3/9-3/15
There are a lot of moving parts to CHOICE (and all Acton Academies). Sometimes it can feel overwhelming. And yet, there are some basics that we are wise to reflect on again and again. These are the basic processes of self-governance and self-management: learner driven core skills, town hall, studio maintenance, guides not answering questions, and discovery through quests. These basic processes keep us true to our philosophy of being learner driven and provide the backdrop for so much joy for the heroes! This week the blog reflects on some of these basic processes…
From the Spark Studio
From Miss Anna We had such a fun week this week. We are loving our Space Quest. We started off on Monday with a zoom call to a friend of mine who works at NASA as a flight controller. We invited the elementary heroes in and had a great discussion with him about various space facts, what it’s like on the International Space Station and inquiries about his salary! All very important details to our young, driven heroes!
Our joy for core skills carried over in abundance from last week. A few weeks ago we had heroes asking if doing a tiny amount of math would “count” for their core skills that day. I too felt the drudgery in the studio! After our tweaks in conversations about core skills and an exciting end to last week’s core skills celebration, I was interested to see if the joy would spill over into this week.
Instead of asking what would “count” this week, I had a hero ask if they could do more math even though they already did some that day! I had to laugh and tell them “of course,” and that they never needed to ask to do more core skills! We had small groups of heroes adding up long chains of different numbers, trying to build the biggest equation they could. I had another group request to get more “ten bars” from the closet – they wanted to see how high they could skip count by 10’s. By Thursday, I opted to skip story time at the end of the day to allow more time for the Heroes to keep working. I pushed the schedule as far as I could, but when we had to stop to do studio maintenance and the end of the day, I was met with groans and complaints. I welcome wishes to keep learning any day!!
From the Elementary Studio
From Kara I am amazed and encouraged to watch the heroes manage their tasks and time. Everyone is working towards a similar end-goal in this quest, but their journeys to get there involve longer and shorter stops, digging in or skimming the surface of different areas, and all the while needing to ignore or embrace the other things going on around them. They are making deliberate choices and owning the progress they do or don’t make towards their goals. They almost always choose engagement in the task before them and are continually kind and helpful to one another. Many of the heroes had fun simulating the stock market with 18 different types of pie this week. Ask your heroes about gains and losses and the risks of investing!
From JeVonne Highlights from the basic processes in the Elementary Studio:
The Elementary heroes stepped up their studio maintenance and as one hero wrote in a gotcha it was the most “effort from everyone” all year. The studio looked amazing! But even more amazing than the actual cleanliness is watching young people put effort into cleaning their own studio without coercion from an adult.
Town Hall is the hero led discussion every Thursday morning where challenges, problems or ideas are brought up, discussed and voted on. Listening to these competent heroes create their own solutions to their own problems is something I look forward to each week. These were the issues the heroes discussed at this Thursday’s town hall: How to hold me accountable to not answering questions, whether or not heroes are allowed to take their shoes off (this is a weekly and entertaining vote), changes to studio maintenance accountability, whether a ping pong ball should be used as a dragon egg and whether you get a promise strike or not for crushing a ping pong ball/dragon egg, whether sword fighting with yard sticks is a promise strike or not (they decided it was) and whether sitting on 3 stools if Spark heroes aren’t present is allowed. There is sadness as ideas that heroes really care about aren’t passed. There is frustration as they experience the challenge of self-governance. And there is definitely humor as certain issues are discussed.
Core Skills in the ES continues to be a joy and a struggle. I remind myself daily that this a long game. We all signed up to trust our heroes through this learning process. While we continue to motivate and create tools to help the heroes develop planning and execution skills, in choosing CHOICE we all agreed that the journey of becoming a self-learner was more important to us than the “academic achievements” of one year. As the end of the school year approaches I find it necessary to remind myself more often of our main goals and our long-term game plan. As we guide and trust at home and at school, it is awesome to behold the life-long skills they are developing.
Thank you for guiding and trusting your heroes. Our heroes have heroic parents as well! We truly believe your heroes are geniuses. We are grateful for the processes we get to use every day that allow your heroes to develop more and more of their capacities!