ALC Educational Model - An Agile Tree
Some things are central to what ALCs are about, but other elements are flexible and may vary between communities. We use a metaphor of a tree to illustrate this aspect of the ALC educational model more clearly.
The Soil is Trust
The biggest dividing line between ALCs and old school educational systems boils down to this: Who do we trust to direct a child’s learning?
Most educational settings (around 99% of them) come from a perspective that children are a kind of empty vessel who couldn’t possibly know what’s good for them. So someone else needs to decide what they should learn, how they should learn it, and then tell them whether they’ve learned it well enough.
An Agile Learning Center is not a place to use hip sounding tools to get children to jump through a bunch of hoops.
That “someone else” may be a school board lobbied by corporate interests, or a curriculum committee who has to call their grandkids for tech support to use a computer, or superintendents, principals or teachers. It just never seems to be the person who actually has to live with the consequences of these choices -- the child.
A Leap of Faith
We could give a lot of reasons why a child needs to be in the driver’s seat of their learning, but in the end, this issue really comes down to taking a leap of faith. A parent must have the ability to put their faith in their child’s inherent wisdom (or at least the need for the child to learn their own lessons when they fail to exercise wisdom).
Our experience with parents has shown us that the deeper issue is usually not an inability to trust the child, but an inability to trust themselves. This is the crux of the matter. Most of us have grown up immersed in systems that teach us we aren’t trustworthy. We went to schools which don’t trust us (as described above), maybe had protective parents at home, and live in a patronizing society with untrusting laws, limiting choices to narrow menus options of majors, classes, careers, or political parties. Most internalize the message that we can’t really be trusted.
It is a powerful thing we do in asking parents to take this leap of faith in trusting themselves. To step outside the box of a dysfunctional educational system and extend that faith further to actually trusting their children. Just making this choice… this leap… can be life-changing. It certainly alters the fabric of relationship within a family. And most importantly, the children immediately start learning they can trust themselves -- a lesson many adults have still been denied.
Some Reasons to Trust
We focused on the leap of faith without giving reasons, because that’s fundamentally the emotional shift parents have to make. However, everyone likes to explain themselves in sensible ways to others, so here are just a few of the reasons that it is smart to trust the child to be in the driver’s seat of their education:
You can’t learn to make good decisions if you’re never allowed to make your own decisions.
Children learn better when they’re doing things they’re actually interested in.
Forcing kids to do things compromises their trust in you (as well as in themselves) and establishes an adversarial relationship.
The best way to learn to trust yourself, is by being granted the gift of trust.
Committing to trust your children creates powerful mutual respect and mutual trust.
Kids have a choice, you’ve just narrowed their choices to: “Do what you’re told” or “Get in trouble.” Some discover they have another option: “Agree to to what I’m told, then try to get away with doing something else.” (Lie about it.) Is that the kind of decision making you want them to spend their childhood practicing?
By practicing self-direction, children learn greater responsibility. Complete responsibility.
You don’t learn to drive by being told or reading books about it, you have to actually get in the driver’s seat.
Following their authentic interests makes them better attuned to their passions and hones their ability to listen for their deeper purpose.
An Agile Learning Center is not a place to use hip sounding tools to get children to jump through a bunch of hoops. If you don’t trust that children are the best, if not the ONLY ones to decide what the need to learn, you’re not building an ALC. You’re just using some new tools to try to do old things better. We strongly recommend against faking it. Our tools are designed to produce actual empowerment, not pretend empowerment. You would likely end up with a mutiny on your hands as empowered kids figured out they didn't have to be limited to your constraints.
Roots / Assumptions
In the soil of trust, the tree has four main roots that are the underlying assumptions of our educational model. They may sound obvious. If they sound crazy to you, then you may want to reconsider whether an Agile Learning Center is a good fit. They are the foundation of our paradigm upon which everything else is built.
Learning: Learning is natural. It's happening all the time
Self-Direction:. People learn best by making their own decisions. Children are people.
Experience: People learn more from their culture and environment than from the content they are taught. The medium is the message.
Success: Accomplishment is achieved through cycles of intention, creation, reflection and sharing.
Branches / Principles
The tools and practices that we use in Agile Learning Centers emerge as leaves on one or more branches. These branches depict the guiding principles we use to translate theory into practice and ideals into action.
In the spirit of being agile, we want each program to be able to adapt our structures, tools, and practices to the needs of their unique community and setting. So, when you invent, assess or integrate new variations at an Agile Learning Center, we recommend using these principles as touchstones to help ensure your adaptations are in the spirit of the ALC educational model and haven’t wandered back toward the habits of authoritarian education that may occupy too much of our imagination and experience.
Infinite Play: Play infinitely, grow infinitely. Play is one of the most powerful paths to growth. The concept of infinite play reminds us that games aren’t about winning. Changing rules and boundaries is part of playing, as is letting players constantly expand the game to incorporate new players and new frontiers.
Be Agile: Make tools and practices flexible, adaptable, and easy to change or change back again. Too much change all at once can be disorienting -- try gentle changes over multiple iterations to see what’s working.
Amplify Agency: Ensure tools support personal choice and freedom, as well as responsibility for those choices. Everyone should have the opportunity to participate in designing and upgrading the structures which guide them.
Culture Creation: Acknowledge and use the water you’re swimming in. We shape culture; culture shapes us. A powerful, positive culture is the strongest, most pervasive support structure a learning community can have. Develop collective mastery rather than restrictive rule-making. Intentional culture building supports intentionality in other domains as well.
Visible Feedback: Make choices, patterns, and outcomes visible to participants, so they can tune their future behavior accordingly. Make the implicit explicit and expand transparency. These practices empower and build trust among community members.
Facilitate: Clarify, simplify, and connect. Don’t introduce unnecessary complexity. Hold coherence for personal growth in an empowered cultural context. Connect kids to the larger social capital of their community as they seek learning resources. Combine many principles and intentions into a single tool or practice, instead of trying to maintain more of them.
Support: Provide maximum support with minimal interference. As adults, we often need support reaching our goals and fulfilling our intentions; so do children. We create supportive structures, practices, culture, and environments. However it’s important to remember that support is not direction -- it does not mean making their decisions for them or intervening and managing their processes. Support that takes up too much space becomes counterproductive.
Respect each other’s time and space: Hold no unnecessary meetings. Keep all meetings tight, productive and participatory. Honor commitments, as well as scheduled start and end times for happenings. Check in before creating work for someone else. Be thoughtful about taking up shared space.
Relationship: Be real. Be accepting. Respect differences. Authentic relationship is the basis of partnership, communication, collaboration, and trust between students and staff. Support self-expression, self-knowledge and self-acceptance, letting the experience of nurturing relationship teach the power of interrelatedness and community.
Full-spectrum Fluency: Embrace multiple intelligences, modes of expression, and learning styles. Nurture multiple literacies. A functional education for today’s world needs to focus on more than just book-learning-type textual, numerical, analytical, or memorization skills. Social, relational, digital, and a variety of other skill sets are now essential; recognize and develop them as such.
Shareable Value: Make value received from learning visible and sharable. Use tracking systems, record measurable progress, generate documentation (blogs, portfolios, images), and teach others.
Safe Space-making: Provide an environment of physical, social, and emotional safety. Set and keep critical boundaries. Foster great freedom within an appropriate frame of safety and legality, so that kids’ energy can be freed up to focus on learning instead of protecting themselves.
Leaves & Fruit
The leaves of our Agile Tree are the tools and practices that we use on a daily basis to embody all this theory. Our tools have proven to be highly effective in rapidly transforming the culture in a school to a healthier state and empowering the students with great clarity, focus and intentionality.
We put the details about our tools and practices in the Facilitation section of the Starter Kit. We mentioned some of them above inside the parentheses descriptions of the Branches/Principles. These tools may be adapted, changed, replaced, or even abandoned at a particular ALC. But do not try to abandon them wholesale. They are extremely powerful culture-hacking devices which produce a lot of intended direct and indirect effects in building a healthy culture. Please take time to explore them.
The fruit of the tree is the benefits to the students, staff and community. Our Agile Tree bears a lot of fruit. (illustrate a bunch of cool benefits here).
[insert Agile Tree image here]
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