Darrell Wills writes about multilevel teaching in an Australian context. His discussion includes aspects of human development, history and teaching that relate to the inclusion of students with differing abilities in the classroom.

The better the questions we ask, the better our results will become. I am asked to address the modern conceptualisation of authentic, multilevel teaching and have taken the liberty of tying this to the notion of inclusion, as it seems only to make sense that one would engage in such a discussion of a 'tool' with some purpose in mind. To avoid multi-level being seen as yet another craze or doing what you do and calling it multi-level, we need to see it as a tool with application to serve a higher purpose. I see two: development of all children and development together (inclusion).

Some questions immediately arise:

 

Authentic:
Learning is a contextual thing as much as it is a process thing. Years ago, 4000 to be close enough as far as we can trace it(1), a group of humans moved from communicating with picture symbolics to codifying the symbolic of voice thus creating the start of the journey that evolved into the alphabetic principle that we know today as the English code. This modern, fairly simple tool of 26 symbols stands for the various sounds that we make and the nonsense of these sounds allows infinite recombinations into (hopefully) sensible words, sentences and stories. Of course there are many variations of this code. Wars have been fought over which one would be used and the history of the code wars is somewhat parallel to the history of geographic and religious wars. Therein, language has been used to separate oneself from another and thus the dominant language has always been a tool of power and segregation as well as a peaceful means of communicating the culture's knowledge. This is one of the historical lineages to inclusion, that is, a shared understanding among folks requires, to some extent, a shared language.

At one level reading is a code and to read, one must decode. However reading is not essential for transmitting or receiving knowledge and to some, it is actually a poorer substitute to the earlier form of knowledge transmission: dialogue. Dialogue is a much richer way of gaining knowledge ... even though we are doing this through the use of the reading code in this conversation. What I am getting at here is that modern learning, via reading is only authentic within the context where the culture uses this tool as a major method of transmitting its knowledge and is only 'dependable' if everyone has access to the tool. In another time and place, other tools, such as memorisation of dialogue, were the authentic tools, as with bards in passing on stories of culture before the Iliad & Odyssey were finally written down. It is at least interesting that before about 3500 years ago reading wasn't important at all. Authenticity therefore has cultural relativity.

 

Multi-level:
There was a paradigm shift that took about 300 years from verbal transmission of knowledge to written transmission and then reading became important and the authentic transmission device of thought that we continue to use today. In some ways, written language began to separate learners and teachers in a way that transmission by dialogue did not. Most people can speak and hear and many can understand what is said. Literacy has never been as widely accessible and therefore to teach any group of learners who differ from one another in significant ways, one must be able to communicate with all.

From the beginning of formal education the major grouping model has been a uniage- level, multi-grade concept where pupils are supposed to be grouped at about the same level (uni-level) which we call grade or year levels. It was once thought that we passed or made the grade and then were promoted to the next level. This model had many flaws. When keeping kids down we soon discovered that it also lowered their esteem. Another major flaw was that we used age to try to get similar levels in the groupings but because of natural distribution this was always more of a fantasy than a reality. Even groups that excluded the extremes rarely had a uni-level. Students of eight would read anywhere from non-readers to a year 12 level and thus the uni-level was never a reality based on age. When we awoke to this we began to discover how to teach diverse levels of students in one activity. We no longer had a sensible reason to exclude the extremes. Thus is the shift to multi-level classrooms.

 

Can all children learn to communicate with one another and their teachers?
There are only 26 English symbols combined in about 127 various ways that make up the bulk of our words and thus cracking this sort of simple code surely is not beyond almost any child of three. Of course individual differences in innate intellect and sociological background may mean that one child may not be as quick as another in cracking a code because s/he either struggles to figure out these 127 relationships and draw correspondence to words heard in her own and others vocabularies, or because her environment is one where the code is not introduced to her in a way that engages her in relevant and powerful ways over time... or some combination of these. There will be a number of students for whom the dominant language differs. For some this is French, Indonesian, and for others it is Auslan, Compic, and for a few it may be body language, facial signs and a few distinguishable noises.

The human, as we have known for some time and the genome studies are confirming, seems well prepared mechanically with the switches turned on fairly early to discern language in both its spoken and written forms.(2) Of course we don't always take advantage of this innate on switch and so the opportunity diminishes. Piaget thought there were moments of optimal learning and urged us to look for and capitalise upon these windows. Both Piaget and geneticists tell us that these windows of opportunity also close or switch off, making the learning of language harder and harder as one gets older. Even common-sense tells us that the earlier we start thinking about assisting children who are at risk of not getting the tools of language to get them, the better.

 

Multi-level teachers:
Un and fortunately we became a very specialised society. One of the downsides has been to remove parents and communities from the long tradition of the ancients:
It takes a whole village to raise one child.

Re-valuing multiple levels of teaching and learning brings us back to an exciting place in recognising that parents and other community members as well as professionally trained people are teachers. Although we may be concerned that the right methodology should be transferred to the parent and community citizen so that the most efficacious methods can be used, truly authentic multi-level must see everyone in the community as both teachers and learners. The unauthentic professional territorial tyranny has led us to abysmal literacy failure rates: Australian averages of 27 per cent overall at grade three, 53 per cent failures of those in low socio-economic groups and as high as 70 per cent in the indigenous populations.(3) Being truly multi-level, the profession will be looking for all the help it can get. Cooperative efforts among all who might help life-long learning make sense in a paradigm shift towards including all. Adding a new dimension to multi-level that is not discussed elsewhere in the literature, I will say that parents aren't always the best trained or supported or emotionally or economically or even educationally able to play this role. If that is the concern of critics of parental involvement then it is a commonsense one; but it does miss the point. Parents do not get an instruction manual with their child. Traditional tutorial practices offered by extended families are mostly absent from modern society. This means that many of us don't know how to optimise the development of the child and we have few trusted guides. Teachers (hopefully) have this developmental knowledge and thus by reconnecting teachers with parents, we not only assist the parent to learn to teach their child to read, we assist them to know their child developmentally and we get in return a depthful and unique understanding of the child. We view this as beneficial in all children and vital when including and designing teaching for a child whose diversity, differs significantly from the group.

 

Multi-level learners and inclusion:
In this definition of multi-level teachers, we have also begun to define their relationship of sharing knowledge with and about the children and thus adults are also parts of the new learners in this model. This is part of the notion of life long learning. We are all learners and sometimes our teachers are our children. (Take anyone over 40 learning about computers for example: their teacher will likely be a teen or younger if they are going to get the good stuff.) In the modern classroom we have much diversity: size, shape, colour, ethnic background, language, sporting, computing, lateral thinking and spiritual prowess to name a few. Multi-level recognises this diversity, adapts to accommodate this diversity, designs learning based on this diversity. This model is tailor-made for inclusion of children whose diversity is some impairment to language as language diversity is anticipated. One merely stretches to accommodate Auslan or Makaton because one is expecting some learners of non-traditional-English. The same goes for the inclusion of children whose diversity is some impairment to body as body diversity is anticipated. One merely stretches to accommodate children in wheelchairs because one is expecting some learners with poorer coordination, less physical prowess than others. There are a number of how to texts on the subject so I will conclude with this: to be authentic one needs only to create rich communication channels among one's learners from which knowledge can flow in multiple directions. To do this across the multiple-levels one has in a modern day classroom and keep them all in the zone of proximal development(4) is a new art form of lateral thinking.

 

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Endnotes

1. Man, John (2000). Alpha Beta: How the alphabet shaped the western world. Headline: London.
2. Ridley, Matt (1999). Genome, Fourth Estate: London.
3. Australian Council for Educational Research. (1997). Literacy Standards in Australia.
4. Vygotsky, L. (1962). Thought & language (translated by Hanfmann & Vakar) Cambridge: MIT Press.

Darrell Wills is the director of educational projects and an educational consultant with
PLEDG projects in Western Australia. This article was reproduced with permission from the
journal Access. This online journal is at http://www.accessonline.org.au/.

 

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