A faculty perspective of the nature of a Small Learning Community and its impact on the learning of urban racial minority students

Teachers are at the forefront of student learning, and the people who have the most direct knowledge about what commonly impacts how students learn. Fundamentally among other aspects, teachers' beliefs characterize their professional lives -- that is, their beliefs inform how they teach and the issues important to them regarding student learning. Therefore, teacher perspectives are the most essential inputs we could have in the school improvement agenda. However, it is not always evident that teacher knowledge of how students learn is sufficiently discussed in educational circles. This prevents us from being informed of best educational practices that sustain progress. This case study with phenomenological elements critically examined a faculty's perspectives of how the features of a Small Learning Community (SLC) embedded in a large urban host high school impact the learning of especially Hispanic and African American racial minority students, and what that meant to the teachers. The implementation of the SLC concept as one of the transformation efforts is on-going, and the need to provide updates on the aspects of the programs in order to upgrade and sustain them is indispensable. In the large urban public high schools that they typically attend, Hispanic and African American students are often described as underperforming. The assumption is that Small Learning Communities (SLCs), when developed in the large host comprehensive high schools could potentially improve student learning. SLCs, by their nature of being small schools as a feature among other aspects, have the potential of creating intimate learning environments for the stakeholders of teachers, students, and parents or the community at-large to easily come together to develop close relationships that allow the students to learn well. The study was designed to present a critical examination of the discursive perspectives of participants. The data acquisition methods included interviewing five faculty members of Bay Valley High School (BVHS) in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, informal and formal observations, visual data, and artifacts. The qualitative research software NVivol0 was used to organize the data, which made the data easy to be analyzed. This provided deeper insights on how the features of BVHS as an SLC impact Hispanic and African American student learning. Largely, this was achieved by determining alignments and discrepancies in the participants' perspectives of what they said and what the literature indicated as well as what the participants said and did. Among the findings of the study, the teacher-participants stated that for example personalization, a mainstay of a successful SLC, was being negatively impacted by external demands such as the standardization of the curriculum and tests such as the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Systems (MCAS) testing. According to the teachers, these external demands interfere with teaching based on teacher understanding of student learning needs. Like the feature of autonomy, the teachers stated that this also limits their independence in appropriate teaching decisions leading to successful learning outcome. Another insight provided by the teachers was that the personalization of student learning depended more on the efforts of teachers and students attempting to develop relationships with each other on their own, and not necessarily the efforts of Bay Valley High School.