Education Week - November 6, 2019 - 29

all roughly the same age, but ability and achievement is
all over the place," Plucker said. "How do we move to a
system where we have a much tighter range of ability and
achievement and the students ages' are all over the place?
That's the key question with personalization."
Trying to group students by ability, rather than age, isn't
easy. But the Kettle Moraine district near Milwaukee has
been at it for more than half a dozen years. Schools in the
district may combine kindergarten with 1st grade, 2nd
with 3rd, and so on, or they may combine 1st grade with
2nd, or 3rd with 4th. Middle schools have classes that span
three grade levels. Teachers typically "loop" with their students, meaning that children will stay with them for both
grades and get new classmates after the first year.
It was a bumpy adjustment at first-including for families-but it's been worthwhile, said Laura Dahm, who
taught in multi-age classrooms in the district for nearly a
decade and is now its director of instructional coaches.
"We always say elementary school and youth sports are
the only places that are grouped by age," she said. "We
work with people of different ages, we sit around the dinner table with people of different ages. We have kids who
will walk when they are ready to walk, be potty trained
when they are ready to be potty trained. But in kindergarten, they all have to be ready to read on the same day."
The multi-age structure gives students more time to
master grade-level content, Dahm said. Older students
in the classrooms can serve as mentors, teaching younger
students routines like how to line up and store materials in
a cubby, so that the teacher doesn't have to do it. And it's
easier-and carries less of a stigma-to customize instruction for individual students.
"It started to be less about what does every 2nd grader
need and more about what does this child need," Dahm
said. "We have really grown to a point where there was no
value associated with what grade level you were on."
Older students bullying younger students has not been
an issue, she added. In fact, because the teacher spends so
much time building up the learning environment in these
multi-age classrooms, students tend to "stand up in new
ways to 'protect' the climate of the classroom," and are
more likely to self-regulate their behavior, she said.

Educators at Lincoln say
older students have more
opportunities to mentor
younger ones in multi-age
classrooms.

Lincoln Elementary in Illinois have grappled with. In fact,
even just making sure teachers' schedules line up in a way
that makes multi-age grouping possible has been tough.
Morgan Peterson, who teaches a 1st grade of both English and Spanish speakers, said that she was paired last year
with the kindergarten teacher next door. By the end of the
year, she said, a handful of kindergartners were meeting
regularly with her students for reading group. And some
of her 1st grade students went down to the kindergarten
for extra help.
The arrangement seemed to benefit those students, but
there were still plenty of bumps. "There's some misalignment of the curriculum," Peterson said. "In 1st grade, we
are working on writing words and writing sentences. And
kindergarten is working on writing letters. It's a huge difference; there's a big gap."
This year, the exchanges aren't as easy to facilitate, in
part because Peterson's schedule doesn't neatly align
with the kindergarten teachers she's paired with. But
overall, she thinks the shift has forced her and her colleagues to look more closely at student data and use it to
personalize learning.
"This model truly allows us to be more responsive to
individual student's needs," Peterson said, "We can get
where we want to be, but there's a lot of growing pains and
some hurdles along the way." n

Curriculum Misalignment
The Waukesha STEM Academy, a charter school also
near Milwaukee, has gone beyond combining a grade
or two. The school has what Principal James Murray describes as a "full-blown competency-based" system for its
K-8 students. Students move on in the school's continuum
as soon as they are ready.
But it took a lot of work, including enlisting a coder and
developer to create the online platforms and adaptive systems needed to track student progress.
"Kids needed the resources to move forward when
they were ready," he said. "We built a lot of that from the
ground up because we couldn't find anything that was already built at that time. We drew it out on napkins and we
started building spreadsheets and wrote codes with it."
The sheer logistical challenges of carefully tracking each
student's achievement data to make sure that he or she is
in the right spot based on ability is something teachers at
PERSONALIZED LEARNING: What Educators Really Think and Do | 29

Education Week - November 6, 2019

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