Dr. Grauer's Column - Leaving the Map Behind: Leadership Lessons From Small Schools

Leaving the Map Behind: Leadership Lessons from Small Schools
By Stuart Grauer, Ed.D.

One morning, a class of our students stood along the beach just five minutes from campus, measuring the intervals between incoming waves.

Their mathematics teacher asked them to record the time between sets and later translate those patterns into trigonometric equations back in the classroom. The ocean became their data set; the rhythm of waves their mathematical (and for some, spiritual or athletic) model. For the students, this mathematics was not abstract anymore. It was a natural force, right there between their toes.

Experiential learning moments like this, especially if they are routine, illustrate something leaders and teachers at small schools often discover: when teaching and learning happens at human scale, eye to eye, curiosity and connection flourish in ways that are difficult to engineer in larger systems.

After several decades founding, leading, guiding, and following The Grauer School in California, and quite a few other schools, I have come to believe that “leadership” in human‑scale schools is often misunderstood—maybe that’s why it makes for such great stories.

Learning around the quad, in forests, and as often as not outside the classroom rather than in it, tends to be common in the small school. When students are known personally and teachers have the freedom to connect learning with real experiences, learning becomes alive—and memorable. Students stop asking “Am I ever going to need to know this?” or the dreaded “Is this going to be on the test?”. But for many school leaders, creating environments like this can feel like navigating constrained or even legally fraught territory.

These are the observations and findings, merged with breaking research, that eventually grew into the immersive, interlocking and sometimes far-flung leadership stories collected in my new book The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen. The Grauer community and all families and friends are warmly invited to celebrate the launch of this book on April 14 (RSVP).

In the early years of founding The Grauer School, I often felt as though I had wandered off the map. There were guides, of course—books on administration, conferences on governance, and established models describing how independent schools should operate. And there were off the beaten track mentors, too, outside of what we were used to envisioning—oftentimes these role models were not even in the field of education. “Alternative” back then was wrongly equated with “substandard” by accreditors and districts. But our school was small, entrepreneurial, and rooted in the surrounding natural environment. What standard was that?

Over time I started to realize that small school leaders and creative educators all over were experiencing the same sensation. So it was and is essential to set the record straight: Small schools are not miniature or lesser versions of large ones.  

They operate according to different rhythms and realities: closer relationships, tighter resources, faster adaptation, and a level of personal responsibility that can feel exhilarating and weighty at the same time. After all these decades in small schools, I came to believe that leadership is less about following established formulas and more about learning to observe, adapt, and trust the unique intelligence of a living community. In a community like that, we simply must trust that students are natural learners. We give them more of a voice, more freedom to learn, and more choices in how to learn.

In many ways, nature can become our most reliable mentor, too, once we have that freedom.

The Rise of Small Learning Communities Matters

In recent years, the school world has finally, after a lapse of well over 100 years (!), begun paying attention to the realities of intentionally small learning communities. Many states have started to offer tuition vouchers, tax credits, or educational savings accounts which almost always benefit smaller and more entrepreneurial learning communities. It’s happening in the public schools, as well, for instance with charters and schools-within-schools. We all want great public schools.

Small, safe and connected schools are finally resurging! The creation of NAIS’s Small Schools Connect forum, the emergence of “intentionally small school” networks across Europe, and the recent NAIS Research Advisory Understanding Microschools in the Independent School Context all signal the shift is underway. More than 200,000 small schools, learning pods, and microschools have begun operating across the United States since the pandemic. As these human-scale learning communities develop, smaller schools—many of which have (often off the radar) practiced this form of education for decades—are emerging as a movement. The Grauer School has led in that movement: what we have is what many schools around the world aspire to. And we want them to have it. The moment has arrived to share and pass along the leadership wisdom shaped inside these human-scale schools.

And there is a lot to share. The recent several years have brought fascinating new conversations and findings about small learning environments.

The emergence of small-scale initiatives in school reflects a desire for environments where students are personally known, feel safe and trusted, and experience learning shaped by their curiosity and development. Families are recognizing the value of human-scale education: strong relationships, flexibility, responsiveness, caring community, and the assurance that their student matters—an alternative to the “bigness” that defines many institutions.

Small schools have always existed within the independent and public school landscapes, yet our leadership literature and norms focus almost completely on the needs of larger institutions. Organizations with complex administrative structures, large development operations, large boards, and a focus on scale and scalability, for all their assets, are not our role models.

The lessons learned in small schools may hold relevance far beyond their size, too. They can point us to age-old truths about how human learning communities thrive and stay safe. And to great stories…

Schools as Living Systems

One afternoon many years ago, I was walking through the forest behind our campus when something caught my attention.

Some trees and coastal sage were flourishing, others struggling, and a few had fallen entirely. At first the pattern appeared random. There were no rows. But the more closely I looked, the more I noticed relationships—how sunlight filtered through branches, how soil conditions varied, how nearby plants either competed or supported one another …and even how a few slight openings of light had invited our middle schoolers (a rather demanding part of an ecosystem like that!) to go running through, snapping branches. Growth depended on conditions—not controls.

The naturalist leader observes and understands how to encourage and create those conditions in which lives can flourish and self-sustain. The leader becomes the chief observer. Safe schools operate this way. We are participants not in a machine, but in a living community whose flourishing depends on trust, shared purpose, honoring curiosity, and the freedom to learn from experience—to Learn by Discovery®.

When leaders pay attention to the subtle, deeper patterns of human development, something amazing begins to happen. Communities become resilient. Students feel known and valued. Teachers rediscover the joy that drew them to education to begin with. In small schools, patterns of focus and calm tend to be visible every day.

A Moment of Transition

Let's sum up. In small schools, relationships do not need to be rule-bound or managed very much, and rows can be shifted to circles where we are eye to eye. In schools like that, the head of school normally knows every student by name—when I stopped knowing every student and family, I knew it was time to implement my succession plan.

After thirty-five years leading the school I founded, I eventually stepped into the role of Head of School Emeritus. When I say my only major promotion was from Head of School to Assistant Surf Coach, there is a real grain of truth in there. Transitions like this are among the most delicate moments in a school’s life. Founder leadership is normally entrepreneurial and fiercely independent but, for sustainability, it tends to give way to the stability of long-term governance. Boards must balance stewardship with respect for the ongoing culture of freedom. The community must understand that healthy schools outlast their founders as a measure of organization wellbeing.

Looking back across those decades, what stands out most clearly is not the administrative complication of running a school, but the simplicity small learning communities gather when they are built on trust. That’s the wrap-up to this story.

Let’s remember the simple things. The leader just reading a class a story can be an unforgettable experience. Small schools remind us that education is fundamentally relational, and that it can be simple again. And it flourishes when communities are courageous enough to leave the map behind and explore new (but often very old) possibilities together. Along this path, I have met courageous educators who have risked their jobs or created extraordinary schools that make great stories.

For heads of school and trustees alike, the experience of small schools offers a reminder that educational leadership and the measure of a school’s worth begins with relationships with each other and with our local ecosystems, not size.

This article is adapted from some of the themes of Stuart Grauer’s new book of immersive stories, The Way to Pancho’s Kitchen: A Trail Guide for Small School Leaders (March 2026). “Without a doubt, this is the most delightful, inspiring, and practical book on leadership I’ve read in many a year…” – Margaret Wheatley, world-renowned leadership expert and bestselling author

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