The Small Schools Workshop is a group of educators, organizers and researchers who work in collaboration with teachers, principals, parents, and district leaders to create new, small, innovative learning communities in public schools. We provide direct assistance through partnerships with school districts. The Workshop actively participates in national and local initiatives to deepen public understanding of the importance of school size to student learning and the role of small schools in furthering positive whole-school and systemic change.

The Small Schools Workshop has a record of successful support for K-12 schools. We offer a broad array of topical workshops and conferences tailored to the needs of schools in the process of redesigning. Areas of expertise include teaching, inclusion and equity, curricular integration, alignment and assessment, career academy design, resource development and strategies for comprehensive school improvement. Leadership development, team building, and school violence prevention are Workshop specialties.

Since 1991, the Small Schools Workshop has:

• Assisted hundreds of elementary, middle and high schools to restructure into small schools or smaller learning communities
  
  
  Advocated for and helped educators win major policy changes at the local, state and federal levels toward empowering schools with a greater degree of self-governance and autonomy
  
  
• Provided ongoing technical assistance and professional development opportunities to teachers, principals, superintendents and teams of teachers involved in small schools
  
  
• Researched, evaluated, and designed assessment tools for small schools

  
  
• Provided leadership to a growing local and national network of small schools and like-minded organizations

Executive Director Michael Klonsky

Dr. Michael Klonsky, Ph.D. is a professor of education and currently serves as the national director of the Small Schools Workshop. Dr. Klonsky is a teacher educator who has spoken and written extensively on school reform issues with a focus on urban school restructuring. His latest book (with Susan Klonsky), Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society (Routledge), is a critique of top-down school reform and the push towards privatization of public schools. He is also the author of Small Schools: The Numbers Tell a Story (University of Illinois Small Schools Workshop) and co-author of A Simple Justice: The Challenge for Teachers in Small Schools (Teachers College Press). He has served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Youth Violence and is past president of the editorial board of Catalyst, Chicago’s school-reform journal. He has also written extensively on the history and progress of Chicago’s dynamic school decentralization effort and has assisted teachers and community groups in starting dozens of new small and charter schools and in the restructuring of many large, traditional high schools. Dr. Klonsky's work is profiled at: http://klonsky.blogspot.com/