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NWREL and Smaller Learning Communities

By Rhonda Barton

(Portland, Oregon)—The number of schools and districts that have received federal Smaller Learning Community (SLC) grants continues to mushroom: There are now more than 800 large, comprehensive high schools across the country working to create more personalized learning environments, with additional sites to be chosen by next spring. The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL) is in the thick of the action, designing the national activities for the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE).

NWREL works with seven regional partners to help federal grantee schools implement their plans for smaller learning communities. In addition to sharing their resources on NWREL's Web site (www.nwrel.org/scpd/sslc/), the project provides assistance to schools through regional institutes on topics like data management, evaluation, and adolescent literacy; site visits to address individual issues; and intensive support for grantees that OVAE has identified as high-need.

Project Coordinator Joan Shaughnessy says although the location of the grantees—and the amount of funding they receive from the U.S. Department of Education—is all over the map, they face some common problems. At the top of the list is the need to find strategies that work for students with different skills, which takes teacher collaboration. The grant funding is meant to enable a group of teachers to work with a heterogeneous group of students. This results in a significant change for high school teachers who have traditionally worked independently.

Scheduling is another big area of concern. "When you collapse kids into smaller units, the high school experience changes," notes Shaughnessy. Often, schools have to look differently at their electives and extracurricular offerings. "We are used to having many choices in our culture but in the process of offering our students so many options, we give them an education that is a mile wide and an inch deep. Many only scratch the surface of numerous topics, so it is hard for them to be engaged in learning," she says.

Altering that paradigm is a change for students and parents, so it's incumbent on the school to demonstrate how the benefits of an SLC outweigh any perceived losses. "What you substitute for a huge set of choices has to be relevant and meaningful," says Shaughnessy. She adds that as they change, schools need to be able to communicate those changes in values and orientation to the public.

NWREL will soon offer a new resource for both OVAE grantees and those considering implementing SLCs. Small Learning Communities: Implementing and Deepening Practices, by Diana Oxley, summarizes key research and contains useful tools based on a gap analysis model: it helps schools look at where they are now and where they want to be. The tools will be used in training programs in the coming months and the entire publication will be available next spring.