Classified "A" by ANVUR in the fields 11/D1, 11/D2 Scientific in the field 14.
Abstract
The article analyses professional resources and challenges in multigrade teaching within a network of schools located in the inner areas of Central Italy. Research on multigrade teachers’ professional development needs has relied mainly on perceived difficulties, which may reflect the reproduction of assumptions and practices developed in monograde schooling. The study therefore adopts a mixed-age teaching framework and combines a semi-structured questionnaire completed by 37 teachers with observations conducted in 13 multigrade classes. At the network level, findings document flexible grouping, common activities, shared curriculum planning, classroom routines, accessible materials, and pupils’ operational autonomy, alongside challenges related to simultaneous teaching, planning, differentiation, and workload. These findings provide an empirical basis for designing situated professional development within the school network. More broadly, the combined analysis specifies needs already identified in the literature by showing that student autonomy is promoted mainly as the independent completion of teacher-designed activities rather than as self-regulation, while peer learning is more developed as a feature of classroom management and relationships than as a structured support for curricular learning.
