Our Core Practices

Everyone has innate desires to learn. In contrast with conventional schools’ externally imposed motivations for learning (like grades, punishments, rewards, shame, and praise), we support motivations for learning based on young people’s curiosity, imagination, playfulness, and joy. We foster a culture that supports young people’s agency for initiating, planning, creating, reflecting on, and evaluating their learning experiences. Sometimes they will work independently, but often in collaboration with and supported by their friends and adult facilitators.  When children get to follow their passions, they engage deeply, and learn more thoroughly and efficiently.

We foster a vibrant community and cooperative culture in which young people are heard, feel a sense of belonging, and can build their confidence, skills, and knowledge for changing the world. For more on these principles, see the Agile Learning Center website.

We draw on the Agile Learning Centers network for tools that build cooperative cultures around self-directed learning. These practices provide visible feedback, effective self-organization, clarity of purpose, and flexible adaptation to changing needs. To learn more about our practices for culture creation, click here.

Each morning, the students gather together and share what they intend to do that day and make any requests for support or collaboration. They may choose to participate in a scheduled offering or leave the day open for spontaneous or self-planned, independent, or collaborative activities. At the end of the day, they gather again to reflect on what they learned and share with others.

We affirm children’s capacities to participate in democratic life on a local scale. In our child-centered democratic culture, our community actively discusses, models, and practices consent with each other. Any group activities and community norms are clear, transparent, and agreed upon through directly-democratic, consent-based decision making processes. As part of our community agreements, students will be asked to consent to participate in a few required activities to help uphold our community’s values and basic communication needs, such as daily morning meetings, daily chore time, Change Up meetings, and conflict resolution mediations. But even these required activities are open to revision through child-centered decision-making processes.

All community members, of any age, can learn from each other. Cross-age relationships can allow for mutually beneficial mentoring, leadership development, and collaboration by shared interests and levels of proficiency rather than ages or grades.

Young people learn best when they are motivated by the joy of their innate playfulness and curiosity. We make spaces for young people to engage in self-directed learning as a kind of “playful work / workful play” all of the time, rather than separating space-times for work and play. We recognize the vital role of unstructured free-play for developing the whole-child including the learning of social and emotional skills such as empathy, communication, and getting along with others; physical skills including assessing risk; and intellectual skills such as executive functioning, content knowledge, and creativity.  Play provides young people with opportunities to try out different roles and social strategies, from which they gain confidence and a sense of who they are.  We support a gradual and natural shift from mostly play-based learning in our younger Roots group to more focused study as our Branches group prepares for adult life. 

Young people can change the world. They shouldn’t have to choose between conforming to the status quo or being treated as disposable. Instead, we affirm young people as worldmakers—as builders of their own, unique visions of the world. When young people find learning relevant, when it resonates with their embodied experiences and helps them interpret their relations with the world in meaningful ways, they can expand their agency to impact the world.  We provide resources for them to study the world-as-it-is, grapple with its limits and possibilities, and imagine and create alternative worlds.

To break down the boundaries between school and the world beyond, we host frequent trips beyond the school and facilitate study opportunities with adults in all kinds of professions and community organizations. We recognize that young people’s practices of playful exploration create meaningful relationships with the local places in which they live. Centering young people in the learning process requires attending to their relations with local places. Place-based learning empowers young people to understand the conditions in which they live, play, study, work, and organize. Rather than imposing a curriculum, adults in our school facilitate curricula that emerge from young people’s interests, experiences, reflections, and questions in relation to their local places, and that deeply involve them in the making of the curricula.

Adults in our project serve as facilitators of young people’s learning.  Rather than providing external motivations (like judging, evaluating, grading, criticizing, praising, or rewarding) that presume hierarchies of knowledge, facilitators offer care, opportunities, guidance, and resources to support self-directed, place-based learning. Facilitators connect students with resources to help them cultivate skills for their pursuits. Facilitators affirm children’s agency while also offering help for developing their capacities to engage with representational forms of knowledge (e.g., math, language, art, natural sciences, ecology, history, politics, economics, geography, etc) in ways that are grounded in and responsive to children’s unique modes of relating. The facilitators are also co-studiers, asking questions and engaging in inquiries along with the students.

In addition to the learning that emerges from unstructured play and exploration, students may participate in offerings.  Offerings are collaborative activities that are scheduled and led by a student, group of students, staff member, or volunteer.  Examples of offerings include a project to paint a wall mural, a weekly astronomy club, a field trip to the museum, learning to sew, bicycle mechanics, mindfulness practice, writing/publishing a school newspaper, a game of capture the flag, algebra practice, or theater performances.  Often, the offerings follow the kids’ emergent interests, but they can also serve to inspire them in new directions that might not be discovered on their own. We encourage parents/caregivers to volunteer where possible and share their knowledge and interests with the kids.  Offerings are generally inclusive of mixed ages, but some may have a limit on the number that can participate.  Offerings may be one-time events or recurring, and they are always opt-in.

As a community, we use a variety of tools and strategies to support each other and promote self-reflective practices to examine difficult behaviors that we can all struggle with at times. Rather than externally imposed discipline, we proactively establish communal and personal resolutions about who we want to be in our experiences of ourselves and others.

Our overall approach to learning goes a long way toward supporting the social and emotional health of our students.  Every day, our schedule allows extensive opportunity to practice social skills, try out social strategies, and learn from the responses of others in a safe and relaxed environment.  Our students gain social confidence as they learn to manage emotions, make responsible decisions, work collaboratively, and build healthy relationships.  Kids needing extra emotional support will find caring facilitators who will gently guide students using a conscious discipline approach.  We foster a culture of mindfulness for ourselves, each other, and the larger world.