Purpose of the Post
This post is the first public explanation of the details of the School aspect of this project in its completed form. This will be the end goal, not our starting point. This is essentially the first draft of the plan, which will be changed as our ideas evolve with collaborative planning and goal setting with the Tribe and others, such as in our Facebook Group. This is only the first step post-brainstorming, so it is pretty rough around the edges. The goal in releasing it now it to get critical feedback on the basic ideas at the BEGINNING of planning versus the END of planning. It's just a more efficient way to collaborate.
The plan, as it is in this form, has quite a few complex parts. Future versions need to be refined, clarified, and simplified.
The Vision and Plan
Mission Statement and Rationale - What is the ultimate goal, and why?
Our mission statement is as follows:
The Lab Project improves our local community by creating a hub of skills, knowledge, and wisdom that unifies diverse members of our community to solve tricky problems within our community.
Our ultimate goal with this project is to improve our local community by creating a centralized hub of skills, knowledge, and wisdom that unifies diverse members of our community to solve tricky problems. This is accomplished by creating a non-compulsory, non-accredited school offering life-enrichment classes to members of our community. Out Tribe runs the school, our Faculty teach classes and lead collaborative community-improvement projects, and our Students learn and assist the faculty in completing their projects.
The summary of the project can be found here: Project Summary: The 30,000 Foot View (v.1.0)
The hypothesis that creates the foundation of the project can be found here: The Sociopolitical Tribal Hypothesis: The Foundation of the Project
As is explained in the "hypothesis" post, this project requires ideologically-diverse people to work together to solve real problems affecting our local community. In the simplest terms, this means sociopolitically-diverse people - liberals, conservatives, and everyone in between.
Our school is not a replacement for formal K-12 or higher education. It is meant to be a supplement.
Vision and Rationale - What is the school going to look like, and why?
Our School will be organized using a model similar to a university (with an administration, faculty, and students who teach, learn, and work on solving local problems around our community here in Montrose.) The school will use basic psychological principles to motivate these people to collaborate and innovate using a project-based learning framework.
How We Use Motivation
Per Abraham Maslow, humans have five basic needs. We utilize those five needs to create an environment where participants are intrinsically motivated to make a real difference through improving themselves and their community. Human curiosity and a genuine desire to help others are the engines that drive this project.
The Tribe and Faculty are assessed for their personalities, strengths, passions, skills, and knowledge to place them in a role within the school structure that allows them to reach their full potential in a deeply-fulfilling way. They identify what they want to get out of life, and we help them achieve it while giving back something of value to the Tribe and to our community. In this sense, we create win-win relationships.
What Do We Teach and Why Do We Teach It?
The classes our School teaches are life enrichment classes, where "life enrichment" includes any topic or subject matter that improves our students' lives in a measurable way. This can range from Brazilian jiu jitsu to knife-sharpening to writing a resume. Any and all topics may be taught depending on the the expertise of our Faculty and the needs of our Students.
The School also provides all the tools necessary, and removes as many barriers as possible, to use what we teach to create a safe, healthy, unified, resilient community.
Our school's pedagogy (how we teach) is heavily inspired by the Unschooling movement, benign neglect parenting, homeschooling, the apprenticeship model, and my own "Organic Learning" experiential learning idea.
How do We Share Ideas?
Our school adheres to the principle of open knowledge, which is based on the open source software movement. As much as possible, we make teaching and learning free and open to anyone and everyone. The free sharing of ideas allows others to adopt ideas, experiment , and improve them. To accomplish this, we will use various Web-based technologies, such as this blog, a podcast, social media, our website, and video hosting sites such as Youtube.
How do we build a sustainable and resilient Tribe, School, and Community?
One of our goals is to assure our Tribe, School, and Community can weather any storm we may encounter to guarantee our long-term success. To this end, our first S&R (sustainability and resiliency) goal is to make the Tribe sustainable for one year with no external support. Our second S&R goal is to do the same for the School (Faculty and Students.) Our third S&R goal is to do the same for our Community. For these goals, "sustainable" means "meeting all five levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs for all members of these three groups.
We will also accomplish this by creating and projecting a culture of kindness, empathy, and compassion backed by a rock-solid culture of strength, courage, honor, and mastery. We will use our martial arts program to instill this culture across all aspects of our Tribe and our School.
How will we unite our Tribe, School, and Community to assure different people are all working towards the same mutually-beneficial goals?
To accomplish this, we will actively teach leadership skills to our Tribe, then our Faculty, and finally our Students. The idea is to create as many high quality, capable leaders as possible to improve the pool of leaders for each of these three groups. Better leadership makes for better outcomes for everyone.
We will also do what we can to assure our school includes Tribe and Faculty that are an accurate representation of our community. This will help these groups understand and empathize with anyone and everyone in the greater Montrose area, which will make the school's project-based learning methods more effective.
Finally, we will utilize cooperative interdependence (the Jigsaw Classroom model) and Organic Learning as much as possible. These systems, when working in conjunction, allows different people to use their different knowledge, skills, and experiences cooperatively to solve real problems in our community.
Guiding Principles - What are they and why do we have these specific principles?
Our Tribe and our School are run based on a set of principles that affect every decision we make. This method of operation assures we stay true to our mission statement.
Principle #1: The best way to solve problems is to give diverse, motivated people tricky, relevant problems to solve, a barrier-free environment, and an easy way to communicate.
Principle #2: Holistic goal-setting is used for every level of planning for the Tribe and the School. Within the school, holistic goal-setting is used for department planning, class planning, pedagological experimentation, and projects.
Principle #3: We embrace open knowledge. Everyone should have free, open access to the information we produce for the purposes of improving themselves and those around them.
Principle #4: We embrace the Gift Economy, which is the idea that freely giving with kindness and altruism improves the lives of everyone. Capitalistic Altruism.
Principle #5: We will utilize intrinsic motivation and curiosity as primary motivators for the Tribe, our Faculty, and our Students.
Principle #6: Diversity is strength. All sociopolitical ideologies working together open-mindedly and cooperatively are necessary to produce a fully functional Tribe, School, and Community. We hate echo chambers of any sort.
Principle #7: Every member of the Tribe, School, and Community are both teachers and learners. Everyone is expected to contribute their knowledge, skills, and experiences to improve the collective.
Organization -Structure and People
Role of the Tribe
The Tribe is the heart and soul of this Project. Made up of hungry, humble, people-smart members, the Tribe uses the School as a conduit to make our world a better place.
The Tribe is the School's compass assuring it stays on the right path and act as the School's cultural stewards, which includes developing the mission statement, vision, goals, and guiding principles. The Tribe also runs the Administration, Academics, and Projects. The Tribe provides all the tools necessary for the Faculty and Students to do good in our Community.
The School, in turn, supports the Tribe by providing for their five basic human needs, which is loosely based on the relationship between Native American tribes and casinos.
The Tribe serves as brokers for knowledge, skills, and wisdom in our Community. This allows the Tribe to develop symbiotic relationships with individuals, businesses, and organizations within our Community. The Tribe is about connecting people and ideas in meaningful ways.
Tribe Members can also be Faculty or Students, and may take classes free of charge.
Departments
The "Academic" division of the School is divided by Departments based on groups of expertise. The Department is a way for Faculty from related fields to easily collaborate. Inter-Department collaboration is encouraged.
Departments can be started with a minimum of two Faculty members is a related area. New Departments will be given a blog and Youtube channel, and start with zero budget. After completing three successful Projects, the Department may petition the Tribe for funding for Projects.
Each department will have an organic goal setting session once per year for the entire department, needs their own principles, goals, and vision, and need to have at least one problem to solve that will make community better per term.
Faculty
The Faculty have two primary roles - teach classes and propose, plan, and complete Projects. No formal requirements are needed for Faculty other than they meet the Tribe criteria (hungry, humble, and people smart), and have ideas, knowledge, skills, or wisdom to share.
Faculty have access to physical space within the school to teach classes and complete Projects, have access to the department blog, and have access to the Department Youtube channel.
The total number of Tribe Members, Faculty, and Students will not exceed 100 per term.
Faculty will develop novel, creative ways to teach their subject area expertise to others in the community effectively, and teach others how to utilize their methods. The goal is to continually refine our methods to make them simpler, cheaper, more efficient, and more effective.
Faculty and their families can take classes for free.
Students
Our students will come from our local community, and will include anyone with an interest in the classes being offered.
Operations
Curriculum
Our initial curriculum will focus on the expertise of the Members of our Tribe, and the Teachers we have immediately available. This will likely include the teaching of primitive skills, self-improvement, health, fitness, and self-defense. In addition to our Tribe already possessing the knowledge to teach these topics, these are also valuable skills that can create an immediate positive impact on individual members of our community.
Our Founding Members of our Tribe are currently curating a list of possible topics to be taught.
In the future, our curriculum will widen to include any topic that is of interest to our teachers and students, of value to the Tribe, or will improve our community.
Scheduling and Cohorts
The School will operate on a "term" schedule, much like colleges and universities. We will have a fall and winter term lasting 16 weeks, and a summer term lasting eight weeks. Classes may be offered for shorter periods of time within each term.
The purpose of the terms is to facilitate planning, give our Faculty the opportunity to spend time working on Projects or plan vacations, make payments easier to collect and process, and make improvements to our facilities.
Each term, students will be organized into a Cohort, which will be used as another opportunity to build social connections between the Tribe, Faculty, and Students. The Cohort will meet at the beginning and end of the Term at an event planned by the Tribe. The end-of-term event will feature a Conference/ Party for Faculty and Students to present their Projects.
Each Cohort will elect a Student Council who will represent Student Interests at the Tribe meetings held monthly. The Student Council will work in conjunction with the Tribe Social Committee to plan the end-of-term Conference/ Party.
Classes
Classes can be different lengths, but the typical class will be one term long. Classes will be planned eight weeks before the beginning of a Term to allow for schedules to be produced, facility use to be determined, and distributed and students to be recruited.
Every class should begin and end with a five to ten minute social session. The purpose of this is to increase social bonding, thus increase the sense of belonging among students.
Projects
Projects are the equivalent to research conducted by university professors. The Projects will be something tangible that uses Faculty expertise and collaboration with the Tribe, Students, and Community to make real, tangible improvements to our community.
All projects must be: Cheap, simple, effective, no unintended consequences, make our community better in a tangible, measurable way, and is enjoyable (fun, play, etc.)
All projects approved by Tribe, sort of like Human Subjects Board, uses holistic goal setting. Faculty and Students present results at Conference Parties at the end of each term. Ongoing projects present what they've learned thus far. All of this is written up and kept in searchable database (the equivalent of our "journal."
Department needs three successful projects done at zero cost before they can ask for funding, individual faculty need two.
Campus (Homestead)
The Tribe will purchase land and build structures to support the Tribe and School.
Eventual goal is to allow faculty and Tribe to live on area of homestead to allow for collaboration. Homestead needs living quarters for Tribe and Faculty, areas to use for teaching purposes,.a shooting range, a great hall, a community kitchen, a community garden, etc.
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