age model, whether we have 120 kids or 220 kids. This is the right educational model and the right thing to do for children in their learning and in their social-emotional health.”

CAP: SSDS head of school Andrea Kasper with a student.