Agile Learning Center

Education Evolved

New York City’s first Agile Learning Center is an independent school for self-directed learners. Students at Agile Learning Centers individualize their learning within the context of a supportive community. We have adapted simple tools for self-organization and intentional culture creation to support young people in engaging with their passions and curiosities while shaping the environment of the school.

At the Agile Learning Center we recognize that students are complex and dynamic people, with desires, interests, creativity, potential, and needs for agency and connection. We know the educative drives that support young humans learning — curiosity, sociability, and playfulness — motivate them to keep experimenting, practicing, and exploring when nurtured. We know their embodiment, emotions, self-possession, and social relationships significantly impact their ability to learn and their general well-being. Both on days when our activities resemble those of progressive schools and on days when they look and sound more like summer camp, staff are co-creating those experiences with kids while guided by these foundational and research-backed understandings of where to focus when aiming to support young people in their journeys towards capability and fulfillment.

On the themes of emergence and evolution, elements of our covid-19 response that we intend to keep for the foreseeable future include the addition of air filters to our space, online and hybrid offerings alongside our in-person programming, and the availability of masks in our lobby.

An Agile Cycle of Learning

In a space that celebrates the many forms learning can take, newcomers can sometimes get caught up in attempting to sort which observable activities are and aren’t ones they can classify as learning. Sometimes classifications are useful, but if learning is always happening, if we’re always practicing something in how we’re living our lives, asking whether something is learning isn’t the most interesting or useful question.

We ask what we’re learning. We ask what we want to be learning and how to go about it. We ask what’s working and what we need to change. And we ask what our rhythms are, individually and collectively.

One pattern our learning often takes, and that our structures are designed to encourage, is an Agile Learning Cycle. It has four phases: intention, creation, reflection, and sharing.

Culture

Culture is co-created, emergent, and powerful. We shape culture, and we acknowledge how culture shapes us. A powerful, generous culture is one of the strongest, most pervasive support structures a learning community can have, so we practice shaping the culture of our space intentionally. We iterate and evolve our tools and practices, staying adaptive so that the process is always serving the people gathered in our space. This practice of intentional culture building supports intentionality and skill-building that serves us in other domains of our lives as well.

Why focus on making agreements and tending our culture? The social environment of a learning-focused space is, ideally, one where there are people of a variety of ages, interests, abilities, and backgrounds freely mixing. In places where it’s become normalized to segregate the very young and the very old, creating an age-mixed community is more difficult than in places where babies and elders are already normal. Alongside ageism, there are other norms from the cultures of other spaces we’re part of that we actively want to recognize and design against for our community.

We get to ask what kind of culture we want, what we’re working to build. Whatever the details of each iteration are, staff know philosophically and many students know intuitively that the social environment would ideally feel stable, supportive, and respectful, a place where young people can bring their full selves and be embraced for who they are. They benefit from a culture that values their agency and trusts they’re capable of learning and of taking increasing responsibility for choices about their lives. Finally, they benefit from having a diverse network of adults who know and care about them, who are available for questions, accompaniment, modeling, or just reassuring the young person that they matter and are not alone. Social support, for kids and adults, is a key contributing factor to life satisfaction and a protective factor through times of crisis.

Practice collaboratively problem-solving and culture shifting, adapting the space together so it can offer a nurturing environment and supportive relationships to a diverse gathering of learners, is ongoing work that we also believe is some of the most high impact work to be engaged in.

The future will be shaped by those who dare to innovate, can tolerate uncertainty, and learn from failures, practice curiosity, cultivate wonder, and collaborate effectively in pluralistic groups without losing themselves. We accompany young people in growing into their natural capacities for not just critical thinking but also creative and collaborative thinking. We prepare young people for the world they are growing up into by empowering them to actively create it.

The Agile Learning Center does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, national origin, or ethnic origin in administration, admission, or any associated activities.

We share this mission the Agile Learning Centers Network, and our staff regularly partner with universities and community organizations to support our own ongoing learning.

Logos by Eric Friedensohn. Photos by Abby Oulton.