Announcing "The Microschool Summit - Changing education, one small school at a time!"

Our first 2022 LearningRevolution.com mini-conference: "The Microschool Summit - Changing education, one small school at a time!" will be held online (and for free) on Thursday, May 19th, 2022.

Small schools have been around as long as humans have been teaching their children. One (or more) caring adult who seeks to empower youth to learn the skills and wisdom needed to lead a productive life in the community. Education today has become large and focused on many things beyond the needs of learners, such as tests, curriculum and assessment. The pandemic has shown a spotlight on the serious limitations of systemic education, and has caused many to take the learning of their children into their own hands.

Homeschooling, pandemic pods, and microschools are all ways that families have chosen to provide their children with a smaller, more child-centered learning environment. Join us at the first in a series of Microschool Summits to explore microschools, their origins, and their potential to reshape education, one student and one small school at a time.

The call for proposals is now open. We encourage proposals that showcase effective examples of microschool planning, implementation, and sustainability. 

This is a free event, being held live online and also recorded.
REGISTER HERE
to attend live and/or to receive the recording links afterward.
Please also join this Learning Revolution network to be kept updated on this and future events. 

Everyone is invited to participate in our LearningRevolution.com conference events, which are designed to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing among information professionals worldwide. Each three-hour event consists of a keynote panel, 10-15 crowd-sourced thirty-minute presentations, and a closing keynote. 

Participants are encouraged to use #microschools and #microschoolsummit on their social media posts about the event.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS, SPECIAL GUESTS, AND ORGANIZERS:

Mara Linaberger (@mlinaberger)
Founder & President, Microschool Builders, LLC

Dr. Mara Linaberger believes that each of us has chosen to be here at this moment in time for a specific reason—that we are each on a mission that we chose for ourselves. And that figuring out what we love, what we’re good at, and how we can be of service is the engine we need to fuel a lifetime of joyful learning. Mara also believes that school often slows down or stifles that excitement for students. So she is on a mission to create a global network of 100 microschools in the next 20 years—to harness education toward helping amazing children to develop their highest potentials while making learning fun again!

Mara is a life-long educator, author, technologist, artist, ballroom dancer, and musician, having spent 25 years in service as a public school educator, teacher trainer, and administrator. Completing a doctorate in Instructional Technology, she went on to earn a Superintendent’s Letter of Eligibility in Pennsylvania. Launching Mindful Technology Consultants in 2013, she continues to train teachers at the masters level on the use of digital portfolios as alternative assessments and on bringing mindfulness practices into the classroom.

Mara is the international two-time best selling author of HELP! My Child Hates School and The Micro-School Builder’s Handbook. Mara currently lives in Harmony, PA, with her husband Michael while she travels far and wide, directly supporting clients in her global Microschool Builders programs.

Chris Mercogliano
Albany Free School

Chris was a teacher at the Albany Free School for thirty-five years and stepped down as director in June, 2007 to concentrate on writing and speaking about non-controlling education and child rearing. He is the author of Making It Up As We Go Along, the Story of the Albany Free School (Heinemann 1998), Teaching the Restless, One School’s Remarkable No-Ritalin Approach to Helping Children Learn and Succeed (Beacon Press 2004), How to Grow a School: Starting and Sustaining Schools That Work (Oxford Village Press 2006), In Defense of Childhood: Protecting Kids’ Inner Wildness (Beacon Press 2007), and the forthcoming A School Must Have a Heart. His essays, commentaries and reviews have appeared in numerous publications around the world, as well as in seven anthologies. He has been featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio’s “Ideas,” and other nationally syndicated radio shows. The father of two wonderful daughters, he lives with his wife Betsy on a one-acre farm in downtown Albany, New York.

 

Kelly Smith (@kellysmithinaz)
Prenda

Kelly Smith is the Founder and CEO of Prenda (prendaschool.com), an education company that helps people run microschools out of their homes. He has been obsessed with learning and building since childhood – from a neighborhood baseball card business to a rap album to a line of cleaning products to high energy laser physics. After earning a master’s degree in nuclear fusion from MIT, Kelly served in engineering and marketing roles at various technology companies, before selling a small software business in clean energy. He started volunteering with an after-school code club at the local public library, helping kids learn computer programming, and he was so excited about the power of self-learning that he started a micro-school around his kitchen table in January 2018. Kelly lives in Mesa, Arizona, with his wife and four children.

 

Steve Hargadon (@stevehargadon)
Learning Revolution

Steve Hargadon is the founder and director of the Learning Revolution Project, the host of the Future of Education and Reinventing School interview series, and the founder and chair (or co-chair) of a number of annual worldwide virtual events, including the Global Education Conference and the Library 2.0 series of mini-conferences. Steve's work has been around the democratization of learning and professional development. He pioneered the use of live, virtual, and peer-to-peer education conferences. He popularized the idea of "unconferences" for educators, built one of the first modern social networks for teachers in 2007 (Classroom 2.0), and developed the "conditions of learning" exercise for local educational conversation and change. He supported and encouraged the development of thousands of other education-related networks, particularly for professional development. For over a decade, he has run a large annual ed-tech unconference, now called Hack Education (previously EduBloggerCon). He blogs, speaks, and consults on education and technology, and his virtual and physical events and online communities have over 150,000 members.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:

The call for proposals for the 2022 Microschool Summit is now open. Please click here for more details and to submit a session proposal.

This is a free event, being held live online and also recorded.
REGISTER HERE
to attend live and/or to receive the recording links afterward.
Please also join this Learning Revolution network to be kept updated on this and future events. 

Supporting teachers as they build the microschool of their dreams, in less than a year, without sacrificing salary or sanity.