THREE COLUMN NETWORK
SINCE 2014
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GUIDES, NOT TEACHERS??
/ WHAT ARE LEARNING GUIDES?
SPRING 2014
Final decision on our first location
LATE SPRING 2014
All founding families and community members in place
FALL 2014
Three Column Sandhills opens its doors
OUTCOMES
CORE VALUES
Those three columns in our logo can be interpreted at least three different ways.
Learners in Three Column Network schools develop knowledge, skills, and understandings in a wide range of subject areas.
Three Column Network schools are all about joy, learning, and community.
Three Column Network schools belong to our learners, learning guides, and families.
PARTICIPANTS
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This is how we advertise for our paid learning guide positions:Three Column Sandhills seeks energetic, dynamic candidates for two new associate learning guides at our new YYYYY, North Carolina, location. Since 2014, the Three Column Network has provided a joyful learning community where participant-learners and their families build meaningful things together along the North Carolina - South Carolina border, in New England, and beyond. As an associate learning guide, you will work closely with the TC Sandhills community to assess participant-learners’ academic strengths, passions, and areas of concern; help them connect their interests and passions with TC Sandhills’ internationally benchmarked academic exit standards; help learners develop deeply meaningful “passion projects” in individual, small-group, and large-group settings; and participate in the daily life and work of our “unschool school” community.Are you tired of the “flat and dead” feeling of 20th-century-model schools? Eager to work with, not for a socioeconomically and culturally diverse small-town community? Curious to know what we mean by the phrases in bold in the paragraph above? If so, and if you’re a college graduate (or equivalent) with energy, passion, and enthusiasm, please contact justin@tcsandhills.org, call us at (910) XXX-XXXX, write to us at TC Sandhills, XXX Main Street, YYYYYY, NC 28ZZZ, or send a carrier pigeon for more information.
/ RECRUITING LEARNING GUIDES
UPCOMING EVENTS
What about these learning guides? How are they different from teachers in a typical school? Actually, when you stop and think about it, everyone involved with a Three Column Network school is a learning guide. Our learners themselves have primary ownership of their own learning, and they work to guide themselves and each other as they build meaningful things together. Learners’ families are the first learning guides they experience, and families are active members of Three Column communities … and of coures they continue to guide their young learners at home and in the community. But we also use the term learning guides to refer to the trained staff members who help learners connect their passions and interests to important knowledge, skills, and understandings. Learning guides are much more important than teachers in one of those factory-style schools, and their jobs and roles are very different from what teachers traditionally did, too. This is how we advertise for our paid learning guide positions:
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/ NEXT STEPS
This is what happens when we receive those phone calls, emails, and carrier pigeons:As you can probably tell, everything about Three Column Network schools is designed to send the message “we are not a typical school … not at all.” This is a position description for a Phase II Three Column School, when it has grown beyond its startup phase of one learning guide and 10-25 participant-learners. (Phase I TC schools will have one paid staff member, the learning guide, with parents and older participant-learners doing a lot of the support functions that require paid staff in 20th-century model schools … and with a number of other functions either outsourced to local businesses in the community (e.g., food service, legal services, accounting) or handled by the Network (e.g. payroll and HR) as the Network grows.) Associate learning guides gradually learn the ins and outs of functioning in an “unschool school” environment with assistance from the lead learning guide, from the participant-learners themselves, and from the learners’ families.
THREE VERSIONS OF THE THREE COLUMNS
INTERVIEWS AND MORE
NOT JUST "INDUCTION"
Once the new associate learning guide is hired and moves to town, the process of community building begins in earnest. Many of us are probably familiar with what doesn’t happen when a new teacher is hired at a factory-model school. They don’t meet the community, they don’t meet their students’ families, and they don’t get very much support or training in “the way things are done around here.” Instead, they’re given keys to a classroom, a set of textbooks, and responsibility for teaching somewhere between 20 and 150 young people! Oh, and maybe a “mentor teacher” who will be available to meet with them once or twice a week for a few minutes. No wonder statistics show that something like 50% of all new teachers in factory-model schools will quit within the first five years, and a big percentage of those don’t even make it through the first year. And we all know that the numbers are higher where the needs are greater, especially in the small towns and rural areas where Three Column Network schools will be starting up.
But we handle the “induction” of new learning guides in a very different way. For one thing, an associate learning guide doesn’t have complete responsibility for anybody’s learning! In Three Column Network schools, the learners themselves have primary responsibility for their own learning anyway. Learning guides are just that: guides through the process who help you connect your interests with real-world skills and with other areas that you might never have thought about. The first step for a new associate learning guide is to get to know the learning community: the learners and their families. We’ll spend some time eating together, talking together, and sharing our dreams, goals, and plans with each other. Then the new guide, with help from the experienced lead learning guide at the school, will start working with small groups of learners … or maybe even with one learner at a time. They might help lead a small group discussion; they might help solve a challenging problem; they might demonstrate how to use a piece of equipment; or they might listen to one learner’s presentation of an almost-finished “passion project,” ask questions, and make some suggestions if the “passion project” isn’t quite as good as it could be. After a few weeks or months, the associate learning guide should be ready to take on more and more responsibility. Eventually, the associate learning guides will be comfortable enough with building meaningful learning that they might just be asked to be lead learning guides in new Three Column Network locations.
Since TC Network schools will be legally organized as cooperatives, with legal ownership shared by participant families and learning guides, the hiring process is as important and serious as that of any other organization that will, in time, grant an equity ownership share to its members. Picture a law or accounting firm organized as a partnership; it hires junior associates with the hope that, in time, some (or most or all) will become partners, and it works carefully to develop those “right people” (to use Jim Collins’ terminology) even after they’re “in the right seats on the bus.” An associate learning guide candidate will send in an application packet including teaching certifications (if applicable), transcripts, recommendations, and the like, but that is by far the least important phase of the process. After a preliminary email conversation, promising candidates will have a phone interview with the hiring committee at the school (the lead learning guide ex officio, plus participant-learners and family members chosen by the membership of the cooperative). If the candidate still seems promising, a site visit will be arranged, and the candidate will spend a day immersed in the work of the joyful learning community on site. Formal and informal conversations with the committee members and with the rest of the TC community will take place as the candidate assists with participant-learners’ projects, interacts with various community members, and eats breakfast and lunch with the community. After a full day on site, it should be apparent to both the candidate and the hiring committee whether there is a good fit or not. If necessary, the candidate can be discussed in greater detail at a meeting of the whole membership, since hiring decisions (like all major decisions in TC Network schools) are made by consensus of the membership.
WHO OWNS THE DECISION?
