Acorn Early Learning Centre is a Reggio Emilia-inspired school in Ottawa, serving toddlers through kindergarteners during the day, and children up to 12 years old in aftercare. The Reggio Emilia pedagogy was conceived in post-World War II Italy, by a group of educators and parents in and around the city of Reggio Emilia in Northern Italy, and re-imagined schools as vehicles for creating a more just and peaceful world.
Play yard and student-created structures
Instead of organizing lessons using preplanned, static thematic units, these schools have a fluid, emergent curriculum, inspired by children’s interests and needs, organized into free-flowing long term projects that run their course over weeks or months. Teachers are collaborators, learning along with students and continually adapting the course of study to ask and answer questions along with their small charges.
The history of the Acorn school mirrors closely the method of the original Reggio system; that is, that the community of parents and educators have worked together to create an ideal learning environment for children. A dedicated group of parents hosted the teachers in their homes before one parent found their current location, and the whole adult community continues to be actively involved in improving the learning environment. Joanne, the director, discovered the Reggio philosophy and knew that she had found a model to describe the kind of education that she had been promoting for decades.
Joanne led me on a tour of the school and shared with me stories of emergent learning projects, to give me a sense of the scope of the learning process. Projects range from artistic and social endeavors that catalyze children’s incredible powers to create imaginary worlds, to very concrete, precise, science-based projects that expand children’s understanding of overlapping topics.
Planning Board for a project around Horses (student interest)
and Respect & Responsibility (student need)
One project involved a turtle that a child noticed in the canal during a class’s stroll. Their teacher recognized that the turtle was not behaving normally, and contacted Turtle S.H.E.L.L., an environmental organization that encouraged them to rescue the turtle immediately: it was an endangered species, and was likely starving—the canal had been drained for the winter. Parents were mobilized, and families convened on the canal that evening for the rescue operation. Over the next year, Turtle S.H.E.L.L. nursed her back to health, and delivered weekly updates and photos to the eager kindergarteners.
"Saving Ella the Turtle"-- pages from student-created children's book
Ella, as they named the turtle, sparked a feverish interest in all things turtle. The class began a study on the life cycle and environment of the turtle, which led to a study of Ottawa’s waterways, which led to a study of pollution, and our responsibility for the environment, which led to a study of water treatment facilities. They had a fundraiser to raise money for Ella’s medicines, which they donated to the organization. A teaching artist worked with the students to design and create a children’s book telling the story of their turtle. They donated a book to all of the local schools, and students from Acorn traveled to local schools to read their book aloud to other children, and answer questions about their experiences.
While the turtle project was anchored in the physical world, other projects begin with whimsy. After noticing that her students were spontaneously creating games about dragons, one teacher launched a project to investigate the Year of the Dragon, celebrating its traits of empathy and patience. Through the cultural study, the children learned that the dragon, despite appearing ferocious, is a protective force that uses its strength for the common good. The children created a larger than life dragon sculpture collaboratively with an artist parent, adding layers of meaning with each new layer of the piece.
The story of the dragon has been passed down so that she’s still a source of strength to new students at the school. Children started to bring special treasures from home that would give others “dragon power” if they needed it: earrings, stones, encouraging notes, plastic “jewels”—all of these tokens are in a bag that the dragon guards. They still come, three years later, to take a token to keep as long as they need it.
In the Reggio model, parents are respected and honored as the child’s first teacher, while the physical environment is also highly valued and referred to as the “third teacher.” Because Acorn is a shared space, they have limited ability to alter the physical environment. However, there were shelves of plants and fish tanks or other animal pets in each classroom, a roomy play yard with structures that the children created with branches from a downed willow tree, and many wonderful toys and learning materials made by students and their families to add to the classroom, such as these hand-cut and painted building blocks.
The co-directors and founders of the Compass Centre, Abby Karos & Andre Morson, are quick to educate me on my language when I begin to ask them about their project: The teens aren't "students," they're "members." Says Andre: "We don’t call this school. We call it an alternative to school.... There’s no curriculum, no set classes, no assigning grades or checking skills-- the person responsible for that is the teens themselves. 'Do you want to work on emotional intelligence, or academic intelligence?' Neither of those is more heavily weighted."
Abby and Andre started the centre 13 months ago with six teens and a small room one fifth the size of their current space. By the spring, they had 12 teens. In September, they had 15, and now it's 23, with more calls every week, through word of mouth, organizations that support teens who struggle with school, and their website. The centre works with families regardless of their ability to pay: families can volunteer, help bring in new members, assist with fundraising, and donate their abilities.
Classes are taught by volunteers, the co-directors, or the members themselves. Class options are presented at Community Meeting, and if a few teens are interested, they begin. Teens are encouraged to "vote with their feet," so after a few weeks if the attendance drops completely, they stop. If only one teen is interested in the topic, they can explore the possibility of a tutorial, or study independently. If teens express a special interest, Abby & Andrew scour the community looking for potential mentors or volunteer teachers.
Teens at Compass elect to come in between one and four days per week, and choose whether they'd like to attend classes, work independently, or collaborate. Compass never plans to have a staff of teachers: it's intended to be about what the teens want to learn, not what teachers are qualified to teach. By not paying teacher salaries, it keeps the model affordable and flexible, and allows a rotating cast of motivated teacher volunteers.
One of the volunteer teachers, Marc-Alexandre, just began a Conversational French class. “Compass is freer than a free school, but not as democratic,” he told me with a smile. And it's true: in a place like the Brooklyn Free School, children are encouraged to sign up for classes and follow through with them for their entirety. At Compass, if a class loses attendance for any reason, the volunteer teacher is politely excused from continuing that class.
Interesting content and teacher quality define the Cognitive Science class taught by Manon, a fourth year university student. Almost all of the Compass teens attend her class. She welcomed the teens into her class warmly, had a fascinating presentation cued up on a projector, and through prompting constant feedback, turned the class into a kind of choose-your-own-adventure.
After watching a TED talk on four types of memory loss, one teen volunteered that she heard that the character Dory from Finding Nemo was one of the most accurate pop culture examples of amnesia. Enthusiastic, Manon asked if they'd like to watch a snapshot of Finding Nemo to judge that for themselves. Obviously, the kids were delighted.
After watching the scene, Manon prompted them to turn a critical eye: "So, what seemed true to what we now know about real memory loss? .... Yes, once they get distracted it’s hard to get them back, that seemed right .... Yes, short term and long-term memory loss seem to be confused. Forgetting whether or not her family had memory loss, that would be retrograde amnesia, while forgetting what’s just happened would be anterograde amnesia." Completely brilliant, spontaneous, flexible teaching.
One teen's notes/free association during Cognitive Science
The options after Compass are exactly the same as for teens who are homeschooled: Universities want a snapshot of the last two years, and a few additional requirements. Those teens aging out of Compass and interested in continuing with higher education have all the support they need to plan accordingly, such as taking the SAT or the high school equivalency test.
Abby on higher eduction: "The more I see it here, and the more that I hear about from North Star staff [a teen center in Massachusetts off which Compass is modeled], the more confidence I can convey to parents: you really don’t need a high school diploma. It’s amazing!"
Andre continued, "It is amazing. It liberates teens from responsibilities they would otherwise have, which is important... Some teens do have the goal of going back to school. We maintain a neutral position.... We don’t hate school, we just think it’s not necessary."
And is the centre a democracy? Abby and Andre echo the words of North Star's founder & director: "This is my livelihood! I can’t have children in charge of my livelihood." That said, they have some of the trappings of democratic schools: weekly community meetings, support and encouragement of initiatives, and student choice in class offerings and attendance.
One teen's mural in the courtyard, a collaboration with a local artist
Abby and Andre talked extensively about the challenge of creating and holding space for some of the teens to go through the "detox period;" many children spend a period of time recovering from destructive patterns of previous school experiences by doing what appears to be nothing. According to the first of the core principles of the centre, "young people want to learn." What's happening during this time is recovery and growth, but it's invisible, and parents have to allow this pressure-free time so that their children don't worry that their time at Compass is tenuous. And then, all of a sudden, a teen will appear to "wake up" and start going to classes, asking questions, exploring, and thinking about their future.
I heard about Compass through Willow Johnson, an incredibly articulate, mostly self-educated teen who I met at a Humane Education conference this past fall. After being homeschooled for much of her elementary years, she stopped after a few years of high school, because, among other things, "I'm being marked on what someone else thinks is important on a test that they wrote themselves about a class that they’re teaching that I may or may not be interested in!?”
I don't want to paraphrase her eloquently described experience, so I've put a bit of our conversation, word-for-word, below.
Willow: "School teaches you that learning is dull. They teach you that learning is something unnatural: It doesn’t feel natural to stay up to 1AM to study something that you aren’t interested in, so that someone else can verify that you meet a curriculum.
"[At Compass,] if I’m interested in something or if it doesn’t make sense to me, I can ask, they can go in depth and answer my questions, and I have time to research it on my own time since all my time isn’t taken up with homework. I'm able to have the freedom to ask questions, even in my daily life, make note of them, because I’m not under a constant stress....
"I’m still in the process of getting out of the mindset that I have to learn certain things, produce certain things. Friends ask me “what do you do [at Compass]?” ... we’re measuring by different standards. There’s an expectation that you’re producing a certain thing. When I do write something, I feel like I’ve done it because I want to, so it’s more meaningful to me. It’s still sometimes hard to be productive when I’m still trying to figure out what I want to be doing, and how to spend my time. I spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. When I make decisions now, I’m not shaping them around school, and I think you learn a lot more when you make a decision for yourself, than when someone is making it for you."
Advice to teens on Compass' wall:
Thank you Compass for your hospitality! Lots of food for thought, and inspiring teens! Other information:
Brooklyn RAD (Revolutionary Artistic Development) is housed on the first floor of a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The self-described “home-based educational program” was started in 2007 by visual artists Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton as an alternative to the hustle in which many parents compete for the openings at Brooklyn’s few art-focused public elementary schools. As the school expanded, they split into two groups: RAD (6-10 year olds) and MiniRAD (3-5 year olds), in neighboring Clinton Hill.
The school employs a lead and an assistant teacher to work full-time with the 10 children, while a number of parents and other adults volunteer their talents regularly. One father teaches Spanish, and one mother who is a reading specialist, works with a group of readers when the class splits for English. Class size is small by design (no more than 10 students) to enable near-daily explorations outside of the classroom: parks, museums, shows, gardens, factories, work spaces, etc.
I arrived before the children and scoped out their cozy school space. The entire first floor is one large open area. Immediately through the front hall cubby area is one room, which houses a reading nook full of pillows, an upright piano, and shelves of toys and learning materials. The middle area bottlenecks to accommodate a tiny bathroom and a desk with the teacher’s workspace, and opens into the back room which is set up much like a traditional classroom: two tables surrounded by chairs, a whiteboard, and other classroom accoutrements like a code of conduct, bins of student work and poster boards of class projects.
Children trickled into the classroom; their teacher told me that despite her efforts, a firm start time has eluded them. The first academic class of the day started at 9:30; children split into three groups by ability. I spent a little time with each group: a bit of a book club around Charlotte's Web, some focused work on crafting a piece of creative fiction to complement whimsical drawings, and a word game involving Scrabble tiles.
"I've got one! Egotistical!"
The other children seemed impressed. "It means you only care about yourself," he added helpfully. "I learned it in a book."
After a snack (fresh fruit and wildly popular seaweed strips, provided daily by a rotating cast of parents), children were given a piece of yarn, a short demonstration, and paired off to work on collecting data to show proportions in the human body. This lesson is exactly the type of hands-on, whole body learning activity that is possible with small groups and an inspired teacher: children were all over the classroom, inventing new ways to measure the distance of their forearm against that of their whole body, or their nose as compared to their face.
After this morning of focus, the students had a full hour of outdoor play at a nearby park, a lunch and rest time, and free play in the afternoon. However, the schedule varies greatly each day of the week. On Tuesdays, parent carpoolers ferry the children to a Makerspace where they build and tinker for much of the day. Other days feature art, music, dance, or Spanish. The walls and shelves of the classroom were full of displays of student art: drawings, paintings, sculptures and mixed-media colleges like this awesome Butterfly.
I thoroughly enjoyed my time at RAD, and was thrilled to see such a thriving mixed-aged classroom. Thank you for your hospitality!
While the turtle project was anchored in the physical world, other projects begin with whimsy. After noticing that her students were spontaneously creating games about dragons, one teacher launched a project to investigate the Year of the Dragon, celebrating its traits of empathy and patience. Through the cultural study, the children learned that the dragon, despite appearing ferocious, is a protective force that uses its strength for the common good. The children created a larger than life dragon sculpture collaboratively with an artist parent, adding layers of meaning with each new layer of the piece.
