Education and Early Childhood Learning

The Multilevel Learning Community

Multilevel classrooms form a diverse and natural community, created through the gifts of time and student diversity. Time enables all partners in the community, including learners, parents, and educators, to gain an appreciation of one another, and it allows for collaboration and reflection. Diversity creates a natural blend of community members. Graduation, shifting enrollments, mobility, and staffing changes affect everyone in the learning community.

Fundamental Beliefs of the Learning Community

• All students are equally important in the classroom.
  A student’s value is not based on his or her age or stage of development. The learning community respects a “different but equal” approach by ensuring that all students have an equal voice in discussion and decision making.
• Each student has unique qualities that enrich the classroom.
  The learning community celebrates and affirms each individual’s strengths and accommodates differences and diversity.
  
• All students play a role in each other’s learning.
  The learning community fosters interdependence and shared responsibility
  rather than reinforcing the notion that all responsibility rests with the teacher.

Partners in the Learning Community

Learners	Teachers	Administrators	Parents

Download Chapter 2: The Learning Community (46.3 KB)