New to your school?
If you would like to know more about the "why" and the benefits of small schools, two short, easy-to-read articles are Debbie Meier's The Big Benefits of Smallness and Small School: Real Gains by Pat Wasley and Rick Lear. In Fixing the Factory, Tom Vander Ark, Executive Director for Education at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, offers a frank look at the problems facing today's high schools and makes a plea for change. And for a synopsis of research that stretches back 30 years, see Kathleen Cotton's New Small Learning Communities: Findings from Recent Literature.

If you are working in a large comprehensive high school that has recently converted to smaller schools, two articles by Rick Lear may interest you: Things You can Count on Happening and Thinking About Conversions. Another article, Comprehensive or Focused, describes how we got to where we are.

Whatever the size of your school, however, teachers are collaborating to improve student learning.

If you are looking for practical tools to use in the classroom, a four-series collection called Planning Resources for Teachers in Small Schools includes numerous topics such as performance assessment, advisories, and project-based learning. Your principal and teacher leader have printed copies of these collections, or you can download them from this website.

Other brief website pages that will introduce you to the Small Schools Project and our work are Why Small Schools, What Are Small Schools, What We Do, and Small Schools Coaches Collaborative.

You may also want to review the research and resources available on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation website.