Teaching in multigrade classes is a challenging task: teachers claim to work more and to be more stressed that their colleagues (Proehl et al., 2013; Shareefa 2021) and this condition can affect the quality of teaching. One of the main critical issues relates to the simultaneous management of different grades with differentiated tasks: while teacher engaged with a group for direct instruction or guided learning activities, they also need to set and supervise individual and self directed learning activities for other students. Multi-grade education is common in rural areas of the so-called minority world, i.e. high-income countries such as the United States, Canada, in many European countries and in majority world countries such as India, China, Nepal, Peru, Colombia and Brazil. In Italy nearly 29,000 students attend mixed-age classes, distributed in around 1,500 schools throughout the country. According to school Italian administrators and headmasters, multigrade classes are affected by a high turn over rate among teachers due to their lack of experience and adequate training. In 2020 INDIRE investigated their needs, their teaching styles and the main critical issues by means of a qualitative survey. This paper reports the results of the analysis of 124 cases highlighting the main critical issues related to curriculum design and to the organization of learning groups, schooltime and classroom spaces. The research has highlighted some difficulties that have proved to be constant over time and in the comparison between different contexts (Veenman, 1995;Cornish L. (2021), ) which can guide training and support interventions for teachers (Parigi, Mangione 2023). The investigation points out that while teachers easily learn to mix grades to take advantage of age difference among students, they remain very much focused on guided learning activities and struggle to provide an effective setting to individual and group independent learning. Students autonomy also emerges as a critical issue for multigrade teachers, as most the of lack of experience in the design of individual and group independent learning activities and share a general sense of skepticism towards students autonomy. This paper work explores through case of study about practices observed and analyzed in the field, the dimension of learning and classroom management with respect to some basic disciplines and the use of spaces (internal, common and external) in the management of learning groups with an inclusive perspective.

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