Age Is Just a Number
What Students Can Gain From Working With Different Age Peers
One of the basic premises of school is that children of different ages attend different grades. When kids are 4 or 5 years old, they go to kindergarten. The following year they move up to first grade, then second grade, then third grade, and so on. With very few exceptions, a child’s age determines their grade.
As a result, students spend nearly their entire day with kids of the same age. In elementary school, they stay in the classroom and learn together, they eat lunch together, they play together, they go to their special area subjects together, they even sit together on the bus ride home. At very few points during the day, if any, do they interact with children who are older or younger than themselves. This is a missed opportunity.
Age Mixing and Evolution
For most of human history, our ancestors lived in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes. These tribes were very small. They are estimated to have been between 30 to 100 people, with no more than 150 (Dunbar, 1992).
Such small groups had interesting implications for the way that children evolved to learn. I’ve said in other posts that kids evolved to learn through self-directed, mixed-age play (you can read more here). If we consider the quantity and ages of children in a group of less than 150 people, we can imagine that it was essentially impossible to be choosy about playmates. It was highly likely that there was only a handful of children in the tribe. Conversely, it was highly unlikely that the children were all the same age. As a result, age-mixing was necessary and natural for ancestral children. When we look at research that examines modern hunter gatherer tribes as a proxy for our ancestors, this necessary age mixing is exactly what we see. Children generally play in groups of kids from ages 4 all the way up to 17 (Gray, 2011a).
Not only is age-mixing evolutionarily natural, but it is also beneficial. These benefits do carry into modern contexts. Modern schools have grades divided by ages to make the learning of secondary skills more efficient. I am not saying that schools should or will get rid of age-specific grades any time soon, but if we can conceptualize ways to mix up our kids when possible, we are likely to see a variety of benefits.
Academic Benefits
One really fascinating outcome of age-mixing is that students who are naturally working at different abilities are able to easily support and scaffold the learning of one another. Within a traditional classroom, we typically have students working at different levels and good practice is to have kids support one another when possible. But when we bring together different age groups, we expand the range of abilities and how they are able to support one another.
Consider reading buddies as an example of the academic benefits of age-mixing. In prior years, I would have my kindergarteners buddy up with a class of third graders. The third graders would come in once a week just to read books with the kindergarteners. The older students were able to model good reading habits and support the more novice, younger students. This created excitement about reading for the younger students and allowed them to get more individualized attention to practice their developing reading skills. Rather than only learning from the expert-level teachers, they had role models who were only slightly more advanced than themselves.
Their older peers provided a reasonable and achievable model for the next step in reading. This can be likened to a teacher providing scaffolding for the student to work in Piaget’s zone of proximal development (Gray, 2011b). However, this type of scaffolding is something naturally done by children of slightly different abilities. Having an older reading buddy, in addition to the typical classroom instruction, really helped my young students grow as readers.
Additionally, the benefits didn’t just end with the younger children. This age-mixing provided an opportunity for all older children—regardless of whether or not they were meeting grade level reading expectations—to be an expert. For many of the older children who struggled to meet grade-level expectations, they were able to practice their skills with someone who naturally saw them as a more advanced reader. They didn’t face the same stigma of struggling to meet expectations or standards as they did when working with same-aged peers in their classroom. This age-mixing opportunity helped the older students practice their skills in a low-pressure situation and improved their confidence. Age-stratified classrooms create competitive situations where all children are expected to master the same expectations at the same time. However, mixing ages—and thus abilities—can alleviate some of that pressure on children.
Social Benefits
Age-mixing also benefits the development of social-emotional skills and relationships. Similar to the academic benefits, social age mixing allows younger children to see realistic, next-level role models for behavior, play, and problem-solving. It also allows the older children the opportunity to be the expert, practice their own skills, and support children who are naturally less experienced. We know that all kids can learn crucial social-emotional skills through play. Adding in naturally differing abilities to that play can further extend the benefits for all.
Mixing ages can also have positive impacts on the prevalence of prosocial behaviors in children and even decrease instances of bullying. If we consider an evolutionary explanation for bullying, bullying can be seen as a way to elevate one’s status in a social hierarchy (see Ellis et al., 2012). In a group of children of the same age and roughly the same abilities, there is competition for social status. Alternatively, groups that are mixed in age allow for a more natural social hierarchy to form between older and younger children without competition. These mixed age groups also allow for alternative ways for children to garner status such as from helping or caring for younger kids. Lastly, kids can choose to play with other children who are socially on the same level as they are, regardless of age. Overall, age mixing has the potential to decrease bullying by reducing the advantages of aggressive competition for status.
Takeaways
I do not think it is reasonable to look at the above information and say it is time to throw our traditional system of age-separated grades out the window. There are some alternative schools who have done it, but there is a long way to go and lots to consider before that happens in the public school setting. However, teachers and school leaders should keep the benefits of mixing ages in mind and create opportunities for age-mixing when possible.
Once again, nothing proposed here is new or novel. I am not proposing large changes to the school structure. But by understanding the evolutionary reasoning and evolved learning preferences of children, we can create small changes that lead to positive outcomes for modern students.
Age-mixing could happen in many creative ways during the school day. Here are just a few that come to mind:
Reading buddies: older and younger children read together in one-on-one groupings.
Classroom visits: older children visit younger grades to read stories aloud to the group or share the work they have been doing.
Tutoring clubs: older grades can provide academic homework help for younger grades.
Interest-based, mixed-age clubs: arts, sports, board games, etc.
Enrichment groups: dedicated time focused on project-based learning such as passion projects or plays with mixed-age groupings.
Mixed-age lunch or recess.
Overall, by creating mixed-age groupings during the school day, we are providing modern students with opportunities related to their evolved learning preferences that they could not otherwise get in traditional classrooms. This change provides benefits in academics, social-emotional learning, and overall school climate. Research shows, mix it up!
References
Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22, 469-493.
Ellis, B. J., Del Giudice, M., Jose Figueredo, A., Dishion, T. J., Gray, P., Griskevicius, V., Hawley, P. H., Jacobs, W. J., James, J., Volk, A. A., & Sloan Wilson, D. (2012). The evolutionary basis of risky adolescent behavior: Implications for science, policy, and practice. Developmental Psychology, 48(3), 598–623.
Gray, P. (2011). The evolutionary biology of education: how our hunter-gatherer educative instincts could form the basis for education today. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 4, 28–40.
Gray, P. (2011). The special value of children’s age-mixed play. American Journal of Play, 3 (4), 500-522.