Our high school, and others around the United States, are divided into Small Learning Communities (SLC’s). The idea of SLC’s is to create “schools within schools.” We have a total population of 2000 students that are divided into six Small Learning Communities of about 350 students and twenty-five teachers (very roughly) each. Those students and teachers — for the most part — stay together year after year.

I thought it might be useful to pull together some resources giving more information about this concept:

I’ve previously posted “What Are Small Learning Communities?”

Small Learning Communities comes from Educational Leadership.

A Humble, Small Learning Community was published in District Administration.

Small Learning Communities is a research brief from The Principals’ Partnership.

The Wikipedia entry on Small Learning Communities has a lot of useful links.

We Discuss Small Learning Communities On My Latest BAM! Radio Show

The Value Of ‘Small Learning Communities’ is the title of my  post at Education Week Teacher. Educators TEd Appel, ReLeah Cossett, PJ Caposey and Tom Hoerr contribute their commentaries sharing different perspectives on what a “small learning community” might look like….

How Being Part of a ‘House’ Within a School Helps Students Gain A Sense of Belonging is from MindShift.

Here’s an interesting new paper on the value of “looping” with students. What makes it stand out from other research on the topic, though, is that it also talks about the fact it happens a lot in secondary schools – often by chance. What it may miss, though, is that it happens intentionally in high schools like ours that are divided into Small Learning Communities:

 

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