Teaching strategies

The participants in this study used various teaching strategies to teach mathematics in multigrade classrooms. They tried to guide and help learners to learn. They also practiced the lecturing method, when they were clarifying issues to the learners. This was then combined with various strategies such as group work, peer tutoring, and individualised learning. According to Little (1995) peer tutoring and individualised learning are the most effective teaching strategies in multigrade teaching.

The teaching approaches varied from one teacher to another. Despite the pair seating arrangement in Shiwa’s class, the lesson was presented through individualised learning. Bibi and Jatty had pair or group teaching, based on the question and answer method. Janet used an activity based learning strategy with individual learners. Collaboration she used was during the time when learners were marking their scripts after the warm-up activity. The rest of the lesson was purely individual with learners doing individual exercises, and approaching the teacher when they had questions. She also used the discovery learning method especially with Grade six learners.

All teachers demonstrated part of the lesson during their instruction, by using chalkboards or notice boards in the cases where the teaching aid was already displayed. The relevant groups of

Grade sixes how to write the fractions in symbols when given expressions in words. Janet’s demonstration indicated how to solve a word problem by drawing pictures to the Grade sixes, and the Grade five learners were shown the various steps in calculating expanded notation involving decimal numbers. Bibi demonstrated the procedure on division with two digit divisors using whole numbers to the Grade fives, and taught multiplication terminologies to the Grade six learners.

Multigrade teaching is believed to be successful if various methods such as peer teaching, group work, and individualised learning are taking place (Little, 2001). These teachers used various methods to teach their classes. Bibi and Jatty used group work and peer teaching in their lessons. Bibi motivated his learners to sit in pairs while Jatty had groups of five to six learners. Jatty grouped her learners in small groups so that she could go around instructing these small groups. She also used the learners in groups to explain to those who did not understand, while she was attending to the other grade. A little practice of peer group was found in these two classes. When interviewed, teachers explained why they had chosen to work with or without groups. Following is an excerpt from Jatty’s interview.

The group works at the certain group. There it is easiest to work with the groups so that now I explain to five to this group and I go to that group again. I think that is more suitable to work in groups with the Grade fives and the Grade six learners and then as a whole.

The above-mentioned lessons seem to support Birch & Lally (1995) and Little (1995) who stressed that successful teaching in multigrade classes can be gained through the use of group work and peer teaching.

Shiwa preferred to do direct teaching because she does not have time to deal with groups. Following is her explanation of how she teaches her combined grades:

I do mostly direct teaching; I don’t do more individual explanation because I am already having a hard time covering the curricular. Mostly, I am at the front giving them examples, having them do their own, walking around seeing how they are doing and then moving on to the next topic.

In addition to Shiwa, Janet also sees group work as time consuming. She gave the reasons why she does not use group work:

I know it is probably against all the policies but I found group work is just a bit chaotic. The ideal group work is fine but critically I found it difficult because you normally get one person doing [all activities]. Even though you try to encourage everybody to take part,it is quite difficult.

Although Shiwa and Janet did not use grouping in their lessons, their method of individual learning also seem to work in multigrade teaching. In my view, learning took place especially in Janet’s class where learners indicated the satisfaction in solving the given problems.

Although Janet, Bibi and Jatty combined their teaching strategies, they kept on shifting between the grades, and gave the work to one grade before they left them to move to the other grade, depending on the content they were teaching. This agrees with Beukes (2006) who stated that the selection of teaching strategies depends on the subject to be taught as well as the environment where the learning is taking place.

In observing the multigrade lessons, one could see how teachers sometimes played the role of facilitators, which is an element of learner centred teaching. Learners were also willing to assist others. Bibi’s learners helped each other during the lesson by calculating together. He also asked them to give their answer in pairs. Jatty’s Grade five learners were motivated to show others how to find equivalent fractions on the fraction chart. However, during the interview Bibi and Janet felt that learner centred (LCE) teaching is not suitable for multigrade teaching. Their lessons appeared to be more learner centred than Shiwa and Jatty’s lessons. But they claimed not to like and use the LCE approach. These teachers seem not to understand the learner centred approach which has an implication to their selection of methods of teaching or teaching strategies.