Flexibility

Teachers in small schools largely escape red tape and administrative pettiness. This enables them to implement improved ideas with a minimum of delay. Field trips, and use of the playground or pieces of school equipment can fit into the actual flow of the learning experience, rather than having to be adjusted to the plans and the needs of several other classrooms.


Individualization

Since the teacher has fewer students, he has more time for each one. The lower pupil-teacher ratio allows for more careful assessment of the needs, strengths, and weakensses of each student. The teacher has a better opportunity to see each as a person having unique problems, rather than as just one of thirty-two fourth-graders all working on the same lesson, for example.

Instructional Flexibility

In a multigrade classroom a teacher has the possibility of allowing a child to read with students in higher grades while, for example, the same child does math with the lower grades. One can more easily gear the work to individual needs. Multi-age grouping enables youngsters to work at different developmental levels without obvious attention being brought to the remediation - a situation that can cause emotional, social, or intellectual damage. It also makes acceleration possible without special attention or notice to special arrangements.

Social Skills

One of the difficulties of single grade classrooms is that they cause each group to lose some of its perspective on human experience by narrowing the social atmostphere within which the children live. A classroom having children of several ages enables students to gaina perspective on what is happening in the lives and education of children both younger and older. It helps them gain a more accurate sense of the past and future in terms of experiences and interests and stimulates the entire leaning environment. Several studies have found that multigrade classrooms improve personal and social development, improve attitudes toward school, and help students become more cooperative and less competitive.

Peer Tutoring

In a multigrade classroom, the children generally have more opportunity to help one another than in a single-grade classroom. Such peer teaching aids the slower and younger children in ways often beyong the communicative ability of adults, since adults have generally fogotten the problems they had in learning a particular concept or skill in the remote past. By way of contrast, the older student has recently passed through the same learning process and can often explain a difficulty in a way that makes sense to a younger classmate. Not only does such an interchange aid the younger student, but there is evidence that the older children learn even more than their tutors. Teaching stimulates their own interest in the learning process and they often make striking gains in achievement.

Develops Independence and Responsibility

Research has found that members of small schools report greater feelings on responsibility by developing independent work habits, and assuming responsibility for their own activities.

Family Atmosphere

Small schools provide a family atmosphere. Mrs. White suggested that Adventist schools should be "family schools, where every students will receive special help from his teachers as the members of the family should receive help in the home" (6T., p. 152).

Academic Achievement

Jerome Thayer studies the test results from the Adventist elementary school in the Atlantic Union Conference and came to several conclusions. First, the average achievement level of the nearly eight thousand students tested in the union's schools was one month ahead of the national average. Second, he found only small differences between children from larger schools. The differences, surprisingly enough, were most often in favor of the smaller schools. Third, Thayer discovered that the more years students had been in Adventist schools, the higher their achievement levels were.(1) Dennis Milburn found similar results except in the areas of vocabulary. Here students in multigrade classrooms were significantly more advanced. In his five year study he found little other variation between students in multigrade classrooms and those in single grade classrooms.(2)

Milburn, Dennis, A Study of Multi-Age or Family-Grouped Classroom", Phi Delta Kappan, March 1981, p. 513.