Five Grades in One Room: Story of Technology in a MGML Classroom
In many government schools and community learning centres across Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, and Jammu & Kashmir, a single educator is often responsible for teaching children across multiple grades at once. A Class 1 student learning the alphabet may be sitting alongside a Class 5 student solving fractions, all while sharing the same teacher, the same classroom, and the same lesson period. Balancing these diverse learning needs is one of the biggest challenges in ensuring quality education, especially where digital infrastructure is limited or unreliable.
This is the reality of a Multi-Grade Multi-Level (MGML) classroom. While the MGML approach enables children across different grades and learning levels to learn together, managing multiple groups simultaneously can be demanding for a single teacher. This is where digital learning solutions can make a significant difference. Instead of expecting every child to follow the same lesson at the same pace, technology enables teachers to engage different groups simultaneously. While one group watches a curriculum-aligned learning video or works through interactive digital content independently, the teacher can provide focused instruction to another group. As students rotate between activities, every child remains meaningfully engaged, making it easier for a single educator to manage multiple grades without compromising on learning outcomes.
Technology is helping bridge the gap created by high pupil-to-teacher ratios, enabling a single teacher to support more learners without compromising the quality of instruction. Designed for low-resource classrooms, digital solutions provide curriculum-aligned content, self-paced learning resources, and simple tools to track student progress while keeping children engaged independently. In an MGML classroom, technology acts as a force multiplier rather than a replacement for the teacher, making it possible to effectively manage five grades in a single room while ensuring that every child continues to learn at their own pace.
Recognising this challenge, one of India’s leading non-profit foundations working to improve learning outcomes in government schools partnered with iDream Education to strengthen digital learning across schools and community learning centres in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, and Jammu & Kashmir.
The goal was simple: equip teachers with multiple digital resources to manage multi-grade classrooms while ensuring equitable learning opportunities for children from underserved communities.
To support this, iDream enabled a suite of digital learning solutions – including Smart Class, Learning Tablets, and the iPrep Mobile App – empowering teachers and students to seamlessly integrate multimedia lessons, interactive learning content, and assessments into their daily learning, even in low-connectivity settings. Rather than replacing the teacher, these solutions were designed to extend the teacher’s capacity, enabling different groups of students to stay meaningfully engaged while the teacher provided focused instruction where it was needed most. The result was a more structured, interactive, and learner-centred multi-grade classroom, where one teacher could effectively support children across multiple grades and learning levels.
The usage reflect sustained classroom adoption rather than a one-time technology rollout. Across 18 schools and learning centres, 90 teachers conducted 17,643 digital learning sessions, together delivering more than 759 hours of classroom engagement. Spanning four states with vastly different infrastructure realities, this consistent usage demonstrates that teachers were not simply using a new digital tool, they were integrating it into the everyday rhythm of teaching and learning.
As the programme continues, the focus remains on deepening classroom adoption, supporting more teachers to become digital champions, and expanding structured, technology-enabled learning to more MGML classrooms where quality education is often hardest to deliver.