Providing Tools for

Small Learning Communities

graphic, Smaller Learning Community Tree

The number of schools and districts receiving 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 partners across the country to help federal grantee schools implement their plans for smaller learning communities. In addition to sharing 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 is offering a new resource for both OVAE grantees and those considering initiating SLCs. Small Learning Communities: Implementing and Deepening Practices, by Diana Oxley, identifies a comprehensive set of SLC practices associated with increased student achievement. It also includes tools designed to help schools pursue the demanding work of transforming traditional comprehensive high schools into 21st-century learning communities.

The research-based practices are organized into five key domains of SLC practice. Oxley uses an image of a tree to illustrate the nature of the relationships among the five domains. The structural supports for a tree's foliage are its branches. In SLCs, teaching and learning teams—the interdisciplinary teams of teachers and the students they instruct—are the basic structural supports for SLC work that results in student learning.

Each branch supports three clusters of leaves, the oxygen-generating element of the tree. One leaf cluster includes rigorous, relevant curriculum and instruction practices; a second leaf cluster encompasses inclusive program practices; and a third, continuous program improvement strategies. The branches stem from the tree trunk, the structural support for the entire tree. In like fashion, SLCs depend on school- and district-level policies and practices to support their growth and sustain their operation.

Oxley's publication was distributed, in draft form, at the Project Directors' meeting of smaller learning community grantees in Washington, D.C., in mid-November. A copy can be found online at www.nwrel.org/scpd/sslc.