One Monday morning at Wicklow Democratic School, a number of students knelt around a fire pit in the schoolyard. It was time for morning activities with Home Groups, and this group decided to use the time to build a fire. They took turns lighting wool and thin sticks with steel and flint, and then, when that small pile ignited, they began to create a waffle pattern with thicker sticks, overlapping layers to build a bigger fire.

“You have to treat a fire like a baby,” Marc, a fellow facilitator at Wicklow Democratic School, told me as he knelt in front of it.

He spoke about feeding the fire continually, tending to it gently, and approaching fire like a living thing – something that is steadily growing but sometimes unpredictable.

I asked Marc about his own experiences with nature and fire as a child. He talked about living near Yosemite National Park in California in the United States, and spoke about how he spent most of his childhood outdoors. Marc said that nature, to him, was more about feeling a sense of connection and belonging to the world than just a pretty thing to look at. Marc continued to say that this feeling is similar to that feeling of closeness that he feels with good family and friends.

“It’s why I fell in love with nature – that feeling of connection,” he said.

I asked Marc if he had attended a Boy Scouts program as a child. He told me that he had, but he often found it too rigid.

“Boy Scouts teaches a lot of skills,” he said, “but there’s a difference between connection and information.”

Marc felt that Boy Scouts approached nature like something to fight against – teaching the scouts to compete for best ways to battle the elements in a hierarchal and somewhat militant atmosphere. Marc, in developing his passion for nature, was more inspired by studying indigenous culture and reading the works of Jon Young ( author of The Art of Mentoring and Coyote Training and creator of the audio series Seeing Through Native Eyes). Indigenous cultures emphasise the importance of approaching nature as though one would approach building any respectful, healthy and symbiotic relationship.

“Once you have connection information flows freely,” Marc said.

We spoke about how connection and trust relaxes the mind enough so that a greater amount of new information can be processed and stored in the brain.

As a young adult, Marc received a degree in Forestry. He was employed for a time in a community-based home school environment in New York where he worked alongside children to build that relationship with nature – examining animal tracks, carving toothbrushes out of dogwood, and identifying best plants for medicinal remedies and food. He brought a lot of the information he gained in the States to Ireland when he set up his own forest school in Wicklow (3 Trees Forest School). Marc offers classes at Wicklow Democratic School and takes opportunities to teach students about nature and outdoor skills whenever a student shows interest in any given day.

Matilda (12) was one of Marc’s students at 3 Trees Wicklow before she enrolled in Wicklow Democratic School. Like Marc, Matilda’s earliest memories are centred around nature.

“Nature feels like I can just be myself,” she says. “It just feels easier, you can learn for yourself, learn by seeing and doing.”

Matilda’s eyes lit up as she spoke about building dens in trees with her sister as a refuge from hard days as a young child. She smiled as she reflected on moments of making necklaces and pencils out of wood, and of learning how to build and light fires at 3 Trees (she showed me how to use the steel and flint more efficiently and quickly).

Matilda also spoke earnestly about how the comfort that she feels during lengthy forest school days in nature contrasts greatly with the tightly scheduled time that was allotted to her play outdoors in some mainstream schools.

“There’s just so much tarmac,” she said, referring to the twenty-minute yard time at her last school.

Aed (18) is also Marc’s student, and a student who is passionate about nature and ecology. He had similar experiences to Matilda where a lot of his mainstream school experience with the outdoors was on tarmac.

“We could see a woodland patch and pond from the schoolyard but we weren’t allowed go there,” he said.

Aed particularly appreciates the interconnectedness and interdependence with nature that he and Marc and their fellow forest school students gain from spending time sitting quietly outside and observing nature.  Aed feels that the connection that is developed in quiet “sit spots” offers students a meditative experience akin to Zen Buddhist practices. This experience is often one that is calm, safe and grounded in the present moment. Taking quiet time to observe bird patterns and the elements “gradually builds an awareness of yourself and an awareness of your place in nature,” Aed told me.

Ted (10) is a student at Wicklow Democratic School who started his formal schooling in an outdoor Kindergarten.

“It was amazing,” Ted said about this outdoor Kindergarten. “We’d be out all day, and only came in for meals.”

“Even in freezing rain?” I asked, thinking of my own avoidance of the cold.

Ted nodded, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”

Ted reflected on some outstanding memories in that school – one being when he and other students had to bring a dead tree down to the ground with ropes, and he counted fifteen roots that sprung out of the ground.

“It was there that I grew a love for sticks,” Ted continued.

Ted told me how much he enjoyed collecting sticks to clear paths through nettle bushes, dig, drag around, and even use them to play golf.

“There’s also something really satisfying about smashing a stick through dead wood,” Ted said.

Ted greatly missed this outdoor time when he attended mainstream schools.

“We only got thirty minutes of P.E. a week, we were trapped indoors!” he told me.

This feeling of being trapped indoors encouraged Ted to sign up for Marc’s forest school and then enrol in Wicklow Democratic School. Nowadays in school, Ted enjoys reading a book on the main hall’s windowsill and feeling the sun from the window warm his back. He loves building fires in the mornings during Home Groups, and drinking peppermint tea by these fires. A recent moment of excitement for Ted was discovering a lovely “surprise in the dirt” of the school grounds with facilitator Liz.

“We were looking for things in the garden to use to make a bird feeder, and then Ted found potatoes! Maybe we planted them last summer?” Liz asked.

No one could remember when exactly potatoes were planted in the school, but our facilitator (and Aed’s mom) Ciara just nodded and said, “Potatoes just spring up everywhere like that.” Ted and his mother made chips with the surprise finding.

At home, Ted likes to observe animals and learn about them by closely watching their behaviours and appearances.  Ted and his father recently used an onion bag with bacon in it to catch crabs.

“We let them go after we caught them,” Ted said to me. “I loved watching those creatures plop over the edge of the pier. We counted them as they plopped back into the water.”

“How many did you catch?” I asked him.

“One hundred and seventy,” Ted answered.

“Wow,” I said. “Well, that’s a fun way to do math.”

Ted nodded, agreeing with me.

Ted’s math and science class with live crabs made me think of Wicklow Democratic School’s philosophy that emphasises how children learn through play, and through seeing, doing and learning about their own interests in an organic manner. I thought of how joyful, excited and yet very calm and centred Ted appeared when talking about nature, and I reflected on how lovely it is to watch Ted and other students like Matilda read books under trees or by sunny windows.

And yet time spent in nature is not all gentle creatures and sunshine. Marc, Matilda, Ted and Aed all told me that managing unexpectedly large fires, putting up tents in sudden storms, rationing food supplies and water, navigating dark woods and making and using effective tools can definitely feel like scary and intense moments of survival.

“But once you have that respect and relationship built, both the challenges and the easier moments are enjoyable in their own ways.” Marc told me. “You have to meet nature where it’s at.”

“Like how Wicklow Democratic School tries to meet students where they’re at and not impose policies like standardised tests.” I said to Marc.

I thought of how often people I knew complained about the rain in their busy city lives, and how different this outlook was to meeting the rain with respect and working with it during camping trips, or using the rain to slide even faster down muddy hills into puddles (another one of Ted’s favourite activities during his outdoor Kindergarten experience).

When Covid-19 hit, people in cities, like me, were suddenly signing up for online mindfulness classes in an attempt to stay present and curb fears about the unknown future. Adults everywhere were anxiously downloading meditation apps with rain sounds and listening to these in between all the terse and sometimes aggressive announcements or arguments on the Covid-19 pandemic that were streaming nonstop through the TV. The freezing cold Irish sea was suddenly met with reams of city-dwellers who’d figured they’d brave the sea since their gym pool was closed, only to discover just how good the sea is for mental and physical health. Family and friends had no options but to connect with each other outdoors. A couple of my friends and I shared moments taking pictures of hikes, sea swims and afternoons spent sitting by trees, and many people commented how they’d had to cancel trips abroad but weren’t actually too upset since they started venturing outside and looking for nice spots in their own counties. We had forgotten how gorgeous Ireland is. The pandemic, for many and for myself included, was a violently unexpected reminder of the uncertainty of life and of nature, but it was also a reminder of its brilliance.

When I listened to students at Wicklow Democratic School talk about nature, I had many moments where I thought that their self-reflection, their eloquent description of their connection with nature and their ability to be present, seemed so natural for them but had taken thirty-five years and a pandemic for me to fully realise. I saw that the pandemic was re-teaching adults all over the world what these forest school students were developing and growing all along by really nurturing those innate qualities sometimes overlooked in society – being present, working with what nature (or life) throws at us, finding calm in storms, knowing how to centre yourself, and prioritising connection.

Ted spoke about how he’d connect with his friends at the outdoor Kindergarten by sitting in a circle with them and singing songs.

“Those songs are burnt into my memory,” he told me.

I took a minute to think of the memories that come alive for me when I reflect on my own school experiences, and memories that stand out in my life as a whole. I realised that like Marc said about nature – it all comes down to connection. I’m much more likely to remember lines from a poem that nearly made my best friend cry in English class than the rules of iambic pentameter. I’m more likely to remember details of the 1916 Rising from interesting conversations with funny history teachers or chats with my sisters than I am likely to remember any major details from that five-page essay I memorised on the Easter Rebellion for the Leaving Cert history exam.

While I know that memorisation is a part of learning and certainly has its place, I feel that the students of forest schools and the students who spend a lot of time outdoors at Wicklow Democratic School are lucky to have more time for connection – whether it be connecting with themselves in meditative observing of outdoor surroundings, connecting with friends through singing in circles by trees, connecting with nature or the elements, or connecting with adults telling stories around fires. I believe that this time for connection leaves space to create more moments that we want burnt into our memories, like those songs that still play sometimes, in Ted’s head.

Written by Tess Sheridan

In addition to revamping the library, our community and staff have deep-cleaned all rooms and reorganized the placement of furniture to create an environment that is easy to navigate, comfortable and inviting. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to everyone who gave their time and energy (and maybe sacrificed a few t-shirts) to paint the school. With some walls painted a deep green and others a light lilac; all they need now is some student artwork. We hope to create many more community murals this year, and we plan to leave space for spontaneous group art projects as we all discuss curricula during SEW (School Evolution Week).

We have put together a researched plan to implement our Open Curriculum Project. This plan takes into account various learning styles and the tools that can best support them. Students can choose to work with a staff member to map out an area of interest that they would like to explore over the course of the year, or meet with staff to discuss a skill that they would like to develop. Our goal is to coordinate an advising network that is tailored for each student’s academic success, career preparation, experiential learning and personal growth. We aim to converse with students about their interests and prepare supporting documents to best facilitate the exploration of these interests. We are inspired by Gaisce to put together a means of learning for students that leads towards a personalised portfolio. These student portfolios will showcase incremental growth in skill-building such as cooking, drawing, refining forestry techniques and many, many more. We also hope to create more opportunities for portfolio work to culminate in certification. Students will be able to record their work and progress with a digital document, and staff will continually connect with students through each stage of the process.

A  major priority of our school is that of maintaining a clear sense of connection with students. We plan to continue with our regular check-ins and student groups, and over the summer we have also been redefining and expanding our idea of what it means to facilitate children with tools like the GROW (Goals-Reality-Obstacles-Way Forward) Coaching Model. This model lays out guiding questions for students and staff to consider so that they can make sure that the student’s needs are continually being met as they explore interests and cultivate passions. These guiding questions will also help to clarify confusions that may arise as students progress with developing their skills. As with everything in the school, we view the GROW Coaching Model as a live document that is always subject to change and reconfiguration.

This summer, we have also been busy reconfiguring our literacy program and researching methods that best support student engagement in literacy. We are taking into account ways to incorporate phonics, reading groups, storytelling, and various literacy games to best facilitate reading and writing. The team has also been discussing ways to add to the environmental print through decorating our walls with imagery and posters to support, encourage and celebrate our readers (we like to emphasise that along with the written word, visuals and symbols are also a part of reading).

Staff members enjoyed reading extensively about a range of topics this summer, including building trauma-informed policies, mentoring and sociocracy. These texts on sociocracy have informed staff on ways to improve the effective and equitable running of the school. We are continually working on the manner in which the school is organised in order to ensure that responsibilities are evenly and clearly distributed. This year, we hope to give parents many opportunities to contribute to policy-making in the school with regular Parent Meetings. 

Our staff were happy to work together over the summer, whether it was in-person in the school building, or coming from Brazil, Dublin, Wicklow, and America to meet and discuss ideas over Zoom. We are excited to implement ideas now that the school is open again, and we look forward to further developing procedures and policies that can best support the school. As always, our policies are open to change and improvement depending on the needs and desires of our community. We hope that you will continue to share ideas and ask questions should they arise as the year unfolds.     

We were very excited for the many games, events and snacks that greeted our whole community during Welcome Week last week, and we are looking forward to School Evolution Week this week! 

Written by Tess Sheridan

Virtual Community

We started up the online school again, on Discord this time to make it more accessible to the students. It was difficult to make a plan because we didn’t know how long the school would be closed, but despite this challenge, we gathered (on Zoom) as a community to discuss what our virtual timetable would look like.

We designed a co-created timetable that incorporated suggestions from staff and students. We had all learned from the previous year’s lockdown and were more aware of our own capacities for online learning, so each day had at least a couple classes or activities with plenty of space for students to self-direct their learning. Students could avail of one-on-one check-ins with staff to help them with their learning as well as to provide support for their wellbeing.

We had some lovely opportunities to connect as a community during this time. In January, we had our family check-ins, where staff members met with families (students were welcome as well) to discuss how each student had been getting on. We appreciate the role a students’ family has in the students’ education, so we were glad to be able to have these check-ins and hear from our extended community members despite the lockdown.

Another chance for connection was our lunchtime hangouts. These regular, unstructured meetings were a space for people to chat about whatever they liked. For one particularly memorable hangout, staff members shared photos and stories from when they were teenagers. Sharing these memories elicited a lot of laughter and also some heartfelt reflections on how the staff members’ experiences of adolescence and young adulthood might have been different if they had been part of a democratic school.

Last, but not least, we had a fantastic Zoom party hosted by our up-and-coming Parent’s Association. The group of parents put in time and effort organising a fun and memorable night for students, staff and family members. There were musical performances, break out rooms with games and chats, and a lovely feeling of community connection.

Refurbishing our Restorative Practices

We have been in the process of making changes to our conflict resolution system for some time now so that it best reflects the needs and values of the whole community. We were able to continue this work during the lockdown and in fact had the opportunity to do several workshops that were open to the staff and students.

To lay the groundwork for these and future workshops, a small team of two staff members and one parent volunteer with extensive experience in conflict resolution met weekly to thoroughly examine specific aspects of the conflict resolution system that needed to be improved and potential solutions to pursue these improvements.

One outcome of these meetings was a series of workshops designed to help students understand what they value about their school community and reflect on how it could be better. We had five workshops, each one using games and small-group discussions to gain different insights on the needs of both individual community members and the community as a whole.

Another outcome was a series of workshops to make concrete changes to the way our JC (Justice Circle) operates. This workshop is also open to the whole school, but more specifically towards JC Clerks and students who are committed to reimagining our conflict resolution system. There have been two of these workshops so far, and the commitment and enthusiasm that the students have shown for doing this work has been inspiring.

Our community also participated in a series of four Nonviolent Communication workshops facilitated by Judith Lardner. Through these workshops, we learned about elements of NVC, like making observations without judgements, how to listen for someone’s feelings and needs, and how to make a request when needs aren’t being met. Developing empathy and learning to communicate compassionately are invaluable skills that will help students navigate conflict and have a better sense of self, not only in our school community, but in their lives now and into the future. It felt exciting to be working on these skills together, and we are looking forward to continuing to learn as a community through future workshops and discussions.

Behind the Scenes

As you may be aware, staff members at Wicklow Democratic School wear many hats. In addition to facilitators, we are also administrators, fundraisers, organisers, accountants and so on, and during the lockdown, we didn’t remove any of these hats. In fact, we were able to jump-start some crucial projects.

We have been working with an organisation called 2into3 who support non-profits with their fundraising goals. Over the lockdown, we had several meetings with 2into3, including two full-staff workshops, to develop our case for funding and determine what funding programmes to focus on. This process is now fully underway and we will continue working with 2into3 in the months to come.

Another exciting project we propelled forward over lockdown is a complete redesign of our website. We want visitors to our website to be able to easily find information and resources that will answer all their questions about our school and help them understand how special our community is. This work has involved re-writing almost all of the text on our website, as well as adding an extensive and up-to-date FAQ that incorporates research about how democratic self-directed learning can help children flourish. We plan to launch our new website before the end of this school year, along with another exciting announcement.

Alongside these projects, the staff team dedicated time to reconnecting with the goals and structures of the organisation. As part of our work with 2into3, we boiled down our mission, vision and values and dreamt into where we would like to see the school in a few years. We also re-evaluated the way roles are divided among our staff team and how we could redefine our roles to be more efficient while also aligning each person’s role with their individual interests and skills.

We also had our regularly scheduled staff planning day, where we carried out a full SWOT analysis of the organisation (SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). We have been reading, researching, discussing and generally buzzing with ideas about the potential we see for the school to keep growing and becoming.

Looking forward

While this lockdown has been challenging for our community in many ways, the time apart will make our reunion in April and the months to follow even more special. We are looking forward to the campus coming alive with the Spring weather as it does each year. We will be welcoming a few new students and holding another School Evolution Week, where we will co-create our curriculum for the last term and discuss what is working well in the school along with what could be better. In June, if the restrictions allow, we will hold our graduation event as usual, and will hopefully be able to invite the whole community to attend.

We will continue to work on our conflict resolution system and overall school culture. JC Clerks and staff will continue to meet and decide on proposals for making changes to the JC. Staff members have started a reading list and will be discussing the first book on the list, Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Compassion, and five staff members are in the midst of a training course on facilitating NVC peer practice groups.

The months ahead promise to be full of empowering work and energising play. We hope you keep watching this space.

Written by Rachel Kuhn

So here we are, after the decision to go with another three weeks of school closures, at least. It’s a sensible option – why take unnecessary chances now that we have the light of a vaccine at the end of the tunnel? This week, I’ve seen feelings of extreme relief at the news that vulnerable family members will be receiving the vaccine, along with feelings of extreme anxiety from a relative working in childcare who was terrified to go back to work on Monday. Heightened emotions that are the new normal now.

Amidst those highs and lows, Wicklow Sudbury School is somewhere in the middle. There will be students and staff who will be gutted we’re not back, and others more circumspect.

For me, it’s always worth looking for the opportunities in these situations, and having a bit more time this month affords us a big chance to get ahead of the game on a lot of things, some of which I’ll discuss below.

It’s been a unique year for us, with more student turnover than in any other year by far. A half dozen students who had grown into very important roles holding the culture in the school and helping newer students all graduated last Summer. Nine more have joined, and while that may not seem like a big transition in a world where thirty plus students per classroom is par for the course, a democratic school is very different in its culture and its norms compared to the rest of our society. When community members have been immersed in a culture of hierarchy and competition and continue to live in a culture outside school that is defined by those ideas, there is a real balancing act to be had in growing and maintaining a culture of empathy, trust and safety together. When students graduate, they take with them three or four years of conversations about the workings of the school, trust-building experiences, and so on.

I’d like to think I’ve built up very strong connections with many students, cultivated through one on one conversations, chats over a cup of tea, resolving situations together, discussing issues in school meetings, joking, playing together and so on. Some of those students wouldn’t really have noticed I existed for their first six months they were here. So when you take about a quarter of the community (with more new students joining on a regular basis for the foreseeable future) and reset those relationships with staff to square one from square fifty, it has a significant effect.

Of course, in many ways that’s quite exciting, it’s great to be able to work with new students now that we’re armed with everything we’ve learned over the last four and a half years. But first comes the hard legwork of generating buy-in and creating the spaces for everyone to assume their own sense of ownership. A lot of the things we do have been put in place by students who are no longer here, and those ideas came to them after completely different experiences than the new students are bringing with them. They arrive into the space governed by rules and norms that may feel like ill-fitting hand me downs. So it’s important that new students get real chances to put their own stamp on proceedings. It’s one thing being told in abstract that this is your school and you can shape it, but in the same way, even if someone had all the money in the world, it would be worthless until they saw what could be bought with it.

Many of the students haven’t yet really felt what it’s like to ‘spend’ the money that is their equal say in the school, but we have some special days coming up specifically for that to happen.

Play is the glue that binds us

A few years ago, before I joined the school, I was lucky enough to interview the former headmaster of Glenstal Abbey School and then abbot of Glenstal Abbey, Marc Patrick Hederman. I wouldn’t have thought Abbot of Glenstal Abbey was a position that screamed progressive, but on matters of education, this guy has a lot sussed. He wrote a book called The Boy In The Bubble: Education as a Personal Relationship, which, as someone just finished with a very negative secondary school experience, resonated with me and has had a big influence on me as an educator.

He emphasised the importance of a trusting relationship between student and teacher, and believed that, without that connection, the spark of curiosity will have a harder time igniting.

I mentioned building up bonds with students through a variety of shared experiences, but the ones that have really stood out for me by their absence this school year are the playing and joking, especially of the physical variety. Until they were taken away by Covid and the need for physical distance, I didn’t truly realise how important those things were for building rapport with new community members, at least for me. This was one of the main ways that I built the trust that Marc Patrick spoke about.

Little things, like tapping someone on one shoulder when you’re on their other side, playing ninja (a reflex game like a mix of dance-tag and non-violent slaps – this one is gold), making a secret handshake, giving someone a piggyback, having a joke arm wrestle, doing an impromptu skit, allowing yourself to be rugby tackled onto a couch, playing sports and so on and so forth.

Whether it’s the oxytocin that flows from these moments or something else, boy have I noticed their absence. Even in relationships where I know we’re completely at ease with each other, it makes it difficult to act like it. It certainly makes it much harder to break down newer students’ perception of you as a traditional teacher or authority figure rather than a facilitator and collaborator.

I can only speak for myself – other staff have still had activities like circus club, outdoor club and self-directed dance that may have helped address this oxytocin deficit (mine are more video and discussion orientated than physical this year), but personally there have been times this school year where I’ve felt, compared to previous years, like a bowl of Weetabix with no milk.

Of course, you can’t have those fun interactions all the time with everyone, but I believe that even for students who are only in proximity to these kinds of easy going japes, they help put people at ease with you as a staff member and with their environment. It’s something that would be quite hard to study, but I imagine the effects of losing these interactions on our community have been consequential enough.

To clarify, there are times for being silly, and there are times for being a reassuring, adult presence, but the latter without the former creates a bit of unhelpful distance, just as the former without the latter can make people feel like they’re not in safe hands.

So what do we do with this information? It’s not clear to me yet, but, as Orson Welles is quoted as saying, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitation.” I’m sure when we reflect on this period where we were limited – shorn of our usual slapstick shenanigans – we’ll get a lot of insight from the other types of interactions that gave rise to trust and camaraderie instead. Therein lies the beauty of a democratic school and its flexibility – every challenge is an opportunity to learn, and there are no sacred cows or dogmas in the way of the necessary evolution.

Written by Khalil Moran

These conflicts offer us the opportunity to grow and develop ourselves but how to do this is not always clear to us. One thing that can help is allowing ourselves to experience our emotions and express them in a healthy way as this can lead to a greater awareness of ourselves, and of others, which in turn can help us to manage ourselves in such a way as to make responsible decisions and also to build and maintain healthy relationships.

Of course, how to do this is not always clear either, or comfortable (!) but I think most would agree, it is important. After all these competencies of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, responsible decision making and relationship building that we can develop in our school environment are transferable to all areas of our life and are utilised for all our life.

So, where to start? Consciously experiencing our feelings, expressing our feelings and experiencing the transformation of one feeling into the next feeling can greatly help us to develop our self-awareness and in turn our self-management. It can also greatly assist our nervous system in coming back into balance if it has been out of balance, for example due to experiencing stress – such as from pent up emotion. One medium that’s really good for doing this is dance.

Dance is a non-verbal form of expression that allows us to focus on what we are thinking or feeling or sensing in the body and then release that through physically moving our body in a way that we feel expresses what’s going on for us. To find your dance is to find yourself, at your most fluid and creative level. The movement facilitates the expression of the emotion or set of emotions that we are feeling. Often, we feel emotions that we don’t actually have a word, or words, to describe because of the limits of language. You might feel an emotion that there isn’t a word that particularly describes it – sadness might be close to describing it, or anger, but it might be a mix of the two, or it might be something else. But where language has that limitation, dance or movement doesn’t. You can move your body in whichever it feels like as you attune to it – whether that’s jumping up and down and stamping or very gently twirling your hand or stretching your back or spinning around or putting your hands in the air – they’re all different types of expression. And as you connect with your body, your body will inevitable guide you as it knows what it needs to do, what it in needs to express in order to bring itself back into balance. Just like a sneeze or a yawn!

So, in our self-directed dance activity that we have once a week, we come together in a space and we dance. It’s like a movement meditation. The music supports the movement and goes through a wave like flow generally starting in a slow, quiet manner inviting us to attune to our inner self, building to a more vibrant, energetic, chaotic rhythm that invites us to shake it all out before gradually returning to a stillness where we can return home after letting it all go so we can let it be.

Within the 45 minute wave of music there are many invitations to many different parts of ourselves to express themselves. Of course, accepting these invitations is not always easy as there can be a large element of self-consciousness. Moving yourself in a way that you truly feel like can feel quite exposing. Exposing different parts of ourselves in this way can evoke feelings of vulnerability in us and, sometimes, discomfort. So a key thing for the space that we create is that it is safe. It is an emotionally safe place to express yourself. So as you move, and as you expose parts of yourself that feel vulnerable, you experience that it is safe, that you are safe from harm. You are in a safe place to express yourself, to be yourself. Sometimes simply by looking around the room and seeing others expressing themselves it becomes easier to give yourself permission to do the same. This experience can be quite transformative.

We started our self-directed dance activity in September 2019 when we created our first co-created curriculum, and it has remained on the menu since then. We come together each Wednesday with a playlist of about 45 minutes of music. The playlist is put together by one of us which in itself offers the creator the opportunity to attune, reflect and express themselves through their choices of music – it can be quite a personal process. We do a quick optional check in about what we might be bringing with us to the dance today and what we may wish to focus on or what we hope to transform and leave with. And then we dance. And sometimes it’s loud and boisterous with lots of interactions between us all and sometimes it’s quieter and more introspective. Each time is unique. Each time is what it is. We then do a quick optional check out to share our experience and how we are now and then we part. Generally the reports back are that the person has managed to process something that’s been on their minds or something came up that they’re weren’t aware of and they’ve managed to work through it or some of it. Overall, there’s just that sense of this feels good, I feel grounded, I’m grateful I can do this in school and I’m glad I did this today.

Ideally, in my world, we’d have dance on the menu every day – but we are just starting out on our journey so we’ll be patient, knowing that the best is yet to come…

“I have come to drag you out of yourself and take you in my heart. I have come to bring out the beauty you never know you had and lift you like a prayer to the sky.” ~Rumi

Richard Boate

The fact that some students were complaining of boredom isn’t necessarily alarming. Part of the philosophy of democratic schools and Sudbury schools in particular, is that learning to be with, and process your boredom is an important process for everyone. A lot of creativity emerges from situations where we are initially bored, and managing the feeling of boredom is an important part of becoming a self-directed, well balanced person.

In this instance, the students who were bored were complaining that it was because their friends were on screens all day. All day may have been something of an exaggeration, but it was true that there was a lot of screen usage. Now, many people do good and nourishing things on screens. Students and staff use screens to make art and music, write, research and of course, entertain themselves, which is a perfectly valid way to use them too, if not done to excess.

But when we asked the students in question whether they wanted to be on screens, they actually said they didn’t. Furthermore, they said they felt addicted to them.

Self-directed learning is not the same as learning by yourself, without help. It is still supported learning, and it is rooted in support from the community around the student. So we set out to address this situation as a community. We had individual and group conversations about screens, and we agreed that staff would regularly check in with the group in question when they were on screens to see if they were using them intentionally or if they needed support to be more conscious about what they wanted to do.

One week it would feel like we were making progress, and another it seemed we were still at square one!

Around the same time that this was happening, we were in the process of having our first Whole School Evaluation. We distributed questionnaires (students and staff collaborated on the questions) about how everyone felt things were going. What did we like about the school and what was so-so? Where were we strong, and where did we need to change?

The year ended with a one day workshop hosted by the excellent Dave Dunn. Throughout the day we had a number of frank conversations, and played some fun games too – at one point writing down thoughts on a topic on a piece of paper before scrunching them into balls and having a big snowball fight with them, with the survivors then picking up the snowballs nearest them and reading them out loud.

Of the various activities we did, one thing in particular stood out for a lot of people – a graph with the vertical axis representing expectations of excellence in a community and the horizontal axis signifying care and support. You could place a point anywhere on the graph to represent a given organisation’s culture.

If the dot was high on expectations of excellence but low on care and support you ended up with a pressure cooker environment bordering on neglect. While I qualify this by acknowledging that there are of course many wonderful teachers in mainstream schools and many students who are perfectly happy, there is no doubt that many of the staff and students’ experiences of traditional education had been one where the dot had been too low on care and support.

The flip-side of that was that if the dot is low on the expectation of excellence axis and high on care and support, you have a culture that is coddling and enabling. The chart helped us understand that we could bring in all the new systems and structures in the world to support students, but if we were truly a school of equals, we all needed to accept responsibility for upholding the culture of the school.

I’ll go deeper into the balance between expectations of excellence and care and support in a future blog post, as it’s informed a lot of conversations since.

By the end of the day, we had created work-groups focused on a number of key areas we needed to work on over the summer based on our conversations on the day and the feedback we received via the questionnaires.

Screen use was in there, of course, along with many other work-ons. Chief among them was structure. Students wanted to direct their learning but they wanted further structure for that to take place in. It wasn’t clear exactly what shape that would, could or should take. For some people, it meant more formal classes, for others it meant a timetable, and for many people, the word simply represented an undefined opposite of the listlessness they had been feeling towards the end of the school year.

There was nothing to stop classes or timetables from emerging in the school previously – democratic education means no coercive structure, as long as people agree democratically, the school be organised in a variety of ways that may be more, or less structured. So often in the past, a class would be requested only for interest to dissipate, or engagement to falter at the first bit of boredom or challenge, or simply because someone who had asked for the class felt like doing something else when the scheduled time came around.

Similarly, since so many things were organised spontaneously on the day of or day before they were due to happen, or by one group without consulting other people in the school who may have made other plans, events would often end up clashing or running into each other.

Other issues included arriving at the school feeling like arriving in a big city for the first time, with no direction, and far too many options. It could be very daunting in the first couple of weeks.

So whatever form this ‘structure’ would take, it needed to strike a delicate balance between organising the school week and making sure everyone knew what was on and when, holding people and showing them that they belonged on the one hand, and on the other hand, it needed to still leave time and space for deep conversations to come out of nowhere, or big games of ‘capture the flag’, and for people’s autonomy to be respected.

By not having a set curriculum, we solved a number of problems that plague traditional education, but this brought its own problems. That said, progress is a continual journey of replacing one set of problems with a preferable set of problems – a life without any problems would be boring and purposeless.

So having problems was fine, but we felt we could do better. We had taken away the drudgery of endless rote learning and the overemphasis on linguistic and mathematical intelligence at the expense of other competencies, we had removed the top-down, ‘because-I-said-so’ style of governance that robs students of their initiative and self-confidence.

But we found it wasn’t enough to just remove problems, we needed to craft an alternative beyond a laissez faire, anything goes on any given day approach. We had run into the tragedy of the commons – everyone was doing what they individually wanted to do, resulting in no one quite being happy with how things were going – a coordinated solution was needed. We needed to discuss as a community what our own personal ideal school looked like, and actively, systemically build it.

So we did!

We found ways to democratically make a curriculum that could meet everyone’s needs while still being possible with the resources of time, space, and people that we have.

We brought in Home Groups so people feel welcomed, seen and heard as soon as they come into the community. We have a Monday Morning Circle to ensure everyone knows or can make known any important goings on in the week to come. We have regular check-ins to see how people are doing on an individual basis. We brought in restorative mediation to give people different conflict resolution options. We established core hours so the whole school community is present for at least five hours per day and brought in tidy-up time at the end of the core hours to remedy the mad rush to clean up at the end of the school day that we used to have.

We also introduced School Evolution Week and Culture Club. Twice per school year, SEW presents an opportunity to have the same discussion we had for the Whole School Evaluation. We adjust the curriculum, and we have world cafes (a well-known method of group discussion/brainstorming) on important topics for the school in order to brainstorm improvements. This way, we are constantly and systemically tweaking and adjusting how we do things to make the best school for us all. Culture Club in turn provides a place for students and staff to continue that conversation throughout the year, considering everything from how we all greet each other, to making the school meeting more humorous, or having more communal meals and celebrations.

Of course, all of these new systems and structures were voted in by the whole school community.

Interestingly, when we met all the needs and requests that arose throughout the Whole School Evaluation, screens stopped being a problem. Somewhere along the line, we had indirectly solved the issue; it didn’t require its own specific solution. Some student’s needs weren’t quite being met in the community, and so they wanted to escape into something distracting. By meeting those needs sufficiently, through an extensive process of listening, discussing and formulating solutions, they no longer felt a need to escape.

This isn’t really surprising. Numerous studies of addiction have shown that it’s a form of dissociation, a way of escaping a less than ideal reality. 

For instance, when word got out that a large proportion of US troops had become drug addicts to cope with the horrific situation they found themselves in while on duty during the Vietnam war, there was a collective panic about having to reintegrate so many addicts into society. However, the problem never manifested. When the soldiers were back with their families and in their communities, the same need to escape no longer existed, and approximately nine out of ten soldiers who had used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that, even without a direct solution, by listening very carefully to the whole community and adjusting the life of the school accordingly, the main addictive behaviour we had seen stopped occurring, and people have been much more intentional in their use of technology since.

Written by Khalil Moran

The school day began much like any other on 12th March 2020. Students and staff arrived ready for whatever projects or courses they were working on. Some studied in the library, some worked on a puzzle in the kitchen, some played basketball. We were all well aware of the growing concern over Covid-19 in Ireland, but were still confident that our school would remain open, at least for a time longer. Then the announcement came from the Taoiseach and soon the 12th of March became our last day to be physically in school for the foreseeable future.

The question that racked all our minds after a short period of adjusting to the lockdown situation was how do we take our learning community online? How do we move our experiential courses, ever-flowing sense of play and participation, kitchen discussions and conversations, and the like online? How? It took a good deal of research and testing from a few of our dedicated staff before we arrived at an online platform that we felt could support our tight-knit community. Within two weeks of the lockdown, Wicklow Sudbury School had an online presence.

The first, and most attended event online was our daily lunchtime hangouts. Mealtime in our school has always been considered a space for conversation and connection, and it was no surprise to see so many smiling faces on Zoom that day. Everyone got a chance to share how they were doing and what they were up to with the lockdown, stories were swapped, jokes shared. The glue that held our community together was strong.

Courses began to appear online as well. Staff translated the classes they had been offering while we were still physically in the school to the online platform and soon students and staff alike were able to freely engage in whatever peaked their interest for what was on offer. Classes such as music theory for guitar, understanding society, art, learning seminars and more were on offer. Social hangouts still abound throughout the week, with a big favourite being a storytelling hour on Fridays, in addition to the lunch hangouts of course.

In addition to the courses, games and activities began to naturally take shape as student participation increased. The daily drawing challenge as well as online board games occupied many throughout the week!

Staff were able to form up our “home groups”, small mixed-aged groups of 4 or 5 students who met weekly to check in, play a game, plan our weeks etc… And from our homegroups, it gave staff a chance to continue to work one-on-one with students as well.

By a few months into the lockdown, we had found our rhythm and also re-discovered something most of us already knew about our school. That connection was at the core to what we did. It didn’t matter how many courses were on offer, what activities were on, any of that. The baseline for our community was to stay connected to each other, and from that the “school” naturally grew out of it. It’s something we’ve known since the school began, it’s a tenet of our philosophy for learning; but, it’s never something we thought would be tested with something as extreme as a school closure due to the lockdown.

The online platform we established became like a coral reef for the school during lockdown. In the open sea of the web, this one space offered a habitat for connection and community to find purchase and then to flourish in a unique learning environment. Of course there were a few “fish” that preferred to stay in the less tended, social areas of the reef, but we even found that they too were doing well. Self-directed learning had empowered them to follow whatever path they wished over the lockdown and they found a way to thrive.

We’ve learned a lot since coming back to school for the 2020/2021 school year. We are thankful to be together again and feel more resilient for what might come our way. As always, watching the constant evolution of our school environment is incredibly satisfying and our time online was a perfect example of that. Here’s to whatever the future holds!

Written by Marc Barker

A 2013 study from Google found that the company’s most innovative and important ideas came less often from the teams characterised by technical excellence, and more from B teams who practiced equality, generosity, and curiosity towards each others’ ideas and above all emotional safety. These are the qualities most valued in Sudbury schools as well.

It’s becoming common knowledge that, with regard to creativity and skill level, Google and other multinationals are not happy with the skill level of today’s graduates. Governments depend on the tax revenue from the jobs these multinationals create, and as a result have made a big push towards STEM subjects in many countries.

But in 2013, Google themselves, after analysing all the data they had accumulated about hiring, firing and promotion since the company’s incorporation in 1998 have published powerful findings, which show that, of the top attributes that go into being a top employee at google, the least important was, in fact, STEM expertise.

The seven attributes that ranked above STEM expertise are all soft skills – being a good coach,; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others; having empathy and being supportive of one’s colleagues;being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

It’s worth a look at how those core skills are woven into the very fabric of Sudbury.

At Sudbury, everyone is a teacher and everyone is a student. We all coach each other. Everyday I see students helping and teaching each other – whether that’s with reading or writing, passing on the latest piano song doing the rounds, or simply sharing something they learned about the world recently. Beyond that, people are comfortable enough to always look for feedback on their songs, coding, story writing and more. While their peers are usually thoughtful and judicious in giving it.

It’s similar when it comes to ‘communication and listening’. The engine of the school is discourse. If you are a bad listener, that will quickly become apparent in the various meetings that take place to run the school and resolve conflict. If it does, you will be calmly coached by your peers to be more present and engage with others.

The time and space afforded to students to develop their interpersonal skills has, from what I have seen in my two years at the school, allowed them to forge deep relationships based on mutual respect and empathy. A student once told me they felt they had passed through the honeymoon period of not noticing their friends flaws. But they sagely acknowledged that genuine friendship comes not just from looking past those flaws, but gently and patiently helping your friends to grow beyond them.

In terms of problem solving, the students, through their various projects and the myriad proposals which have come before them at the school meetings, have had to approach problems from many different angles and have had the benefit, through listening to other school community members, of hearing a diverse set of perspectives on those problems.

One example being the recording booth the students made in our music room. They had to research how to make it. Then choose the best method for the budget they had. They went off to a local second hand store and from the hodge podge of materials they found there they made their own sound proof recording booth. I think that’s the kind of initiative Google and many others would agree is not quite as encouraged in traditional schools.

Finally, ‘making connections across complex ideas’. This one is a great attribute to highlight the kind of unstructured learning that happens in the school. Over time I have heard or participated in conversations about climate change, cultural appropriation, gender, homelessness, consent, representation, inequality and trans-humanism, to name a few. At any moment any of these kids can strike up conversation on one of those topics, and almost instantly find two or three enthusiastic participants in the debate. Of course, as young people, there are still many concepts they have not been exposed to, but when they are, they can often get to grips with them quickly and in a very natural and creative way.

What makes a team tick?

As part of their research, Google spent two years conducting more than 200 interviews with Google employees and looking at more than 250 attributes of 180+ active Google teams. Contrary to the researchers’ expectations, they found that “Who is on a team matters less than how the team members interact, structure their work, and view their contributions.”

Google learned that there are five key dynamics that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google. These dynamics can be applied beyond Google groups and would indicate success in any collaborative project in both work and school. So how does a democratic school develop these dynamics and lay the groundwork for a successful career?

1. Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed?
2. Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high quality work on time?
3. Structure & clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?
4. Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?
5. Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

The study found that psychological safety was by far the most important ingredient for a successful work group and was the underpinning of the other four dynamics. Team members thrive when they can trust each other, and to build trust, team members must know how to listen to and empathise with each other. Psychological safety is among the most important aspects of Wicklow Sudbury School. Our community has a significant focus on creating a safe environment where students feel that they are supported and that they are allowed to experiment and explore their passions and ideas without fear of negative repercussions.

The values of our school community also encourage the development of the other four dynamics. Students’ work is meaningful to them because they choose the work themselves, and this is the reason the work matters to the students as well. When the students work in groups, they can rely on each other to do good work because they all want to be in the group and value the work they’re doing together.

Obviously not every student (or maybe any student) in Wicklow Sudbury wants to work for Google, and multinational corporations are far from the final arbiters of what we as a society should value. But this study matters because it shows that soft, abstract skills like empathy and creativity are just as important to success as hard skills.

Click here to read the study

By Khalil Moran and Rachel Kuhn