Tag: alf
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Educambiando Visit ’17
I was invited to the Agile Learning Facilitation training that Educambiando hosted in December of 2017 in Veracruz, Mexico. After months of tending my language-barrier worries with serious study sessions and my leaving-school-for-over-a-week worries by getting ahead on paperwork while my spawn practiced running things without me, I headed off on my first international trip…
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Questions on Repeat
One of the practices from my time in conventional classrooms that still serves me is that of listening for signs that I wasn’t clear enough in communicating. One such sign is when I’m getting the same questions repeatedly; sometimes it means our group isn’t practicing listening very well yet, but 98% of the time it…
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ALF Resource: Intergenerational Trauma
After reflecting a bit on how I’ve been voraciously consuming nonfiction without pausing to share out my learning–waiting, I think, to see the whole tapestry it’ll become once I weave the pieces together–I’ve decided to push myself to share my draft-y notes. Here’s the first attempt: The other night, I got home and decided to…
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ALF Page Jan. 2018 Update
How does someone even end up at alf.agilelearningcenters.org? I honestly am not quite sure. What I know is that the page used to essentially be a flyer for the ALF Summer super-programs in Charlotte, NC. As we started to see other ALCs hosting various retreats, trainings, and workshops starting in 2016, the page morphed into…
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“I’m Bored” Toolbox
@catmooy and I opened this old draft blog post and asked people to help us finish it. We asked what people do when they’re B O R E D and they (@kirkorovfan @thewitchqueen908 @serenagermany @simoneboss @theanchor @heartabby @aidenstarwars) helped us come up with this list: Read a book. Play with stuff that’s here. Look at…
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ALC-NYC Summer Planning (list)
When it’s time: Explore why you’re interested in organizing a facilitator training. Re-read some anti-colonialism/anti-oppression texts. Reflect on your experiences facilitating and then as someone holding an ALC community. What roles and topics can you rock? Which ones do you need to find partners to take up? Set personal intentions and goals ASAP: Gather a team…
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ALC-NYC Summer Planning (narrative)
This post started as my journaling the process @ryanshollenberger and I went through in planning the first ALF Summer program outside the Network program in Charlotte, NC in the 2015-2016 school year. It’s one of 3 posts I’m putting together from my experience planning the NYC programs so far. While I didn’t write that we…
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Naming the Silence
Margins of planners. Notebooks. Arms. Chairs. Bookshelves. Trees. Rocks. Napkins. Any blank space as an invitation for my pen. I scratched out song lyrics and lecture highlights, webbed thought-explorations, inked out feelings I wanted to examine, captured quotes from all my favorite authors, promised friends that I loved them, tested forms and the boundaries of…
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The Talk I Never Gave
Last Tuesday, a friend reached out and asked about giving a TEDx talk at the United Nations International School. It’s been a draining couple of weeks, and I was intrigued but not feeling quite on top of my game. I asked what he wanted me to talk about, ready to say ‘no.’ Agile, he said.…
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External Brain
This summer I worked some days at an adventure playground. I was there Saturdays, with two other adults and sometimes volunteers. It was work I really enjoyed, and I have lots of thoughts about it, but the biggest impact it’s had on my ALC-NYC school year life is that it’s where I started keeping a day…
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A Day-Trip: Franklin Institute and Bresslergroup Debate
Last Thursday morning, most of the ALC-NYC crew headed towards East Harlem for a day of philosophy, visitors, Japanese, wrestling, music, and more. Meanwhile, I texted with my co-conspiritors and packed a notebook into my field trip bag. Learning is natural and happening all the time. I’m generally a fan of our foundational principles at…
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The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Kanban
“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools…Responding to change over following a plan…” When I was first looking for information on Agile Software Development, I found these lines and smiled. It makes so much sense: meet people where they are, pay attention to relationships and dynamics, have tools but don’t get attached to them, plan but…
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I need a nap ;)
Started the week like this: (Thanks @abram) Mittwoch like this: (Thanks @creeperclaws @heartabby @starwars @beths10 @muffinsthecutest and @pigsfly!) Ended it like this (with woodworking and Minecrafting and improv games and cooking and and…):
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This week!
It’s very exciting to set up new students with blogs 🙂 Especially when they jump into writing independently, leaving me 10 minutes to write alongside them! We had three students visiting this week. They jumped right into offerings and games with other kids, which was great to see. I spent a lot of time working…
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Making it official.
Growing up, I was often told that I should go to school to become a professor. Meanwhile, I read stories about and observed the lives of master teachers. And I started asking how they got to where they were. A pattern soon emerged, and it made a lot of sense to me: the master teachers–the…
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This week!
It feels like I could write separate posts for each thing that happened this week…The days are just packed, as Bill Watterson might say if he could see us. We returned from Mid-Winter Break for Oliver’s third week, Saylor’s first, and Aiden talking about adding a third day with us. @Bear was back from his…
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Broadcasting
It’s a behavior that various magazines I read as a kid attributed to pregnant women and children in the early stages of speech development. You’ve likely encountered it…”I want macaroni” or “I’m going to the bathroom” or “I’m drawing now.” These are all examples of broadcasting. Now, I’m not pregnant or celebrating a new ability to express…
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January 15th…week end…
I sat down to write with all kinds of snippets that I was excited to share, but in reflecting on them to find a theme for the week (an approach to blogging that I’d like to play with transitioning to rather than listing happenings each week) I found a deep feeling of contentment. Days are…
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Last (in school) post of the Year
Each school year–each day, really–brings expected joys and challenges. This year started with lots of challenges. Mostly growing pains in the sense that we started the year with a 4:3 ratio of returning to new kids. Even if all the established ones were culture keepers and all the new ones showed up with culturally neutral…
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On expectations…
This was a week in which I reflected on the difference between intentions and expectations. Twice, I set the intention with kids to go ice skating. I intended to reconnect with a friend who’s been off-grid. Intended to get new body art. To stretch. To blog. To clean. I called these my intentions, but they…
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