Creating your unique identity as a microschool and developing key school structures that enable learner-centered learning can drive what makes your microschool special and how it will contribute to scaling learner-centered practices within your system. 

Consider the following school structures from Learner-Centered Collaborative to reflect on how you want to design your microschool: 

• Small Learning Communities: Learners belong to multi-age small groups organized by a caring adult to support a sense of community and foster social-emotional and academic development, such as advisory groups, crews, teams, or houses. This may also involve rethinking cohorts of students and educators to create small learning communities across classes within a larger school building, or reimagining the concept of cohorting by grade level.
• Real World Learning: Learners are provided regularly scheduled time and structures to engage in authentic, interdisciplinary work in collaboration with community partners. This may look like blocks of time for interdisciplinary and community-connected projects with multiple educators, design thinking challenges, or days set aside for extensive fieldwork and/or internships.
• Performance Assessment: The assessment and reporting of student progress include evidence of how learners have grown and the development of the desired whole learner outcomes, in addition to academic outcomes, through competency-based and authentic performance assessments. This could include exhibitions of learning, student-led conferences, portfolios, defenses of learning, and competency-based reporting.  
• Teacher Collaboration: Educators have regular, structured time during the work day and throughout the year to learn together and collaborate. The time is used to learn and apply new strategies, co-design interdisciplinary projects and learning experiences, reflect on implementation, review data, and create plans to support learners. 
• Distributed Leadership: Structures that support and facilitate shared ownership and agency at all levels, including opportunities for learners and educators to make decisions. These include structures such as student advisory, Instructional Leadership Teams (ILT), and school committees.

Guiding Questions

• What is the microschool’s mission and vision? You may want to refer back to your purpose, but broaden this more holistically to think about your vision for students and how you will operationalize that vision through your mission. 
• What value statements describe how you want to operate as a school?
• What is your unique identity? Will you be a STEAM school, a CTE school, a competency-based School, or focus on another area? 
• How will students be organized in cohorts to foster a sense of community? What structures, such as advisory, could students be part of to build relationships and develop critical real-world skills?
• How will students in the microschool engage in real-world learning through community partnerships?
• How will the schedule enable real-world learning, performance assessments, small learning communities, and teacher collaboration time?
• How will teachers in the microschool collaborate to plan interdisciplinary learning?
• How will students demonstrate what they know and can do through performance assessments and authentic demonstrations of learning?
• How will students in the microschool engage in decision-making processes?
• How will teachers have ownership in the microschool?

Action Steps

Create mission, vision, and values statements through collaborative, learner-centered, community-led processes.

Develop a schedule and calendar that incorporates small learning communities, time for real-world, interdisciplinary learning, performance assessments, teacher collaboration and distributed leadership.

Develop an advisory program or related structures to build community and culture.

Ensure ongoing collaboration and involvement by creating structures for students and teachers to contribute to school decision-making. 

Develop structures for portfolios, defenses of learning, student-led conferences and/or exhibitions of learning. 

Tips and Examples

• The microschool at Myrtle Avenue Elementary begins each day with a multi-age advisory breakfast, where students in grades 4-6 share a meal and engage in brief SEL programming before their first class. 
• The microschool at Lincoln High School in the San Diego Unified School District comprises a cohort of 11th- and 12th-grade students engaged in work-based learning, pre-apprenticeship, and professional certification programs. They share an advisor who is familiar with the challenges and opportunities of this program and gather in a dedicated microschool advisory room to share insights, participate in online classes, and meet with their advisor when on campus.