Tasmania, Australia, is no ordinary place — and Reece Community High School, in Devonport, is no ordinary school. One of its buildings houses 100 students in four “principal learning areas” (classrooms is not in the vocabulary here): large rooms with activity centers that flow into one another, each connected to the outdoors, with the long corridors typical of many schools notably missing.
Published in Edutopia, this article by Prakash Nair and Randy Fielding explores the Small Learning Community, or SLC — the design offshoot of the small-schools movement. Progressive educators converge on a simple ceiling: no more than 150 students, echoing anthropologist Robin Dunbar’s finding that 150 is roughly the maximum number of people with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship.
Community, by design
The evidence ranges from New York’s Julia Richman Education Complex — a failing comprehensive high school reborn as six small schools where nearly all students graduate — to EDI-designed schools that put the idea into brick and mortar:
With $30 billion spent on school construction in the United States each year, the growing move toward Small Learning Communities is an important step in the right direction — for the organization, the architecture, and the spirit of tomorrow’s schools.