Teaching in Community Schools: Creating Conditions for Deeper Learning

TLDR

Community schools mobilize teachers, families, and staff to collaborate on equity, leveraging community knowledge, integrated supports, and innovative pedagogy to create richer learning opportunities and sustain teacher well‑being. This broadened view of teaching in community schools offers researchers new avenues to study and advance both the discipline and the broader community schools movement.

Abstract

The community school strategy calls on teachers, families, and school staff to take on new and more challenging roles to collaboratively address existing educational inequities. For example, deepened family and community engagement in the schools can help incorporate the rich funds of community knowledge and experience, both in the classroom and in making plans and decisions about the school. As school and community stakeholders work together, they can develop learning opportunities and access to services that support student learning and development. Community schools are particularly well-positioned to take advantage of research-backed strategies like integrated supports that help students come to class more prepared to learn, hands-on and innovative teaching and learning opportunities to deepen and extend learning, and sustainable workplace conditions to promote teacher satisfaction and retention. Embracing the link between learning and community, teachers and community school staff ensure that students and communities have opportunities to access rich, challenging, and culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogy, while accessing resources and supports. This expanded conception of what it means to teach in a community school presents new ways for researchers to study and help advance the field as well as the larger community schools movement.