Multigrade Teaching and Learning

In multi-grade classroom settings teachers are responsible for teaching children of different grade levels in the same classroom at the same time. In South Africa, these classrooms are often the only option for the delivery of education in rural areas where there are not enough learners to set up a conventional school. The classrooms are labour intensive and require more planning and professional development than the conventional classroom.

Although multi-grade education is a worldwide phenomenon in rural areas, the training of these teachers has remained unaddressed in many parts of the world, resulting in the poor academic performance of rural learners. In South Africa, 8 million children attend rural schools, of which more than 2 million are taught in multi-grade classrooms. This picture mirrors the African continent where 50% of classrooms are multi-grade. Currently, multi-grade classrooms account for 30% of world classrooms.

In many countries, multi-grade teaching has been introduced in schools which are mostly in rural and sparsely populated areas that also have a difficult terrain. This has also been the case in South Africa. The main reasons cited for the introduction of multi-grade teaching include:

(i) Increasing access to education provision to disadvantaged areas;
(ii) Increasing access to learning in understaffed schools;
(iii) Maximising the use of available teachers and classroom space; and
(iv) Ensuring the cost-effective use of available resources.

Curriculum adaptation allows for the national curriculum to be adapted to local multigrade settings. It could be done in several ways as indicated in the diagram below.

Teachers who are innovative in teaching strategies may explore learner grouping methods and some level of whole-class teaching combined with differentiation of activities based on the grade, as opposed to the quasi-monograde strategy.

Peer tutoring is a strategy that could allow teachers to draw on learners in higher grades as resources for teaching those in lower grades, as it an initiative on the part of learners to attempt to understand the teacher’s instructions. Peer tutoring is beneficial not only to those being tutored, but also to those who are tutoring, in that as they explain to others they reinforce their own understandings. Peer tutoring also encourages learners to collaborate with one another.

Multigrade teachers think of the purpose of assessment as determining learners’ understanding of the content taught and determining academic progress at the beginning and during the year. Assessment practices point to a shift towards continuous or formative assessment (also known as assessment for learning). Continuous assessment is more consistent with multigrade teaching in that it is assessment aimed at better learning, as opposed to assessment used to determine promotion from one grade to another.

Teachers in multigrade classes tend to apply various assessment forms, including tests, assignments, classwork, homework, orals, research and demonstrations. Some teachers tend to give irregular assessments and fewer tasks than planned. Various reasons were given for this, such as the burdensome nature of recording grades.

Requirements relating to the amount of assessment and recording need to be revisited. Teacher in-service training should seek to reinforce assessment practices, as well as encourage adoption of assessment practices that are compatible with multigrade teaching. There is also a need for the Department of Basic Education to provide administrative assistance and also to provide guidelines for a basic minimum number of teachers for each multigrade school.

The successful implementation of the Strategy and the Plan is dependent on the following pillars:

The use of technology to enhance teaching and learning is all but non-existent in multi-grade schools. The use of technology can help teachers to work with different levels of age and abilities in a classroom and can greatly enhance the quality of teaching and learning in multi-grade classrooms.

The strategies for the advancement of quality teaching and learning in multi-grade schools should extend beyond providing teacher development in multi-grade pedagogy to include the provision of essential resources including innovative technology and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that will enhance the administration and management of the schools as well as the quality of teaching and learning.

The Revised Annual Teaching Plans were released in 2020 and 2021 to make up for learning losses experienced due to school disruption during Covid-19.

Foundation Phase

Intermediate Phase

The challenges faced by multigrade teachers could be avoided with the provision of specific multigrade training and support. An immediate step to be taken should be to provide in-service training to teachers on various aspects of multigrade teaching competencies, including curriculum adaptation, classroom organisation, teaching strategies, and learner assessment. District officials should also be trained, especially in regard to the support they can provide teachers. Accompanying this training should be the distribution of multigrade teachers’ handbooks to which multigrade teachers could refer whenever necessary.

Please see the links below for more reading on MultiGrade Teaching and Learning.

• Education, development and support for multigrade teachers
• Education Faculty pioneers multi-grade education in South Africa
• The Multigrade Classroom Teacher Development
• Multigrade teaching in SA
• Multi-Grade Strategy and Basic Education Sector Plan