Open houses and open doors

On the heels of last weekend’s wildly successful Education Transformation School Fair, many participating schools and other alt ed programs are following up with open houses, tours, and special events for this week. In fact, the entire month of March is positively bursting with opportunities to get to know the people and places of Austin’s alt ed community—and find the right fit for your kid. Check our calendar for all the details. Here’s a preview:

On Saturday, March 2, visit The Natural Child Learning Community, a Montessori-inspired, nature-oriented preschool in the heart of Georgetown. The program provides a part-time, holistic learning environment for children between the ages of 2-1/2 and 5.

The next day, Sunday, March 3, head over to the 9th Street Schoolhouse in near East Austin to meet Caitlin and Laura, who place radical faith in children and, following the Free School model, offer guidance and experiences to develop lifelong learners. They have one immediate opening for a girl and are enrolling boys and girls age 5–12 for the fall.

Monday, March 4, is a great day to check out two South Austin alternative schools. The Whole Life Learning Center, part of the Self-Design network, is a two-acre school where kids age 5 and up work with mentors to develop holistic, individualized learning plans, honoring each learner’s physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual development. The Austin EcoSchool is offering a family tour of its "Edible Campus," where you’ll see students’ work, meet the staff, and learn about the school’s unique programs, including Game of Village. It is currently enrolling for ages 5–14.

On the evening of Tuesday, March 5, the Clearview Sudbury School will host a free talk and Q&A with scholar and author Peter Gray (who is also speaking in town this week at the SXSWedu conference). Dr. Gray, a research professor at Boston College who blogs regularly at Psychology Today, is a leading authority on the role of free play in children’s development; his new book, Free to Learn, will be officially released the same day. Clearview staff, students, and parents will be on hand to answer questions about this democratic K–12 school in Central Austin.

Friday, March 8, is your next chance to visit the Inside Outside School. Let them know to expect you, and you'll get the full tour of this community-based, intentionally small learning community situated on more than seven wooded acres in Pflugerville. “Teaching for Human Greatness” is their creed, and they’re now enrolling kindergarten through 5th grade.

And now for something completely different: On Wednesday, March 13, the Growin' Together Hands-on Afterschool Program will host a SXSW Youth Showcase, featuring some of the hottest bands in the 18-and-below universe. It’s free for all ages (donations accepted) and will rock the Austin EcoSchool campus.

After spring break, on Wednesday, March 20, join the parent tour of AHB Community School, a creative and collaborative educational alternative that seeks to cultivate authentic, balanced critical thinkers who are prepared for a life of learning and community engagement. AHB serves ages 5–12 in Central Austin. Be sure to give them a heads-up that you’re coming so they can prepare the best tour possible for you. Can’t make it that day? You’ll have another chance on March 27 and on other Wednesdays in April and May.

To stay up-to-date on alt ed events, make a habit of visiting our calendar and clicking on any listing for details. Much more is coming up this spring, with many doors opening to you and your children.

Fall down seven times, get up eight

Deborah Hale, executive director and cofounder of The Inside Outside School, submitted this thoughtful guest post about how her school deals with “the daily drama.”

Fishing and observing wildlife in the creek are some of the calming and centering activities available to children at the Inside Outside School.

At the Inside Outside School we help our students become positive contributors to the world by supporting their growth in seven dimensions of human greatness. We introduce one dimension every week for a special focus when we have our Monday democratic meeting, which we call “The Hive.” For the past two weeks we have been working with the dimension of interaction, which Lynn Stoddard, author of Educating for Human Greatness, defines as “Promoting courtesy, caring, communication, and cooperation. Fostering a sense of community.”

With our younger elementary students, learning to regain composure is an ongoing big issue. We have many things in place to help them with this, like safe places where students can go when they are angry, sad, or overly frustrated. We have a zen garden box where students can rake sand and arrange stones. We have a great big dirt pile with shovels. We teach breathing exercises, calming activities such as squeezing a pillow and tapping shoulders with crossed arms, and conflict resolution scripting for being at “the equator” (an imaginary line either side of which children in conflict can stand to work toward a resolution without having an adult swoop in to fix it for them). We have mediation-trained older students who help out when the equator is not enough. We have acres of calm green woods, a bubbling creek, gardens, chickens, and hands-on classes where kids get to make things like herbal salve to put on fire ant bites, quilts, slit drums, boats, and apple pies. Above all, we have no tests and no homework.

And we still have the daily drama. It's a mystery.

There are myriad circumstances that activate the fight-or-flight response, which seems to fuel the drama. Norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter, is released when the inner alarm system is triggered. Sometimes a child will feel a threat to his or her safety, esteem, or position of power, or maybe perceive a threat where there is none. Once activated, the response can seem violent or inappropriate. Things that seem minor to adults take on major proportions in the life of a child. So working on interaction as a dimension of human greatness requires looking at the children with loving eyes, knowing that each one is complicated and that even when they act out, do hurtful things to their friends, and push every one of our buttons, they are simply trying to get their needs for power, approval, and security met—needs we all have.

A Japanese proverb says, “Fall down seven times, get up eight.” This speaks to resilience. Our effort at the Inside Outside School is to help children learn strategies for getting back up again, learn how to help those who have fallen, learn when it is best to give others space to feel what they are feeling about having fallen down, and, ultimately, to care deeply about the well-being of each member of our community.

Deborah Hale

Expert kids

What happens when you allow kids to follow their own passions at school, to delve deeply into matters that truly fascinate them? They become experts, in the best sense of the word. And they love to share their expertise.

Punk fashion comes alive through independent study

I met a bunch of young experts at the Inside Outside School’s Expo Day last month. Their areas of expertise were richly varied, ranging from the physics of electricity to the diversity of aquatic mammals, from the history of the Texas Rangers to the development of punk fashion, from the culture of Jordan to the uses of herbal remedies. The media they used to present their discoveries were equally varied, including music, a diorama, a Q&A session, a PowerPoint presentation, written reports, edible offerings, a map, a blog, and an original art portfolio.

Each student had been encouraged to choose a subject for independent study and had spent much of the semester immersed in it. I do not mean “choose” as it is euphemistically used in so many classrooms to mean, for example, “Pick a country in Europe and write a report about it.” I mean that at the beginning of the semester teacher/directors Deborah Hale and Kathy Cauley spent a great deal of time with individual students exploring their interests, ideas, dreams, talents, and goals, with their ears tuned to the limitless possibilities; then they helped them find a focus on what they were most excited to learn and how they wanted to go about doing it.

Throughout the semester Kathy and Deborah frequently checked in with students about their independent projects, offering guidance, support, provocative questions, and resource suggestions as needed. Students found ways to help each other get “unstuck” or re-inspired. Some found they needed a new angle after a few weeks of research. Some decided to do two or more projects rather than one. Others struggled to decide the best way(s) for presenting their discoveries, despite the school’s overall emphasis on process over product. In the end, they all seemed, to me and to other Expo Day visitors I interviewed, to be confident in their knowledge, eager to share it, and hungry for more.

Herbal remedies studied and shared at the IOS Expo Day

The Expo brought back memories of my fifth grade CLUE class, by far the best educational experience of my kindergarten through high school years. CLUE (short for Creative Learning in a Unique Environment) was an innovative program in the Memphis public schools that emphasized critical thinking skills, creativity, collaborative problem solving, interdisciplinary study, and independent projects. There, for a few hours each week, we escaped the confines of our regular classroom desks and were set free to pursue things we cared about. One CLUE kid I know spent most of her school year writing and illustrating a novel; another became uber-skilled in origami; another plotted the course of a certain star. For my independent project I chose to study the creation of the Panama Canal (it had captured my imagination the previous summer during a family trip to visit relatives in Panama). To this day, I feel a strong connection to this subject and remember it in more detail than anything I ever studied for a test—because it was mine.

A quick online search tells me that the CLUE program is still going strong in Memphis, although, naturally, it has evolved. Unfortunately, it is still restricted to a small percentage of the public school system’s students. I’ve always thought that kind of learning experience should be available to every child, everywhere. It is heartening to know that kids at the Inside Outside School (as well as some other alternative schools in the Austin area) get the encouragement, resources, and time to cultivate their curiosity, practice their passions, and share their expertise.

Lots of opportunities this week!

This week is brimming with public events at local alternative schools. Each is a great chance to check out the school’s facilities, learn about its programs, and meet staff, students, and parents.

• The Austin EcoSchool will open its doors on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons for a Barefoot Books fair, with sales benefitting the school.
• On Tuesday evening you can attend an information session at Clearview Sudbury School and get answers to all your questions about the Sudbury model of education.
• Also taking place at Clearview this week is the school’s first movie night. Everyone is welcome to join the local Sudbury folks on Thursday evening for a showing and discussion of Voices from the New American Schoolhouse, a documentary about the well-established Fairhaven Sudbury School in Maryland.
• Friday is the Inside Outside School’s Expo Day, where kids will present the projects they’ve worked on all semester. You can also buy cool stuff handmade by the Apothecary Class.
• Later on Friday, head to the Whole Life Learning Center’s open house to learn about its unique programs, including “Freedom Fridays,” which feature enrichment classes that are open to the homeschooling community.

For more details, go to the Alt Ed Austin Calendar, where you can click on any event to find the time, location, and other specifics. If you can’t make it to these special happenings, no worries: contact any of the schools listed in the Directory to arrange a visit of your own.