ELTE University is in the process of developing further the existing community of multigrade teachers. These teachers work at different places all over the country, so as a first step besides email communication they got some training in using the Moodle CMS for communication with each other and their mentor. In the near future the community is planned to be expanded by teacher trainers and researchers whose main aim is to provide more support with the help of KP-lab tools and ideas.

Operation and activities of the community

The main professional focus of the existing community is to help and reinforce each other’s efforts in organising local activities and competitions, which also includes recruiting and involving more teachers. Another activity is monitoring the email correspondence between university students (who were previously trained in the use of email communication) and their own multigrade pupils. The monitoring process is planned to be supported by the teacher trainer (tutor of the university students) and her  colleagues specialised in the pedagogical usage of ICT since in the process of organising the correspondence  tools alike and special methodology will be needed. .

Main topics of the work of Hungarian  multigrade teachers ‘Gardonyi Club’

Multigrade teachers teach more than one stage in the same time in the same classrooms in the remote areas of Hungary. They need more help than other teachers, but they do not have access to  common forms of in-service teacher trainings due to  difficulties caused by distance  and lack of human resources (small number of teaching staff i.e. those colleagues who are on training cannot be replaced by others).   Multigrade teachers have not the necessary platforms  for sharing and exchanging ideas regarding their professional experience.  Connecting multigrade teachers with the teacher training center at ELTE in the framework of the KP Lab project is a challenging opportunity for both parties, which also contributes to further research on the education of disadvantaged students.

1. Research on didactics: The role of ICT supported learning in  multigrade schools (students’ age group: 6-10 ys)

Most of the multigrade students speak social dialect of the Hungarian language. (In Hungary the parents can choose school for their children absolutely freely, it means that mobile families take their children in the urban schools from the villages where they live.)  Thus, most of our students have language difficulties. We focus on skills development by the systematic usage  of outer mental representations. We use hands-on and digital activities and different types of communication: visual and verbal, both written and oral form, e-mailing and forum messages,too. Learning material (learning objects) are prepared by a group of researchers, multigrade teachers and a graphic designer, who has strong educational interest. Most of the learning objects is presented in the form of  PowerPoint presentations.

2.  Multigrade schools and  the local community

Schoolchildren collect traditional objects of everyday life of their villages and they make expositions.

Schoolchildren  take part in  social events, performances that are specifically organised for the local community, for example Christmas party.

3.Schoolchildren and the world outer the village

Multigrade students  introduce themselves to  other multigrade students all over the country. They also started e-mailing with pre-service teachers in English. This experience is a part of the university students’  training. We hope that multigrade pupils will start e-mailing with students of other countries, too.

4. Whole year students’ competition 

Teachers of the Gardonyi club take part in this competition, and one of them helps in organising the competition for the other multigrade schools. The focus is on  exploring environment and practicing  different ways of communication. 

Multigrade teachers share their experience,  both successful and unsuccessful episodes  of their educational activity on a university web page. They discuss their problems also with a researcher face to face at the  weekends  and they are offered daily professional help via the Internet.