It's the first day of the new school year, and even before the Willett School bell rings, groups of children are gathered on the playground in Attleboro, Massachusetts, eagerly clustered around teachers to share their summer adventures like old friends. What makes this school year so different for these children and teachers is “multiyear assignment”: these students will have the same teacher for two years.
As school systems from coast to coast look for innovative ways to restructure schools in order to improve student performance, many are looking to multiyear assignment as a way of shaking up existing paradigms. The Attleboro School System is a case in point.
What It's All About
Under the direction of school superintendent Joseph Rappa, this New England school system began to move quietly in the direction of multiyear assignment during the late 1980s. In a pilot program, a few teachers were asked to follow their classes for a period of two years. The pilot proved to be successful, and the school system now requires all classroom teachers from grades 1–8 to spend two years with their classes. First grade teachers move to 2nd grade, 3rd grade teachers move to 4th grade, and so on. Even high school staff are now considering the idea.
As with any break with tradition, many parents and staff questioned the rationale behind the change. Was multiyear assignment a radical new trend or an old chestnut left over from the days of the one-room schoolhouse? Where did this idea originate and did it have merit?
Faced with the exciting yet scary prospect of spending two years with my students, I decided to research the concept. I found that there's only a limited amount of information. Early 20th century Austrian educator Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf Schools, felt that the teacher should follow the class throughout the elementary grades much like a “third parent” (Ogletree 1974). Multiyear assignment has also been successful in middle schools in Germany, where teams of six to eight teachers work with the same students from grades 5–10 (Koppich 1988).
The concept of multiyear assignment as we now know it apparently first appeared in New York in 1974. There, award-winning educator Deborah Meier considered the practice an essential component in her ideal school because it enabled children and teachers to get to know one another well (Goldberg 1991).
Continuity and Familiarity
In a recent survey of some teachers in Attleboro's pilot group, responses to multiyear assignment were quite positive, for many reasons. For example, teachers agreed that children are less anxious about the new year. They know both the teacher and the expectations. Parents happily report that preschool jitters are a thing of the past, especially during the second year of the cycle.
A bonus for teachers is that they gain almost an extra month of teaching time. Getting-to-know-you time becomes virtually unnecessary during the second year, enabling us to get to learning without much review. We also find it easy to build on the experiences we shared the first year.
Children are also able to continue their learning throughout the summer. We furnished our students with packets of ideas for summer reading, writing, and exploration, taking care to keep the activities short, interesting, and fun. Children study insects, collect rocks, and observe and graph weather patterns. Most parents have enthusiastically supported these activity packets, especially for those rainy summer days. In the fall, on the first day of school, our 4th graders proudly brought in their handmade bug houses (a product of their summer homework), and our insect unit was off and running.
Teachers also report that time spent on developing social skills and cooperative group strategies really pays off during the second year of the cycle. Students are better able to resolve conflicts and they are more skillful in working as team members to solve problems. These skills will be especially important as schools across the United States move to group-based performance assessment.
From the perspective of the whole language teacher, multiyear assignment offers enormous advantages. Vermont educators Mazzuchi and Brooks (1992) write that this policy provides teachers and students alike with the “gift of time” for observing social and language development. As 1st/2nd grade teachers, the two have found multiyear assignment to be invaluable in assessing growth. Because each child develops at a unique pace, teachers can experience the joy of seeing even the late bloomer blossom. And with two years to nurture and reflect upon our students and our instructional objectives, we can be certain that our instruction will be constructivist, or child-centered, rather than curriculum-centered.
Multiyear assignment is increasingly vital to the countless children whose lives are riddled with change—change of residence, change in family structure, change of economic status. Our kids come from broken homes, or go home to empty houses, or see parents only on weekends: they seem to really benefit from having a teacher as a role model, mentor, and friend. Multiyear assignment appears to provide a strong support system for these children.
Parents have generally supported the policy. They say that, like their children, they appreciate the chance to become familiar with a teacher's instructional style and expectations for classwork and homework. They also report feeling more comfortable during the parent-teacher conference, especially the second year. By that time conferences are more meaningful, given the perspective of the past and present.
Not Without Flaws
It would be unfair and unrealistic to suggest that this approach has no problems. Many of the teachers surveyed included words of caution.
Several teachers warned that the particular makeup of a class might adversely affect the group's potential to learn. They suggested that such classes may need to be split up (a good example of why teacher input is essential). Teachers also advised that two-year classes need to be extra sensitive to students new to the class, lest they feel like outsiders. We have found family meetings and “circles of friends” to be excellent avenues for dealing with this problem.
Teachers expressed their own anxieties as well, particularly over the fact that their job performance over two years might be assessed based on their students' performance on standardized tests. This policy, they said, left them with an enormous sense of responsibility.
Finally, on an emotional note, teachers reported that it becomes very difficult to separate from the class at the end of the cycle.
My Favorite Year
I am currently in the second year of my two-year cycle. I look back upon my first year with satisfaction. As a 30-year veteran of the teaching profession, I can say that it was one of the most rewarding and exciting years of my career. My original fears about changing to a new grade quickly disappeared as I moved from a curriculum-centered to a student-centered classroom. Best of all, the month of June did not mark an ending; it was merely an interlude.
My students returned this September fully equipped with familiar skills and strategies for responding to literature, for process-writing, for group problem solving, and for using learning logs. They understood the importance of portfolios and of reflecting on their personal growth. Perhaps the very first entry in the daily journal of Larry, one of my 4th graders, best sums it up: This is the best first day of school. I can be with my teacher from last year. I can see my friends. I like school.
