Multi-age education in the Montessori sense means that children are grouped for instruction across a two or three year age span. The intention of multi-age groupings in early childhood is to capitalize on the naturally occurring differences in the experiences, knowledge, and abilities of each child similar to the interaction that occurs in families, play groups and spontaneous neighborhood socialization opportunities.

Children need opportunities, not only to observe and imitate a wide range of competencies, but also to find companions among their peers who match, complement, or supplement their interests in a variety of ways. In multi-age there are also leadership opportunities for children to act as role models for less mature classmates. Multi-age groupings provide these leadership opportunities.

Conversely, single age groups tend to create enormous normative pressures on the developing child as well as the teacher as knowledge and skills are expected to progress in a lock step manner. This results in the unintentional holding back or penalizing of children who fail to meet an arbitrary normative expectation. There is absolutely no scholarly research indicating that grouping children who are all within a twelve-month age range can be expected to learn the same things, in the same way, on the same day, at the same time. In fact just the opposite is true. There is a large body of educational research stating that multi-age education results in higher than expected cognitive, social and emotional gains.

In summary, the wide range of knowledge and skills that exists intrinsically among children within a single-age group suggests that whole-group instruction, particularly when overused as it is in traditional classrooms, does not serve the child’s best learning interests. In a Montessori mixed-age classroom, the teacher sets up activities in which children make choices and take responsibility for their work as members of a group. As a result children in the group have the opportunity to learn to work with others whose abilities and disabilities are different from their own. This is a powerful learning tool for future success.