Week 9 2024-2025 in Review
Dear TCC Families,
In our second week of this learning cycle, we've settled into a predictable rhythm of offerings alongside pop-up experiences. Mondays we set the week, connect via 1:1s, plan long-term projects, perhaps make runs to the grocery store. And we meet to touch base, reflect on, and shape our culture - how are things feeling in our community? What are we doing well? What might we want to tweak? This week we explored whether and how we solve problems - is our process working? Examples of community problems might be: how do we keep food off the new indoor rug when snacking? Or how might we ensure we're communicating clearly about farm tasks? How are we sharing limited resources, like the TCC laptops, and what role do personal screens play in general screen use? We acknowledged that interpersonal conflict, specifically, is also a topic we want to explore together, and will do so separately.
Other consistent offerings this cycle are Current Events & Histories of Resistance, D&D, TCC Awesome Math, Forest Play & Building, and Acting. The community has many, many, MANY baking and cooking projects in the queue, and the budgetary committee is learning how to categorize and track funds - this is a work in progress!
The offerings on the board represent what we might consider to be "structured" learning opportunities. Imagining that if a young person commits to attending math offerings, for example, they are learning math, is a notion that fits neatly into our preconceived ideas about how learning happens. It also strikes at the oft-fraught topic of learning math in self-directed spaces. How will it happen if we don'tโฆmake it?! How learning happens (and doesn't) and what learning even IS came up at multiple points this week. A young person returned to math this week, after not attending math offerings for quite some time. During a debrief, they shared that they'd been concerned they would have "forgotten everything" or "wouldn't know how to do it" anymore, and that they were surprised and happy to note that they hadn't actually forgotten anything - and that even their mathematically accurate notation of their own thinking was on point. "Why do you think it might be that you didn't forget anything, and you picked right back up where you'd left off?" We connected about this idea of "learning loss" - what it means in conventional school, and if it's a real thing. We wondered, if we've really learned something, why would we forget it right away?
How do we know we've learned something, anyway?
At another point in the week, during an offering led by a young person, we explored how participants might pursue their own learning on the topic after the offering was over, what they thought they were learning during the offering itself, and what modes of experiencing information were most meaningful for folks there. Some young people at the offering were eager for a "homework" assignment to give their follow-up investigation of the topic shape and direction. Others were very vocal that homework would never be something they'd want to pursue. How do we know how we learn? What environments and other supports empower us to explore and answer that question? What environments and experiences make answering that question challenging - or even impossible?
In Self-Directed Education learning environments, especially Agile Learning Centers - a common component is optional offerings and other scheduled experiences. These comprise what we could refer to as the "real schedule." And, beyond the REAL schedule, are the in-between times, or the "shadow schedule." Mel Compo, a facilitator at ALC-NYC, writes about this very thing in a piece for the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. Where in the schedule are children learning - and is it what we think they're learning?
You may notice some features of the learning environment they describe at ALC-NYC are quite different than at TCC (we definitely do not encourage folks to use Khan Academy for their math learning needsโฆ). Some folks in the SDE world say, "Once you've seen one ALC, you've seen one ALC." We all do things a bit differently, as different communities shaped by different values and people. AND - we do move with the same core beliefs in mind, and we'll end with those here:
The soil we grow in is trust.
Learning is natural and happening all the time.
People learn best when they make their own decisions.
Children are people.
People learn more from their culture than the content they are taught; the medium is the message.
Growth is catalyzed through cycles of intention, action, reflection, and sharing.
What does learning look like
for you?
Thank you for your patience with this Week in Review.
With gratitude and care,
Emily, Sarah, and Zoey
