Alternative Education Resource Organization

Practical Skills & Application

Financing Non-Profit, Non-Public Schools
Alan Berger
Exploration of some of the methods, ideas, and challenges involved with financing smaller non-profit, non-public schools. Particular emphasis on funding socio-economically diverse schools using Brooklyn Free School as an example.

Parent Participation: The Backbone of a Democratic School
Meghan Carrico
Parent Participation is the backbone of Windsor House School. Parants are an integral part of the day to day running of the school. This workshop outlines how a parent culture is grown and nurtured. As parents become full members of the school, their education parallels that of their child, and the democratic model of education becomes theirs as well as their child’s.

AERO Europe?
Franzi Florack
A short introduction to the Alternative Education network in Europe followed by the discussion of how we can bring the different ‘branches’ together and connect them to AERO and the international educational alternatives movement.

Venturing Together: Cultivating Personal Strengths & Nurturing What’s Healthy (Introduction to creative strengths-based mentoring)
Bill Rossi Humane education acknowledges who the student is and addresses her strengths while supporting and diminishing her limitations. This workshop offers fresh insights on the art of mentoring and developing relationship, including new perspectives on essential skills such as listening, personal examination, integrity, respect, equality, consistency, sharing, trust, and modeling.

The Jedi Mind Trick: Clues to Human Behavior that Give You the Advantage Deescalating an Angry Child
Eric & Dorothy Smoot
There is a goal to misbehavior. Children give us clues as to the purpose of their behavior. Immediately recognizing the goals they are vying for i.e. power, attention, revenge, or avoidance-of-failure, can be the first step to deescalating negative conduct. What do you say when confronted? How do you avoid escalating the situation? What if he or she is on medication? Utilizing some special techniques for dealing with angry youth will give you the first response real life advantage you need to recover from the situation without incident.

Applying Child-led Learning Principles in the Classroom
Laurie Spigel
Knowing how unique every child is, we must understand that a successful outcome for each child is a different outcome for each child. How do we encourage individual goals and support them in a classroom environment? How can each child feel heard and nurtured? How does a teacher help students develop in the way that is best for them? How can you use your resources and skills to bring everyone together when they are all so different? These questions will be addressed with real life examples, sharing techniques that I use every day.

How do children learn mathematics?
Gilles Laverdure Mathematics is often a subject that alternative school teachers have difficulties integrating into their pedagogical philosophy. This is largely due to the fact that math is often misunderstood in its fundamental essence, even at the level of elementary programs. This workshop will show how mathematical concepts have evolved through time and how this understanding can be useful to teachers.

Engaging Students as Partners in Learning
Adam Fletcher The belief that learning is not a top-down process is not reflected in current practices throughout our learning communities today. This workshop focuses on engaging students as partners in every facet of learning, teaching and leadership in education for the purpose of strengthening their commitment to learning, community and democracy.

Partnering With Public Schools
Adam Fletcher While not a silver bullet, this workshop focuses on proactive perspectives towards partnering with public schools to help create student/adult partnerships and healthier learning environments. After identifying a clear vision, pragmatic relationships, and accessible mechanisms, participants will have a clear concept of different ways they can improve public schools.

Moving Forward with the Struggle: What Can We Learn From the Alumni of the Open School
Rick Posner My book, “Lives of Passion, School of Hope”, discusses the relations, influences and recommendations from the alumni of one of the longest lasting alternative schools in the public sector, Jefferson County Open School. This workshop will address where we’ve been, where we’re going and hopefully, how we get there. The workshop will include a panel of alumni, from different eras from The Open School.

Cultural Inclusion: Honoring Each Child and Creating Cultures of Success
Angela Engel
This session is designed create climates of learning that embrace diversity and build school/family communities oriented toward success for all. Participants will also learn how to structure leadership and school policies that are inclusive and empowering. Address content, curriculum, and assessments that expand awareness, inspire citizenship and promote social justice. Discover new ways for outreach, engaging the community, and building partnerships. Identify patterns and behaviors that advance collaborative models and collective problem-solving. Ultimately this session will help students, administrators, and teachers reach goals that support democracy, individuality and greater humanity.

Influencing Education Policy: In your backyard and beyond
Angela Engel
This session is designed to help administrators and educators understand the history and significance of both recent and past education reforms and trends and what it means for their schools and classrooms - including national policies such as: ESEA, Goals 2000, NCLB, and Race to the Top, and the National Standards Initiative. This seminar addresses the core problems facing American education today, identifies the power players, and provides solutions to positively affecting educational progress. Participants can expect to learn strategies for building alliances, increasing membership, strengthening messaging, utilizing the media, and developing effective action plans.

Angels & Warriors: Great Teacher Personas
Anthony Dallmann-Jones
Angels & Warriors: A presentation and discussion of what attributes and methods make for a Great Teacher.

Children are not Individuals - they a Members in a Family Dynamic
Brent Cameron
In a family, the political dynamics of our relationships deeply effect who we are and the quality of our lives. Families can get trapped in patterns of behavior that are hard to change let alone understand. This workshop will introduce the 5 different political dynamics in relationships and will then illustrate how each position is created and sustained by our languaging. Our languaging, which is what we say inside to ourselves, what we say directly to others and also what we don't say in words but communicate with our postures, gestures and behaviors. A father or child who is unavailable is communicating loudly through his or her behavior, a behavior of absence. Silence speaks loudly. This workshop will first introduce the model then give participants an opportunity to discover language patterns that are common to each pattern. We will work to create changes and breakthroughs in family dynamics so that people will have new tools to change negative patterns and to sustain healthy balanced positive patterns. The political dynamics learned in the family project outwards to determine how we are governed on a continuum between authoritarianism and authenticism.

Where are You in the Development of Human Consciousness?
Brent Cameron
As individuals we go through many stages of development through to maturity. This workshop will illustrate how our species has gone through six distinct stages of development over the known history of our humankind. Knowing the stages will allow us to get a sense of our own growth and development in relationship to those we work and live with. These stages are all in existence today in various groups that interact from culture to culture and within our own culture. Individuals move through some or many of these stages in their own lives. Our educational system is locked in a cultural stage that is transcended by typical families that think beyond that paradigm. Free schools, alternative, democratic schooling and home learning are all shifts to different levels of thinking that can't be understood from the previous paradigm of thinking. The logic of the metaset can not be predicted or understood from the perspective of the subset. The workshop involves investigating the evolving collective consciousness of cultural perspectives and gives us a chance to understand the different perspectives with more clarity and insight. Knowing the presuppositions that shape other world views serves to inform us of our role and position in the evolution of human understanding.

SelfDesign - The human being is the design that designs itself.
Brent Cameron
Intelligence is a blend of choice and strategy. The most flexible part in a system has the most influence in that system. The difference between the political strategy of authoritarianism and egalitarianism is a function of choices. Freedom or having choices is fundamental to setting the condition for the possibility of being human. The difference between a good speller and a poor speller is not intelligence in the sense of "better hardware" but more in the sense of a better software program or strategy. Being able to design strategies is first of all based on awareness of what we do when we perform any neurological process then being able to choose and design the most effective path. We will explore perfect spelling, what the strategies are and watch someone transform from a poor speller into a great speller by discovering the strategies of good spelling experientially. In today's world overgrown with information we can no longer assume to know it all and should focus on how to learn and what is worth learning. This workshop will provide insights into human thinking and learning as epistemological process.

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