Stephen A. Swidler

Naturally Small: Teaching and Learning in the Last One-teacher Schools Stephen A. Swidler

This book asks simply: How do the teachers in these small schools manage to teach? The research reported here is concerned with how teachers and students organize themselves and "do school" that is small is scale. If school size is emerging as some important variable in student achievement and school improvement, and smallness is some key to that variable, then it stands to reason that one-teacher schools still have something to tell us. While the primary audience for this book is teachers, teacher educators and education policymakers, others, such as parents, might pick up this book and see some images of schooling that are both familiar and strange to them. The book offers portraits of instruction that can offer readers something to think with as we consider what it takes to improve school life for our own and other people's children.