Ignite Your Teaching
Ignite Your Teaching
Split Grade Teaching Myths
Think teaching a split grade means double the prep and double the stress? Think again! In this episode, Patti dives into the most common myths about teaching combined grades and reveals the truth about what actually makes them work.
Tuck these in your teacher pocket:
- Plan one unified lesson for both grades (without doubling your workload)
- See the curriculum as a continuum instead of two separate checklists
- Simplify planning by focusing on skills, not just expectations
- Strengthen classroom management and student independence
- Ditch the guilt and find balance in your split grade classroom
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Welcome to this first video in a series all about teaching split grades. I want to start here, not with the strategies or planning tools, but about the feelings, the feelings that we all have when it comes to teaching split grades. For most teachers, the very first reaction they have when they hear that they're being assigned a split grade is not excitement. It's often anxiety. That moment when you read your assignment and see a 4-5 or a 5-6 or a 3-4, it often comes with that sinking feeling in your stomach. The reason is simple. Most teachers believe that teaching a split means double, double the prep, double the workload, or even double the stress. And that belief shapes how they plan and how they show up for their students. But here's the truth. Those worries are often built on myths, and they're myths that stories that teachers tell themselves or that we hear passed around in the staff rooms, that teaching a split is so hard. And it makes it sound like it's almost impossible. But I want to talk today about how we can dismantle some of the myths that we tell ourselves about teaching a split grade and replace them with the realities that make split grades not only feel manageable, but sometimes even easier than teaching a single grade. When we think about a split grade, or we think about a single grade for that matter, we have to remember that we have such a wide gamut of students in our classroom and their skills and abilities that really all classrooms in their own way are split grades. So why is it that we think the split grade assignment is so drastically different than a single grade? So the first myth that we often tell ourselves is all about the idea that split grades mean double the work. This is the most common fear. Teachers imagine having designed two complete sets of lesson plans for every subject every day. One plan for grade four math and the other for the grade five math. One set of language lessons for grade four and another set for grade five. And that doesn't even account for our students on IEPs that might need to be modified at a grade that is even beyond the scope of our split. When you think of it this way, of course it's going to feel overwhelming. Who has the time to essentially do those two jobs at once? Not me and probably not you. But when we stop thinking about split grades as doubling our lessons and we think more about how we can efficiently cover the curriculum, the key here is to teach unified lessons, one lesson to the whole class, and then scale the work or the expectations based on the grade level of students that are in our room. It means the teaching portion of our day stays the same. It's the output or complexity of tasks that changes. Now, this is very doable in both language and in math. So if we think about math, suppose you're teaching grade four addition with regrouping. For grade four students, you might use four-digit numbers, and your grade five students' expectations might have them extend those same strategies but using five-digit numbers or even multi-step problems. In this example, you're not creating two entirely different lessons. You're teaching the same concept. Except when we look at it on a continuum, we're looking at how the complexity changes grade to grade. So while we'll have grade four expectations and they're using four-digit numbers, we'll start our examples using those four-digit numbers and gradually work our way into using the five-digit numbers for our grade five students. We use the analogy of everybody's on the same train and the grade fours are simply stopping at the stop first, and the grade fives are stopping at the second stop. We can really think about this idea that we're teaching the same lesson and we're just dropping off students at different points along this continuum of complexity. When you plan with this mindset, you quickly begin to realize that you don't actually need double the time to prepare. You need one strong lesson plan with the thoughtful variations in practice tasks. It's also an important thing here to look at planning lessons that focus on having, say, low-floor, high-sailing tasks or open-ended tasks, or even tasks that embrace an inquiry perspective. These have are these types of lessons have built into them the idea that we have a multitude of ways that students can jump into the task so that they can be successful. The second thing we often tell ourselves here is that we have to cover every single expectation and we really look at the curriculum almost like a checklist. So when we're thinking if we're a split grade teacher, we automatically, instead of looking just at one grade's curriculum, now we're looking at two. So it's natural to think that now we've doubled up on all the things that we do. Many teachers end up feeling weighed down by the overwhelming amount of curriculum expectations. And they think that if they do not cover every single expectation, every dot and dash of these expectations for both grades separately, then they'll somehow be in trouble. Or this pressure leads to create long, complex year plans that try to squeeze two full curriculums into one timetable. And if that's the way you're looking at split grade teaching, it's no wonder that you're feeling overwhelming. It's no wonder that you feel overwhelmed. The curriculum, however, is not meant to be taught as two separate silos. It's not simply just your grade threes, then your grade fours, then your grade five. In fact, if you dig into an analyzer curriculum, it is designed to be built on itself, which means it grows and changes gradually year after year. So grade four expectations feed into grade five expectations, which then flow into grade six. When you start to see the curriculum as a continuum rather than as separate checklists, it becomes much more clear that you can teach many lessons that apply to both grades at once. For example, in reading, both grade four and grade five students are expected to make connections as a reading comprehension strategy. The difference is that the grade four students might be working with a shorter, simpler text, while the grade five students might be analyzing more complex passages with multiple layers of meaning. When we're making connections for our students, we might have the same text and we might have the same expectation that students are making connections. But what we can expect from our students is going to be different. Where the grade four students might make very literal connections with the text, we are expecting our grade fives to make a few more deeper connections using inferential details. While our grade fours might be making connections to an event and something they can actually point to in the text, our grade fives are going to be wanting to push them into looking a little bit beyond the words and looking for a lot of those implied details. Again, that means as a teacher, you're teaching the same lesson. You're using the same text, you're teaching them how to make connections, and you can differentiate the instruction by saying grade fours, I want you to focus on making inferences or making connections based on the things that are actually happening in the text. And grade fives, I want you to start pushing yourselves and going beyond the text literal meaning and start using inferential details. Now, the benefit here is that those grade four students that are actually ready to make inferential details and connections with their when they're reading can go ahead and jump forward. The grade five students who aren't haven't yet mastered making literal connections can scaffold themselves back. And then we can expect different things for our assessment. So we're teaching the same lesson and expecting different outputs from our students based on what grade they happen to be in. Then we assess them on the expectations we have of the skill set we need for each grade. Instead of teaching, making connections first to your grade fours, then to your grade fives, we want to really focus on teaching at once and adjusting the level of text or even the depth of and complexity of those responses. This really dramatically reduces that sense of overload when you're not seeing the curriculums as two side-by-side things you need to cover, but you're guiding students along that same staircase, just bletting them off at different steps. Now, another thing we often tell ourselves when teaching a split grade is if we miss something, then you will absolutely fail your students. We all know teachers are professionals and we care a lot about our kids. And that care often translates into guilt. That guilt that if we don't cover every single expectation, they are somehow letting students down. Add in that myth that the curriculum police might come and tattle on us if we're not covering absolutely everything, and that pressure to be perfect becomes enormous. The reality here is no one is auditing your classroom. No one is the curriculum police don't exist, and they're not coming around making sure that every expectation covered line for line, word for word. What administrators are looking for is evidence of growth. They want to see that students are developing skills, deepening understanding, and progressing through the year. Are they meeting the overall expectations of the curriculum? It is not our job to check off every single micro expectation separately. In fact, we can see when we are efficiently looking at the curriculum, we can see that there's a multiple expectations that I can cover in one task. So when we're seeing that we can cover the same expectation in multiple ways, it allows us to focus on the big picture, and that means emphasizing those transferable skills, your critical thinking, communication, problem solving, and creativity. That allows our students to meet those expectations in a much more flexible way. Let's think of a practical example here. In social studies, one grade might be focused on indigenous communities, and the other grade might be focused on early societies. Rather than treating these as totally separate, you can design lessons that emphasize shared skills, looking at how we analyze daily life of a different society. We can focus on teaching our students how to research, how to analyze those sources, comparing perspectives, recognizing that in this case the content is different, but the underlying skill set here connects. So we can design one project that is the same for both a grade four or grade five students, and we can ask our grade five students to analyze an Indigenous society. Well, our grade fours are looking at an early society from early civilizations. We're asking them to look for the same thing, ways of life, how they celebrate, how the different roles and gender roles, their language, their social structure and hierarchy. We can teach students the same sort of concept, but recognizing that our students can apply that concept in different aspects means that we still, again, the goal here of us teaching one lesson to two different grades and varying the output of what they're doing instead of constantly trying to change and update the input and teaching two separate lessons. Now we often hear the idea that teaching a split is hard because it feels really chaotic. And this comes down to that fear of classroom management. Teachers imagine that while they're teaching one grade, the other will be off task or noisy or lost. The reality here is if we have a split grade, even when we have a straight grade, we need to have strong routines and purposeful independent work. And yes, all students have the capacity to work independently. It means that split grades can actually run more smoothly than single grades because students will need to learn those independent skills and a sense of responsibility because they cannot always rely on the teacher for direct attention. This is going to help them build their ability to work on their own, which is a skill that they will need throughout their educational journey. For us as teachers, it means establishing consistent routines and providing structured choice to teach our students how to work independently, step by step, the classroom becomes calm and productive. Chaos, however, happens when students don't know what to do or don't feel engaged. It's not simply because there are two grades in a room. So as teachers, if we build those consistent routines and help to train our students with strong classroom management practices, it doesn't matter what grade happens to be in our classroom, whether it's one grade or two, teaching students how to work independently means we need to have strong classroom management skills, not necessarily related to whether it's a split. Now all of these ideas and myths have one thing in common. They assume that teaching a split means doing more. More lessons, more prep, more marking, more stress. The truth is the opposite, actually, teaching a split is about less. Trying to find opportunities for less duplication, less detail chasing, and less guilt for the teacher. When you adopt an efficiency mindset, you see the overlap in the curriculum standards, you streamline your planning, and you allow yourself to focus on the big picture instead of those tiny minute details. That shift changes everything for you. Suddenly, teaching a split feels not like an impossible burden, but more like a challenge, a challenge that you can handle and is totally doable. So I want you to think of some things that you can do to help making teaching your split just a little bit easier. One, I want you to write down what your biggest fear is about teaching a split grade. Then ask yourself, is this based on a myth that you've constantly being told and perpetuated by other teachers, or is it a reality? And try to rewrite that into a truth. For example, I need to stop planning double the lessons because I'll plan one lesson and scale the tasks. Next, I want you to audit your next week's plans. Look for one subject where you thought you had to plan separately and ask yourself, can I teach one lesson to both grades? How could I adjust the outputs so that my input, my teaching lesson, can be the same? And finally, focus less on the details and more on the big picture. Choose one subject area. Identify three skills that both grades need that you want every student to master. Keep those front and center as you plan instead of getting lost in the micro details of the specific expectations of the curriculum. And remember that split grades feel overwhelming when you are trapped in a mindset of myths. When you replace those myths with the realities that it's about efficiency, finding overlap between the two grades, and focusing on the growth of your students on the continuum of learning, you begin to see that this is not just double the work, that it's different work. But when you work smarter, not harder, it's work that you can absolutely accomplish and overcome. Now, by the end of our series on teaching a split grade, I want you not to feel anxious. I want you to feel empowered and see that teaching a split grade is not about surviving the year, but it's about thriving by using strategies that help you save time, build independence in your students, and make your teaching more effective.
