The needs of small schools are plurime and differentiated according to human, technological and economic resources available, to the cultural vision and to the social context of reference. A research led in Italy (Pieri & Repetto, 2019) on a sample of small schools scattered across the national territory, has identified a series of educational and organisational requirements which are chiefly concerned with management issues of multi-age classrooms and single grade classrooms with a limited number of students.
These requirements are even mirrored throughout the international scholarship on education in small schools (Lindstrom & Lindahl, 2011; Hyry-Beihammer & Hascher, 2015; Smit & Engeli, 2015).
A first requirement expressed from teachers and principals is to improve education for groups of students of the same age. For these students, wheter or not belonging to multi-age classrooms, it is essential empowering the development of subject domain and transversal competencies tailored for their age mainly through individual and collaborative activities. For individual activities it is necessary to define personalised learning strategies, enhanced by technologies; for group activites, collaborative learning strategies should be identified, able to promote peer exchange processes able to overcome the boundaries of a single or multi-age classroom and to involve students of the same age from different classrooms and schools. Collaboration among students through “open classrooms” requires the definition of sharing mechanisms of teachers and learning tracks, as far as the individuation of processes to optimize timetables and resources employed.
A second requirement is to harness the potential of education for group of students of different ages. Students of multi-age classroom yet work in this way, nevertheless the design of learning activities fulfilling different age groups is complex and demanding. It is necessary to adopt learning approaches that through curricular alignment and spyral approaches meet the educational needs of students with different ages and motivate them to collaborate to reach specifique learning goals. Also in this case online education, through syncronous and asyncronous activities, could increase the opportunities for students and optimise teachers’ workload.
The review of national and international literature, furthermore, has revealed that the embedding of a small school in the territory as well as its function of cultural and social presidium could be sustained through innovative learning activities, even supported by technologies. These activities should involve the community to which the school belongs and should value, as Epstein (1995) stands for, traditions and assets of the culturale heritage.
In Italy it appears that, even in the most innovative contexts of small schools where technologies are present and are used daily, these are excessively connected to the single subject domain and to the specific topic that is often object of one ore more extemporaneous lessons. There is a lack of a more interdisciplinar and seamless vision of education and of a dominant theme leading and ensuring consistency to learning activities suggested and achieved by teachers.
Thus the main objective of this research* was to fill these gaps and to meet the identified requirements through the creation and validation of an innovative educational model, named “Small schools as educational communities”, which came out from a research action process carried out in some rural schools of Northern Italy.
*The research was funded in the context of the project Piccole scuole – Programma Operativo Nazionale plurifondo (2014IT05M2OP001) per la scuola – competenze e ambienti per l’apprendimento” 2014-2020 – Asse I “Istruzione” – OS/RA 10.1 “Riduzione del fallimento formativo precoce e della dispersione scolastica e formativa” – Azione 10.1.8, Codice progetto: 10.1.8.A1-FSEPON-INDIRE-2017-1 – CUP: B59B17000010006