What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Mixed Aged Tutoring

3425 Words14 Pages
What are the advantages and disadvantages of mixed aged tutoring and teaching? During the course of this assignment I would like to explore the advantages and disadvantages of mixed age tutoring and teaching, to enable me to do this I will use not only experiences from my own workplace but from research previously carried out by others. Most of us grew up in an age-segregated school system. So did our parents and grandparents, and this makes it easy to assume that such a school structure is both natural and universal. In fact, it is universal neither geographically nor historically. A quarter of Scotland's primary schools have fewer than fifty students; 80070 of Portuguese children go to schools with no more than two classrooms; and there are 11,000one-teacher rural schools in France. Age segregation, as practised in most large schools, is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one which runs counter to the pattern of upbringing of the young which previously existed for millions of years. Mixed age classes occur when a single teacher instructs more than one year group of students in the same classroom. This is most commonly found in smaller schools but it can also occur in larger schools where there is fluctuating or uneven enrolment. Mixed age classes are generally necessary because of the size of a school or the intake of that school. In some schools they may be formed for pedagogical reasons. This is often referred to as “vertical Grouping” (Dean 1992) Multi-age classrooms are nothing new and often there is no alternative if you think about the schoolhouses of old or even now in smaller communities such as those situated on islands where children of all ages studying with the help with one teacher is still a necessity. It is interesting to know that the Dfes and Ofsted both favour setting and streaming of different ability groups at primary/secondary

More about What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Mixed Aged Tutoring

Open Document