![Agile Learning Center at Manhattan Free School]()
We are a team of educators, entrepreneurs, and social change agents who are building and sharing Agile Learning Centers -- a 21st Century model of education.
Hey Agile Learners!
Does this sound familiar? Long, slow, boring hours wasted in school with someone trying to make you learn something irrelevant and uninteresting, yet when the need to know about it arose in your life, you quickly and easily learned what you needed to know from any handy information source.
If so, you're probably an agile learner.
In fact, it seems like most people start out being agile learners, and have the capacity to identify what they need to learn when they need to learn it. Unless we've been drained of passion by droning teachers and tedious assignments, we maintain our connection to our natural hunger to learn and grow.
Did you know it's possible to organize your whole education this way? A school can actually serve the learning needs of a student instead of bending children to a curriculum that some committee of gray-haired academics has decided is "good for them."
Introducing Agile Learning Centers
Best practices of Agile Software Development
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the wisdom of Collective Intelligence
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the magic of Self-Directed Learning
Agile Software Development
The world is changing so fast that businesses have had to figure out ways to empower teams and individuals to have faster cycles of responses and decisions than their management hierarchy can find out about and respond to. This is especially true in high-tech fields like software development where the traditional strategy of gathering needs and requirements, creating a careful design and critical path execution plan, and delegating the parts of that plan to departments and teams tends to churn out a product that is outdated before it is released.
Agile practices have evolved to allow business to get out of their own way and empower teams and individuals to respond directly to user needs in quick, iterative sprints.
Some of the Agile structures we've adopted are morning stand-up meetings, kanban boards, and weekly sprints.
Collective Intelligence
Agile Learning Centers are optimized to adapt the learning needs of their students. Instead of cumbersome curriculum, tiresome traditions and excessive rules, we provide a lightweight framework and the social tools to adapt and evolve it to best fit the needs of the learning community.
Some of fun tools for getting things done together are: Gameshifting, Polymorphism, and Dynamic Alignment
Self-Directed Learning
The power of self-directed learning has been demonstrated by every human who has learned to speak, crawl, walk, or navigate social expectations. Before kids ever go to school, they've already accomplished these kinds of huge things, essentially on their own. Humans have managed to do these things for many thousands of years without "schooling."
And in the last hundred years, Free Schools, Open Classrooms and other alternative educational models have demonstrated the ability of children to continue that inherent pattern and learn in mere months things that it takes years of "teaching" to accomplish in traditional schools.
The best way to maximize learning is to maximize engagement. The kids who are choosing what they're doing and learning are fully engaged. Agile Learning Centers are organized around this as the centerpiece of students' time.
The First Agile Learning Center (the next, and more?)
During the past school year (2012-2013), we piloted this model in New York City at Manhattan Free School. We succeeded in revitalizing the school's culture and community, the kids loved it, the staff loved it, and we are excited to take it into a second year. We also got the school out of debt so that this year's revenue is all available for this year's operations.
We even have a group starting a second Agile Learning Center in upstate New York. However, we are painfully aware of a responsibility to share our work with others who know the mainstream educational model has expired and are seeking practical, viable, and affordable solutions.
We know there are people around the world hungry for these tools to make places for their children's learning to thrive.
What these funds make possible
1. Agile Learning Facilitators (ALF) Training Program
This week we announced that we would offer a training program to people wanting to learn to work in an Agile Learning Center. We already have 8 people signed up, but we need assistance in producing the content and materials for the program.
ALF program participants will be able to work directly with students at Manhattan Free School, or at the upstate Agile Learning Center starting in Chatham, NY. They may also work towards starting another Agile Learning Center in a new location.
2. Our Coaching Program
Children in an Agile Learning Center get to choose their own coach -- someone that they trust and speak with weekly about their learning priorities and needs. We started our coaching program partway through last school year and never got it running fully. We need to dedicate some more time and resources to making this vital part of the model serve our students better.
We need to re-launch our coaching program and provide adequate training and support for our coaches to be effective.
3. ALC Starter Kit and Web Site
We have a basic web site for our school, but need to invest in one for Agile Learning Centers to document and share our framework. We want to provide an ALC starter kit and grow a community of learners and educators to continue to evolve and curate the model. All materials will be shared under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.