small learning communities or professional learning communities

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Page 1: Small learning communities or professional learning communities

3. Small Learning Communities or Professional Learning Communities? In this paid column in Education Week, author/consultant Richard DuFour responds to a principal’s question about reorganizing his high school into separate houses or Small Learning Communities with interdisciplinary teams. The principal asked if the SLCs would be better than content-specific Professional Learning Community teams in which teachers had been working.

DuFour said no, stick with content-specific teacher teams. “Furthermore,” he continued, “there is little in either the history of American education or recent developments in the field that suggests converting schools into SLCs will improve student achievement.” DuFour cites the findings of James Conant’s 1959 Carnegie study, which argued that any high school with fewer than 400 students was ineffective and inefficient. Two recent studies by the American Institute for Research (2005) and SRI International (2006) looked at schools that had been organized into SLCs with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They found that student attendance and achievement, especially in mathematics, were worse in the Gates schools than in other high schools in their districts. The studies also noted the high staff turnover due to the demanding and unwieldy teacher workloads often inherent in small schools. “Although there have been some isolated examples of apparently successful small schools emerging from the restructure of a large high school,” says DuFour, “these have been the exception rather than the rule.” The best hope for improving schools, say the experts, is to emphasize continuous monitoring of student learning, tighten school culture, and pay greater attention to issues of curriculum and instruction – advice that the Gates Foundation has heeded.

Small Learning Communities aren’t the answer, says DuFour. “Ultimately the culture must change to impact classroom practice and student and staff expectations, and the best strategy for improving schools at any level will focus less on the structure of the organization and more on building the capacity of people within the schools to create a new culture – the culture of a PLC, with its intense focus on each student’s learning, collaborative and collective effort to promote that learning, and hunger for evidence of student learning to inform and improve professional practice and to better meet the needs of the students we hope to serve.”

“Are Small Learning Communities (SLCs) Synonymous with Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)?” by Richard DuFour in Education Week, Feb. 23, 2011 (Vol. 30, #21, p. 26), no e-link available