# Courage to Grow: How Acton Academy Turns Learning Upside Down Story of how Laura and Jeff Sandefer started Acton Academy. **Distinctives** - Trust the children - "We trust you and you have power. You don't need to ask us to get a drink or have a snack." - "self-governed young people bound by contracts and working towards specific goals." - Let them struggle - "Be courageous enough to let them fall into chaos until one of the other children steps up to lead."- Embrace the adventure / chaos - "work hard to earn your freedom and have a lot of fun along the way" - "Witnessing the chaos is so difficult for me. It's just disheartening when the studio turns messy and mean. Some days I want to give up." - Cycle from order into chaos and back into order again - Eventually the kids can learn to predict, resolve and manage the cycle on their own rather than depending on adults to mandate it from top down - Socratic teaching: - Never answer questions, no matter how practical - Students are in charge of discovering the answers - Students become seekers of knowledge and wisdom - Socratic method for teaching history - Moral dilemmas - "giving young people the tools to make better moral decisions" - "When we get the questions right, young people will spend hours on the research and, with a little preparation, they'll hold a self-organized, high-energy debate." - Mixed-age classrooms for peer teaching - Peer accountability - Student-written and agreed-upon contracts - Student-driven community - "Make it fun to belong, then let the tribe set it's standards. Hold up a mirror when the group or some individuals fail to keep a promise." - Town Hall Meetings - Weekly - Students facilitate the meeting - Agenda is created by completing a form, specifying either an announcement to be read out loud or a problem that needs to be discussed and resolved - Forms are collected in a box, facilitator reviews and sets agenda - Agile - Self-paced learning - Adults primary job is to set up the environment properly - Proper expectations and boundaries will enable children to take charge of their learning rather than wait and be told what to do. - Children as central figures in the environment - made for them, not for adults - have everything they need within their space - they know what to do and when to do it without an adult needing to make an announcement - Experiential learning - Set up experiences "in which the adults had no idea what the outcome would be" - Similar to the way the Spartan education system worked: complicity through action - Do real-world work - Exhibitions of Learning every 5-6 weeks to demonstrate what they learned over that period - Invite parents and friends to participate in the evaluation of learning - Examples on page 75 - Portfolio Review Meetings - Cull best samples of writing, art, and project documentation and construct a portfolio for parents to review - Parents see and asses for themselves - Ask questions, discuss areas of weakness and strength together - Assessment is hard! - Reflection / retrospective - "The next day to reflect on their learning and process the experience with their guides." - Core Skills Work: reading, writing, and math - Writing - Journaling and creative writing, with frequent feedback and sharing - Writing Workshops: idea generation, rough draft, critique, revision, critique, editing, and publication - critiqued one another on ideas, organization, word choice, sentence fluency, voice, and conventions (grammar), and ranked use of traits from strongest to weakest - Science taught via Kuhn's paradigm shifts - paradigm busters, puzzle makers, data collectors - Design systems that run the school rather than an adult running the school - In reality, the adult is _part_ of the system - "The magic of checklists" - Ceremonies designed - Greeting ceremony every morning - Kids with disabilities: "Jeff estimated that perhaps one-third of our Eagles have some level of ADD or ADHD." - Hero's Journey Interesting examples: - "Hands-on project focused on building a mini-civilization-their own-during their first few weeks. Developed guidelines for the studio, including rules of engagement for studio discussions, such as "Listen", "Be concise", and "Provide evidence." Key Quotes: "Minimally invasive education so that they can be free and joyful in their discoveries while working on things that matter to them." "I wish I had known to love the messiness, ambiguity, and questions." #books