Over the past weekend of June 21-23, 2019, we held our annual Liberated Learners Conference for people who are working at the various programs across our network.  This year we welcomed about twenty-five people from nine programs.  For me, this weekend has become a celebration of having colleagues on this adventure of supporting teens and families to live without school.

            Here are some of my highlights of the weekend:

• Individuals making a real effort to attend from upstate New York (Deep Root), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (Princeton, Bucks, Raritan Learning Cooperatives), Massachusetts (Bay State), New Hampshire (BigFish), Virginia (Embark), and Texas (Epic), along with several North Star staff and Board members.
• Interesting workshops such as: Math in LL Centers, Running Classes in Self-Directed Education Centers, Recruiting and Retaining Volunteers, Unschooling Music Program, When We Don’t Feel Helpful, Supporting College Applications, Crisis Planning, and The Benefits of Video Games.
• An opportunity for each of us to share our highlights of the year and our most memorable stories.
• Organized discussions of how we might leverage our network and our vision for the future of Liberated Learners.

            During the academic year, most of us have very few local colleagues with whom we can share our stories in a meaningful and mutually supportive manner.  The chance to relax, laugh, and empathize is a deeply re-assuring and valuable time for all of us.

            We identified a few specific goals for the coming year:  1) building out a process for encouraging week-long exchanges among our teens at each other’s centers; 2) creating a Liberated Learners social media presence by allocating some limited funds to hire someone to do this task (stay tuned for the job application)  3)  ongoing improvements to our online portfolio application now re-named The Compass App.

            I am delighted to hold a role at this conference as a veteran founder and now book author about the movement, and I am grateful for the chance to learn how other people are doing things differently than we have been doing them at North Star.  Liberated Learners is an open-source network, and the fresh energy, skills, and vision of all the people across the network provide a wealth of creativity and knowledge.

            Meanwhile, I had a couple of other interesting thoughts at the conference I want to share about learning and what our centers are offering to our members:

            Even among these wonderful friends and colleagues, there were moments when we had workshops going on that I wasn’t feeling up to attending.  Sometimes I felt a need to attend to some other tasks, or I wanted to have a private conversation with a specific individual, or I just wanted to step outside and feel the sunshine.  It wasn’t a big deal.

            Except, we all know, that this is a Very Big Deal to our teens at our centers.  The opportunity to choose to go to a class or not is a fundamental experience they have rarely had in school.  Living with this freedom and making choices is an important piece of developing maturity.  Giving young people, especially “students”, this level of choice about their learning is both powerful and simple.  It is really nothing more than treating them the same we treat ourselves in a conference setting.

            The second idea is related:  the main way to ruin the conference for all of us would have been to impose any kind of requirement about attending workshops, and then having some version of quizzes or reporting required to demonstrate what we learned from our attendance.  Any sort of coercion and evaluation of the attendees learning would have completely sapped the enthusiasm and joy out of our weekend.  This idea is so obvious it hardly needs to be stated, but again, it is the full difference between attending a conference for one’s own purposes versus attending compulsory school classes for the sake of credits and grades.

            Finally, one of the highlights for me came at the end of the weekend, after our final workshop.   A new staff member at one of our centers took me aside and said,

“You know how we all describe the parent who tells us, ‘Thank you for your work.  I feel that I have my child back.’  Well, I just want to tell you ‘Thank you for creating this model.  As an adult, I now feel I have myself back.’”

            Such a team we are.  Gathering in this way is a lovely closure to the past year and sets us up for a summer of vision and planning for the fall.  Together, we all keep each other going.