Creating Small Learning Communities: Lessons From the Project on High-Performing Learning Communities About “What Works” in Creating Productive, Developmentally Enhancing, Learning Contexts

Personalizing the school environment is a central goal of efforts to transform America's schools. Three decades of work by the Project on High Performance Learning Communities are considered that demonstrate the potential impact and importance of the creation of “small learning environments” on student motivation, adjustment, and well-being. Findings about how to effectively create such small learning environments in middle and secondary school are presented. Of particular focus are the ways in which ecological changes that create smaller schools within large ones, teacher and student teams, and other personalization strategies may engage diverse, socially, and economically disadvantaged students, in middle and high schools, to improve academic performance, reduce dropout rates, enhance developmental outcomes, and close equity gaps.

Personalizing the school environment is a central goal of efforts to transform America's schools (e.g.,  Biddle & Berliner, 2002 ;  Carnegie Task Force on the Education of Young Adolescents, 1989 ;  Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 2003 ;  National Association of Secondary School Principals, 1996 ). Recently, however, some have called into question such major personalization efforts as middle schools or the creation of “small schools,” particularly the efficacy of the approaches advocated for creating such conditions. Illustratively, several states and districts have begun to move away from what they see as the ineffective model of middle school to a return to K–8 configurations (e.g., Philadelphia, Baltimore).

In the current article we consider both the intent and potential impact of the personalization of school environments through the creation of “small learning environments” based on more than 3 decades of work by the Project on High Performance Learning Communities to create such environments. ( Felner, 2000 ;  Felner et al., 2001 ). Small learning communities are at the core of a wide array of recommendations for school reform and a number of labels that have been applied to efforts to personalize school environments. To avoid the confusion that might result from constantly shifting between those labels we use the construct of “small learning communities” to apply to this concept.

Our emphasis is on features and issues that are common across all of these efforts whether labeled “small schools,” “schools-within-schools,” “houses and/or teams,” or embedded in larger frames (e.g., Sizer's, 1997, advocacy for personalization within “Essential Schools). The label of “small learning communities” makes clear that the central focus across efforts is the creation of conditions that engage students, support learning, and enhance development.