Lived Experience of Teachers From Teaching Multi-Grade Classrooms

Education is one of the main and decisive pillars and determining factor of social development In particular, primary education as basic education has a practical and extremely important role.It is necessary for the government to provide suitable educational opportunities for the development of themselves and students.Multi-grade classes are very important as a solution to create equal learning opportunities for all children who need to be educated.If education in multi-grade classes is provided in a scientific and principled way, the strategies of education in these classes can be used to improve the quality of education in other schools, A multi-grade classroom is a special educational situation in which students from at least two grades up to a maximum of six grades are present, led by one teacher (Mahdipour, 2018).Multigrade classes in rural areas of developing countries are mainly open for children to access primary education, but in developed countries they are not a necessity but an educational choice.Since our country is one of the countries where the dispersion of its villages has caused the population of students to decrease, therefore, in order to provide education services to them, classrooms are held in multi-levels.The planning and application of teaching, the process of assessment and class management in multi-grade classes are more complicated and difficult (Aksoy, 2017).The workload of a multi-grade teacher and teaching time is much more than that of a single-grade class, and the space and facilities available to the students of these schools are much more limited than normal classes.Therefore, in the classification of the problems of multi-grade classes, the problem of lack of time is at the top of the problems.Considering the most fundamental goal of any educational system, which is academic progress; Achieving these goals of academic progress and self-management in multi-grade classes can actually be the biggest concern of policy makers and education executives.It believes that multi-grade teaching requires additional learning materials because learners often need to work independently.(Sepahvand, 2018) In his research, he came to the conclusion that in multi-grade classes, teachers use more learning strategies that are appropriate to the individual differences and age of the students and diversity in learning styles. All the teachers were of the same opinion that using a teacher's assistant in teaching both speeds up teaching and increases the self-confidence of the assistant's students.considering the number of challenges that have arisen and the necessity of the lack of deep and detailed findings in this field, as well as the existence of many classroom management problems in multi-grade classes, the results of this research can be used by teachers and other education officials,  and help education in order to organize multi-grade classes better and more scientifically, especially in terms of time and efficient classroom management;In line with the professional development of multi-grade teachers and increasing the effectiveness of teaching in these classes, using the lived experiences of teachers will be one of the most important sources of providing practical information for use in managing multi-grade classes. Therefore the aim of this study is to describe the life experience of teachers of teaching multi-grade primary classes in rural areas. The need to conduct this research and other researches in this field seems absolutely necessary considering the growing speed of multi-grade classes, and the short-term benefits of the results of this research are the use of inexperienced and new teachers of multi-grade classes. The basis for raising the quality of teaching and learning and one of the long-term benefits is that the results of this research can be used by the planners of the education organization. In this study, the research method is qualitative and phenomenological. The goal of phenomenological research is to clearly describe and identify phenomena.The participants of this research included formal primary school teachers of Mako city who had teaching experience in multi-grade classes. among them the participants of the research are 15 people with a criterion-based purposeful sampling method. The research tool is a semi-structured interview so that the participant can describe his or her perspective on the subject, as he or she has experienced it, using his or her own language and words.At the beginning of each interview or before, the participants were introduced to the purpose of the research. The interviews were between 20 and 40 minutes and only one interview session was conducted from each participant.  In the current research, using semi-structured interviews, the collected data was accurately and objectively recorded and was approved by the steering committee (expert professors, experts and multi-grade teachers) and parallel interviews were conducted and all the recorded interviews were carefully examined and compared. and all the steps of validating the research data, including designing the basic interview questions, conducting preliminary interviews and parallel interviews, and determining the level of theoretical saturation of the interviews, were strictly under the control of the steering committee, and finally the validity of the data was approved by the steering committee.In order to obtain the credibility of the interview questions, the opinions of expert professors, experts and teachers who have served for years in schools and multi-level classes in the rural areas of Mako city were used.And to ensure the reliability of the research data, the method of repeated study, data comparison, summarization and classification of information was used without making any changes in the data.became The data was collected using semi-structured qualitative interview and analyzed by Claizey's seven-step method. In order to validate the data, the opinions of expert professors, experts and teachers who have served for years in schools and multi-grade classes in rural areas of Mako city were used. In-depth analysis of teachers’ experiences resulted in identification and categorization of 6 main topics: Teacher qualifications, Functions of lack of planning and supply of human resources, Educational program issues, Comfort and facilities, Support and value multi-grade classes, and advantages of multi-grade classes; and 11 sub-themes: teaching methods, class control, problems of students in multi-grade classes, problems of teachers in multi-grade classes, problems of students’ families in multi-grade classes, Curriculum content and implementation, Teachers' salaries and school fees, reducing problems of multi-grade classes, improving and increasing productivity of multi-grade classes, Positive aspects related to teachers and positive aspects related to studentsresulted.