“Go team!” I said as I ended our morning circle one day in October. We had just made a game plan with the students for setting up props and sets for our annual “haunted path,” a tradition we started in our first year of our microschool.
As the kids were excitedly heading outside to work, one of my new students, a seven-year-old boy, asked, “Why did you say, ‘team’?” I explained that at our school, we are all a team, working together to make things happen. He got a big smile on his face, and a little burst of energy left his body in something akin to a fist pump. He ran outside to join the “big kids” on his “team.”
I love telling a seven-year-old boy that he is on the same team as the 13-year-old boy who is already taller than the adults running the school. I love telling him that he and I are on the same team. That is what community is, and that is the environment where kids learn and grow.
Many microschools are choosing the one-room schoolhouse model of yesteryear and creating mixed-age classrooms. In fact, I have noticed that increasingly, the very definition of the term microschool includes mixed-age classrooms as a defining feature. My own decision to do mixed ages was to build on a larger scale what I was already seeing as beneficial in my own family homeschool.
When I first considered homeschooling, I was impressed by two families in my neighborhood that were homeschooling. I noticed that one had an older son who was so sweet with my younger kids, and both families had older girls and boys that could relate socially with all ages. They seemed more participatory than other teens I saw in our church classes. When I asked their moms about this, they opened my eyes to the way that age segregation in traditional schools may be affecting kids’ social skills, encouraging them to see younger kids as “lower” and adults as unapproachable or something to be avoided.
However, even though I intentionally created my mixed-age learning environment, I do sometimes find myself worrying about the challenges that come with it. We imagine that somewhere there is an ideal classroom working so efficiently through learning objectives, all the children with matched skill levels being equally challenged and feeling equally engaged and thriving. Of course, we know this classroom doesn’t exist, and yet, when our own learning environment also falls short of this ideal, we worry that the mixed-age format is the problem. I remind myself, and encourage other founders to do the same, that age-mixing is a feature of my program, rather than a shortcoming.
Here are three reasons mixed ages are a benefit to the learning environment:
- The real world is mixed ages, mixed skill levels, and mixed experiences. We don’t need to create a world for students that doesn’t actually exist. In their adult life, they will sometimes be the trainer and sometimes the trainee. They will need to wait for others to understand, share their own knowledge, or collaborate on problems where there is no clear “right” answer. Mixed-age classrooms allow for increased empathy, opportunities to reinforce learning and build confidence through sharing what they know, and better retention through peer-to-peer exchange—all skills that will serve our students in their real life in the real world.
- The stigma of “delays” or being “behind” disappears, and space is created for natural learning timetables and neurodivergence. In a mixed-age classroom, skills are just skills, and you have either mastered a skill, or you are still working on it, regardless of your age. Because age is de-emphasized, kids make friends based on shared interests, and they naturally share skills with one another as they work on projects together. There is no need to define when a certain skill should be learned, so kids stop worrying about comparing themselves to peers, and focus instead on learning the skill needed as the need arises. This is especially true in self-directed learning spaces where there is no defined curriculum. Again, in the adult world, we would never say to a friend, “I can’t believe you don’t know how to play the piano and we are the same age!” Age doesn’t define skill acquisition—interests, life experiences, hobbies, and goals lead to skill mastery.
- Focusing on mastery rather than grade level allows for deeper learning and a wider range of skills to develop. If there is no grade to “move up” to, there are only skills to be learned and mastered. In a mixed-age classroom, we can stop comparing kids to a list of grade-level skills and start seeing them holistically as people. A child may need the full year to work through social-emotional regulation skills, doing very little academically (according to common grade-level standards), and then the next year, with increased confidence, fly through two years of math or language skills. Likewise, another child may work quickly through science topics due to a deep curiosity, but need space and time to absorb language. There are no learning emergencies in a mixed-age learning environment. All of the skills will still be available to learn next year.
As with all communities, there are benefits and challenges to working together with other humans. However, when I clarify the goals of my school, and see that mixing ages naturally creates opportunities to meet these learning objectives, I can focus on these challenges as a feature of my program. These opportunities for growth are some of the most powerful lessons given in my school.
