Investigating the Gaps Among Policy, Teacher Education, and Practice in Multigrade Education in Bhutan

Abstract

Multigrade pedagogy has been used in Bhutan for more than two decades as a means of accelerating universal primary education. The study from which this paper is drawn used interview, document analysis, and observations to investigate the gaps among policy, teacher education, and practice in multigrade education in Bhutan. These gaps exist because government intention to train teachers and deploy them in multigrade classrooms lags far behind policy initiatives. We found that, currently, many teachers are either untrained or trained only in monograde pedagogy and are poorly resourced. Although the Ministry of Education has a policy to use multigrade teaching to achieve universal primary education, our research found a gap between policy intentions and practice in implementing multigrade teaching at the classroom level.