Combine 7th and 8th Grades Canon Elementary School District #50 - Essay Example

Combined classrooms have advantages in developing the children’s maturity and sense of collaboration while teachers are often put in a difficult situation of managing lessons well and risking teaching efficiency. In this paper, the benefits and drawbacks of combined classrooms will be discussed and evaluate if it is appropriate for Canon Elementary School to adapt for the aim of maximizing salary of a teacher. Multi-grade classrooms are not new to education. An educational system which is more open to diversity and maximized staff members usually implements combined classrooms.

For them, multi grade system is more favorable for students, teachers, and the school management since it allows the children to have “sufficient teacher attention,” introduce a sense of responsibility to the older students, and “provide greater stability and security for pupils” (Little, 2007). Furthermore, it provides the pupils a chance of social improvement, as they interact with others of different age and background. Such system is implemented by Charles Dickens Elementary School where there is a school-wide combined classrooms where it features: learning continuity for pupils in cooperation with parents and teacher, team teaching of two teachers per classroom, and learning activities based on “open-ended, integrated, thematic, co-operative approaches using varied resources” (Dolik, n.d.).

The environment of Dickens provided a student-centered quality, where children and faculty members treated each other as ‘family.’ The Cross of Glory Lutheran School also imposed the same thing in their curriculum. The children are not only assessed with their abilities but also with age, which means that there is complete diversity among them. Pupils in a multi-age classrooms “break down barriers of age and gender” in the name of learning and building responsibility especially for the older students (Cross