Hello to all of our friends around the world. First and most importantly we hope that you are safe and well. We will be hosting a Zoom gathering this Sunday 7/26/20 at 12 noon – Eastern time. The invitation is below. We hope to see you then. We’ve missed you :) Peter Berg is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: AERO meeting 7/26/2020 Time: Jul 26, 2020 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Meeting ID: 871 6496 3472 Password: 144906 One tap mobile +13017158592,,87164963472#,,,,0#,,144906# US (Germantown) +13126266799,,87164963472#,,,,0#,,144906# US (Chicago)
Dial by your location +1 301 715 8592 US (Germantown) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 646 558 8656 US (New York) +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) Meeting ID: 871 6496 3472 Password: 144906 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kxMVVTLKk
Founded in 1982, The Tutorial School is an independent, alternative, democratic school for ages 10–19 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, offering an education based on freedom, trust, and self-governance. We provide our students with a flexible learning experience based on tolerance and sound relationships. There is absolute respect for the student’s right to be one’s self. The school is run cooperatively by faculty members and students.
We would like to invite some authentic and supportive individuals to be part of this caring and nurturing environment. We find it works best when we do this slowly, so we’d like to find those who can volunteer one or two days a week in the beginning. If we are a good fit for each other, then that position will become a paid faculty position.
The ideal candidate would be someone who can view their position as one of mentoring and counseling rather than teaching one or two specific subjects. Our plan right now is to have our Fall 2020 semester take place primarily outdoors, so someone who enjoys time in the sun and working outside should plan to have fun here. Please check out the following links to learn more about us and our expectations for faculty members.
Communication skills: Maintain open and supportive communication with students and faculty through active listening, self reflection, positive verbal/non-verbal body language. Model honest, equitable, pro- social dialogue via:
Active Listening: Listening to others without mentally preparing responses, observe their body language and micro facial expressions. Tentatively rephrase what is being shared by asking for clarification to assist your understanding of the statements made to demonstrate pro-social communication.
Self Reflection and Maintenance of Self: Observe personal thoughts, feelings, and actions. Take time outside of school hours to reflect on personal and family history, motivation for actions, and emotions that come up in relation to engagement with students and staff. Cultivate awareness and seek counsel as needed to address recurrent issues, resolve conflict, and address habits that prevent full engagement in open/honest communication.
Verbal/non-verbal language: Use age appropriate language and vocabulary. Avoid sarcasm. Maintain positive tone and vocal level. Show positive non- threatening body language.
Model Community Supportive Behaviors: Share with students community supportive behaviors as outlined in “the agreements;” using actions rather than words when engaging with students or representing the school to parents and the public. Teach through use of self, time management, follow through, self reflection, and attention to ideals and beliefs that maintain the schools positive learning environment.Consult with staff and students regarding personal needs or actions that may impact the school community such as time off.
Engender Respect: Honor the students process. Recognize and show understanding of each student’s learning history and current knowledge base without directing, preaching or otherwise overpowering the students natural abilities to acquire knowledge and expertise. Meet the student where they are by showing patience and acceptance of their individual learning needs as well as their abilities to
verbalize or otherwise express understanding of subject mater and interests. Model pro-social dialogue, healthy boundary setting, and helpfulness. Use sportive, non-punitive language and active listening skills to promote mutual respect.
Service: Respond to student concerns in a timely and thorough manor in recognition of their status in the school community. Recognize that through listening actively, engendering respect,honoring students process, maintaining self, and modeling supportive community engagement that you co-create an atmosphere conducive to learning.
Be authentic: Know scope of knowledge. Recognize personal strengths and weakness and when to consult or seek assistance openly and honestly. Take responsibility for personal actions that effect students, staff and school in general.
Collective work ethic: Strive to contribute equally to tasks necessary to maintain the school house and grounds. Model respect for school house and grounds by cleaning shared spaces and tending to ones personal impact on the school environment.Respect student and other staffs needs for order, organization and cleanliness. Address concerns of students and co-workers in a timely and thorough manor to maintain cohesive school environment.
Think of the well being of the entire school community prior to taking actions for self or for pet projects. Respect others students and faculty’s time when scheduling appointments, events or personal time off.
The top 4 ways respondents found out about the conference. AERO Email AERO Newsletter AERO Social Media Word of Mouth 90% rated the conference as excellent or above average. 6% rated it as average. “No words can describe how amazing it was” 89% found the conference site to be very helpful or extremely helpful The largest number of respondents are from Northeast – US, Followed by Southwest – US, Canada, and Asia 91% of respondents found the price of the conference to be reasonable to very reasonable. 2% found it somewhat reasonable. 52% attended the AERO conference for the first time. 96% indicated they would attend this event again. 2% indicated they would not. 2% were undecided 90% said indicated they would attend a similar/smaller event sometime in February 2021. 3% indicated they would not. 7% were undecided Over 80% felt that they had enough time to network. “I had enough time to network but could always use more” 85% felt that they had enough ways to network. About 80% attended popup sessions. Most felt that popup sessions went well or were OK
Some suggestions on how to improve the conference :
Maybe have a one day break for people to do networking, and to take a breathe, and declutter all the information in the head then return to conference activities with a non overwhelmed energy. Then a month out have another check in on networking and connections to keep momentum up.
I was pleased and impressed by all of the effort put forth by the organizers and presenters. It was a marvelous experience. I would have liked to have to have had the opportunity to attend a workshop on issues of privilege and access in SDE. Some of the docs did present those ideas though, so I am glad that was addressed during the weekend.
More student talks and Q&As, so that we know what they think. And, more parents to share how they make a living while committing into homeschooling.
Every AERO conference should have offerings about race/accessibility/diversity/inclusion issues and make space for people to discuss and learn about this. I know it’s a really tricky subject. I hope AERO does NOT take the same approach as ASDE (cancel culture, white apologism, etc.) but rather opens space for dialogue and how we can all be better around this topic.
Absolutely love the hybrid idea, running on alternate week-ends through the summer, and the aerox which i haven’t attended yet but absolutely will given the smashing success of this aero conference.
More youth speakers and activists
More speakers from marginalized backgrounds and workshops and discussions surrounding this topic as it relates to self-directed learning and alternative education.
I think it was a really good conference at a very challenging time. I appreciate being able to have the recordings to listen to afterwards for the sessions I missed. I wish we could have addressed racial inequity more directly and especially had some POC youth –that would have been very powerful. Perhaps for the next conference.
Other comments I was so happy to be there! The USA EDT start time allowed me to take my time in the morning, eat a little something, and easily get to the room before/at start time. I realize not everybody had that luxury! Grateful.
Thank you all for efforts in organizing and hosting this conference. I can only imagine the logistical/technical hurdles you had to work through. Well done.
Thanks for putting this together and providing so much support with the prices to make it super affordable.
Please do not consider turning AERO into a digital conference once the world has returned to normal. I really cannot connect with people over video conferencing. I ended up not attending most of the sessions, despite the conference being one of the things I was looking forward to this summer. It was very well done and organized, but I really need the in-person interaction and place to focus.
Virtual conference a wave of the future You provide such an incredible and important service with AERO the org and the conference. I love how people from all over the world attend. I think it’s important that you stay neutral and welcoming of different pedagogies.
When we first realized that we would have to abandon the in person AERO conference that was planned for Minneapolis and create a virtual conference, we were skeptical that it could measure up to the face to face one. When it became obvious that we couldn’t have a regular AERO conference this year, we had to suddenly switch gears in March a start to create our first remote conference. We’d never done a full conference this way before, but we were determined to try to incorporate key aspects of the AERO conference: A wide spectrum of attendees, extensive networking, opportunities to create spontaneous pop-up workshops, etc.
For a long time it looked like our network was also skeptical. We stagnated at about 100 registrants for a long time. Then, at a member’s suggestion, we threw it open to everyone by offering to let people name their own conference fee for a week. This led to an explosion of registrations. Many still paid the regular price and we ended up with a record 500 registrants.
The conferences itself was a continuous revelation. We were surprised at almost every turn. For example, we did introductions with 90 people in the virtual room. It was not chaotic! Everyone took their turn to make a brief introduction with no moderation necessary.
As the conference grew and evolved it suddenly occurred to us that the conference was like a giant learner-centered child, learning and developing as it went along.Stephanie Sewell said “I felt like I jumped into doing a doctorate!”
Eventually we had over 45 regular workshops, 8 keynotes, 4 panels, 4 mini-talks, 4 school visits and 4 documentaries. We also had our first online AERO auction that raised $1450, a continuously open main room, operated overnight by people from Sri Aria School in Malaysia, 15 spontaneous pop-up workshops including one inspired by Jaki Armstrong about systemic racism.
As often happens, this year we received many unsolicited workshop proposals and didn’t reject any. Anyone who attended was able to host a popup session or discussion topic. We had more leeway because it was online. Also, for the same reason we had a record 30 countries 35 states, and 7 Canadian provinces participating, from such places as Burkina Faso and South Africa to Egypt, Russia and China.
Riverstone Village students singing conference theme song
There we so many things created at this conference! For example, there was a collaboration between Carl Rust in Indiana and students and teachers at Riverstone Village in South Africa that produced this song. It became our conference theme song and was played throughout the conference. It is a really catchy tune sung by a well known African singer. Let us know how we can spread the tune further.
There were many student activities, including three student panels on student rights and other topics, some student-led workshops, and even a conference Minecraft server.
The AERO Conference website was elegantly created by our conference webmaster, Anthony Umina. It was set so people only needed to click on the website they wanted to attend and it would go right to a Zoom link. Now it wall be revamped so that you can use the same website to go to the over 50 videos of the conference if you were an attendee. If you did not attend you can purchase the video package HERE .
We used a special app called Whova so attendees could communicate with each other, to the organizers, network or create popup workshops. According to our records, at least 250 attendees downloaded the app and have sent nearly 5,000 messages and continue to use it now, after the conference.
By all measures this first online AERO conference was quite successful, surprisingly so for us. It may have appeared seamless, but there were lots of little fires being put out in the background. Luckily we had Anthony as our web expert. We are considering doing another virtual one, maybe next February in an expanded virtual AEROx.
Some Conference Feedback
It was extremely well done and the pivot to a virtual conference seemed clean and easy on the participant end! I am still catching up the conversations and looking forward to a lot of video replays. KT
Jerry this has been the most unbelievable experience!! I’m the most technologically challenged person on earth, and I’m cruising through. It’s so well organized. Well done! TR
I think that the organization you and Peter have done shows the amount of time you have put into it. It is the best run Zoom meeting I have been involved in. CN
Much better than taking part in a conference in person as I have obstacle of language. Now I can follow it much better by text and oral together.
The conference energy has been great to observe. Tell Peter he is doing a great job with all of the reminders and coordination – and when he did the interviews, too.
I can honestly say, from the bottom of my heart, my life will never be the same.
This conference was one of the most meaningful, inspiring experiences I’ve ever had.Not only from an educational point of view, but also from a human perspective.
I think that you are undercharging. Strongly recommend raising the price, but having a pay-what-you-can option as well. This establishes it as a valuable conference and continues to allow people who need a price break to take it. I would also add the option of paying extra to support those who can’t pay full.
No words can describe how amazing it was!Great conference and an eye-opener for saving travel, motel, variety of participants, and meal experience. Prepare for an even larger participant virtual conference in the future. WJ
Some parts were excellent; some parts were average, and everything in between.
Thanks for putting this together and providing so much support with the prices to make it super affordable I started a discussion because of the deafening silence around anti racism. It seemed that AERO had its blinders firmly in place. On second thought, nothing before its time! So perhaps AERO’s reluctance forced me to ‘go brave’. Thanks so much for still forging ahead with the conference. I think it was a beacon of light in a dark time, and so heart warming to see the energy and enthusiasm everyone has for keeping this approach to education alive and growing. I think it was especially important for my team to be involved as up til now I was the only one that had been to a conference (APDEC). I think this will have helped to inspire them and solidify the what, why and how of the philosophies behind our school at a pivotal time for us (we’re launching our first one day nature programme in term 3 this year).
Of course, given the choice, I’d prefer to attend an in-person conference, but this one surpassed my expectations. There were even perks that the online offered that are not possible in person, such as the wonderful international spectrum of attendees. The main room offered opportunities for networking that I was concerned were not possible online, so even that was a happy success. All in all, this stands up very well to the in-person conferences and was a wonderful and inspiring experience.
I am still feeling the excitement of the conference. It far exceeded my expectations of what a virtual conference could provide. The international piece was great. I felt like globally no one thought education should or would go back to prior to the pandemic. Lots of exciting work going on globally. CF
Yong Zhao does a keynote on ZoomBrian Conner of the National Student Rights Association
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