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ac		how schools are organized

language is power good schools for everyone making alliances working and learning together finding a focus trying out new ideas how schools are organized how are we doing? opening the school doors things to avoid		CAN YOU DESCRIBE a time when you learned something important - something you still remember and use in your life? Whether the task was driving a standard shift car or dancing the tango, chances are you weren't in a large, anonymous crowd at the time. And you probably stuck with it for at least an hour or two-with help from an expert coach at your side-before you began to catch on. To take advantage of what we know about how people learn, many schools in Challenge sites are rethinking the way they operate. For instance, a daily schedule in which a teacher sees five different classes of 30 students makes it hard for teachers to know students well. So some schools ask teachers to work together in teams, giving them more time with fewer students. And some make class periods longer, to let students go deeper into a subject.
		block scheduling
		Instead of dividing the school day into the traditional seven 43-minute periods, the block schedule uses fewer and longer class periods, which last at least an hour and often up to two. Sometimes teachers integrate two or more subject areas (such as language arts and social studies) into the long block of time. Or some schools condense a full course into a semester, college-style, by meeting for longer periods.
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		Breaking a school of several thousand students into smaller units also helps make the learning environment more personal and thus more effective. Also, allowing time in the school day for teachers to plan together helps them do their job better. Decisions about school organization can also give students more time to actively explore important questions in an inquiry-driven classroom, with the teacher acting as a coach rather than "delivering instruction. " Or a school might organize its program so that students must demonstrate their readiness in public exhibitions of their work before promotion or graduation.

		small learning communities
		Because research shows that people learn better in a more personal setting, many big schools are dividing into smaller groups of teachers and students. These small learning communities may use a career theme (such as health and medicine) or an academic area (such as the arts) to focus their work across the core subjects.
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		* WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS: Small schools are superior to large schools on most measures-including school grades, test scores, honor roll membership, subject-area achievement, and assessment of higher-order thinking skills-and equal to them on the rest. This holds true for both elementary and secondary students of all ability levels and in all kinds of settings. If one uses graduation rates as a measure of effectiveness, small schools also cost less. Challenge evaluators in New York City found.
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