The aim of “Going Small” is to demonstrate how small personalized learning communities provide an optimal platform for the most important elements of effective professional development.
Following a review of the most current research on professional development practice, the authors extract a list of five characteristics of high quality professional development: sufficient time, shared instructional goals, use of information on student performance and teacher practice, building capacity of instructional leaders, and outside technical assistance. The paper then seeks to make explicit how each of these characteristics is supported by organizing schools into small personalized learning communities and provides a sustainable framework for increasing opportunities for job-embedded, ongoing professional learning.
