My grandmother was a teacher. In the 1920s that meant that she was one of the few college-educated women around, especially in rural Missouri. She taught in a one-room school house where all grades (1st through 12th) were in the same classroom (kindergarten wasn’t even imagined yet). I’ve seen pictures of her in front of the school, with her students (some taller than she). It has always fascinated me that my grandmother went to college (the same college I graduated almost 60 years later) and taught school, even after she was married (a taboo in those days), stopping only after my uncle was born.

By the accounts of her students, my grandmother was a good teacher. And the multi-aged small classroom of a one-room school house was a good set up. Why? Because it was able to meet the individual needs of each student. Now I realize there was much that teachers in those days didn’t know about teaching methods and curriculum. And in farming communities, there were huge gaps in the children’s education as they worked as farm hands. But it’s still worth thinking…what did one-room rural school houses have that we don’t.

Well, let’s start with what they didn’t have that today’s public school has much of – two things come to mind: 1. administrators and 2. high stakes testing.

Without those things, where was the measurement that my grandma was indeed doing a good job of educating her students? Well, it had to come from the students and their parents directly.

But some of the things a one-room school had going for it was the small class size and a multi-age approach. I was first exposed to the idea of multi-aged learning when I researched a Montessori preschool for Kay. Super Dad had enrolled his older two children in Montessori and was very enthusiastic about its benefits. One of the methods used there is that many of the lessons are self-correcting. That means that the student himself discovers whether he has done the lesson correctly and in seeing the mistake can then fix it. This method not only helps the child be able to see the mistake and not make it again, but it doesn’t introduce the idea of a teacher grading a child and all the emotional issues around failure and competition that other methods do.

The other method I liked about Montessori very much is that children were encouraged to teach/coach the other children. This is the ultimate sign of mastery of a concept, being able to teach it back. And the kids love it. What this also fosters socially (with the teacher facilitating things correctly) is helpful compassion and camaraderie among classmates. Nothing is better than watching children encouraging children.

This approach can backfire though. When I moved Kay from Montessori (where she’d completed 1st grade but was only 5), and placed her in public school, the school insisted on keeping her in 1st grade because of her age. I was troubled, but understood the wisdom of keeping her socially with her age group, yet I worried about how bored she might be. The teacher, seeing Kay’s advanced skills, used her and another child as teacher/coaches for many of the children. While Kay didn’t mind at all ( she had come from a place where children taught each other), it became apparent that Kay was doing a lot of teaching and not much learning. There was no system in place to educate Kay beyond her current level, there was no one for her to learn from (as the teacher was busy with all the other 20 + kids). And it took fighting the school bureaucracy until she was in 3rd grade to get her in advanced classes.

The other beauty of this approach is that children advance naturally, not by “grade level”, but by how quickly or slowly they learn. And if the class is small enough, each ones individual needs is more easily met. And children are introduced to the same concept over and over, at different levels. Children working on the 3rd grade level can learn something by listening to a 5th grade math lesson going on around them.

My grandmother’s classroom probably looked very much like the self-correcting and children coaching others models that I’ve described. It was such a more collaborative effort.

I realize that I’m likely romanticizing some when I say that one-room school houses are the answer. But as we watch what is appearing to be a mass exodus out of traditional public schools to home schooling, smaller private schools, virtual schools, etc., it does make a person wonder if smaller classes and a multi-age, multi-level approach wouldn’t go a long way toward “fixing” what’s broken??

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