Intentions
Agile
Ministry
A Self-Directed Learning Community for children and teens, ages 8 to 13.
"You have created a magical environment where the children feel safe, heard and alive." - Corinn, mom
Welcome
WE ARE TEMPORARILY CLOSED AND WILL REOPEN FALL 2023!!
Welcome to Intentions Agile Ministry, a self-directed learning community for children ages 8 to 13 years. Our drop-off program meets in Whitinsville, MA on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:00am to 4:00pm.
Our mission is to support children and teens in living a spirit-centered life, accessing their deepest wisdom, and discovering who they are in their fullest expression of themselves. We support their social and emotional health, as they learn and grow together with their mixed age peers. Through play, curiosity, self-responsibility, spontaneity, experimentation, self-awareness and self-expression, children can align with their truth, connect with their innate gifts, and share those gifts with the world!
Freedom & Flexibility
With the Agile model, everyone is both a teacher and a learner. All community members are valued for who they are and everyone has a voice in creating our community. Having a mixed-age group is a key component as collaboration between the children, teens, facilitators, volunteers, and the greater community is the basis of our learning community.
"Self-Directed Education is education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the person becoming educated, whether or not those activities were chosen deliberately for the purpose of education."
Learning is natural and happening all the time. Community members will naturally follow their own interests. Offerings are interest-based and provided by those within our group and in the larger community. The goal of the facilitators is to create an environment that maximizes the ability for our students to learn and grow.
Experiencing true freedom around ones learning is empowering. Learning to be self motivated, self-responsible, and self-reflective prepares children for learning and collaboration anywhere and any time in life. Having trust and faith in this process and in your child is important. Children thrive when they have freedom around their own learning journey.
Daily Flow of our Days
9:00am - 4:00pm
We begin our day with a community meeting, where we play a connection game, set up our offerings and requests' board, and discuss our intentions for the day. We then experience the day together as a community, each day looking different than the prior days. There may be some opportunities and topics further explored and knowledge deepened, but we live in the present moment, and how our days unfold no one truly knows until we are experiencing it. You might see individual, small group, and whole group activities happening. There might be game play, building of projects, art creations, reading buddies, science experiments, hikes, cooking, outdoor play, hikes, amongst other things. We end our day with a community meeting to share our highs, lows, and gratitudes.
Our Location
We are temporarily closed for the spring 2023, but will reopen in the fall of 2023, with a new location in Northbridge, MA. Our new location abuts 50 acres of woods! Pictures to come soon!
Our NEW Focus- Fall 2023
Our Specialized
Self-Directed Learning Program
Our new focus will be working with homeschooling children who follow the path of self-direction. It is absolutely okay if your family is new to this path. Children enjoy freedom and will quickly assimilate well to autonomy. We offer a monthly parent support group to help alleviate fears that may come up around self-directed learning. It's inevitable to experience them. We all do!
A NEW CONCEPT:
This concept is new and we think it's exactly what is needed for our self-directed learning community! We intend to guide and support our students into their later teen years. Our program will age up each year. In the fall of 2023 we will begin with children and teens, ages 8 to 13. The following year we will age our program up to 9 to 14 years, the next year, 10 to 15 years, and so on, supporting teens right up to adulthood.
Together as a community of learners the sky is the limit! In a self-directed learning community the children steer the direction of learning, individually, in small groups, and as a whole community. They inspire each other to learn, grow, take on new challenges, expand their understanding of the world around them, experiment, try, fail, succeed, and learn more about who they are as learners and people. As the children have the need to learn something more advanced/specialized in preparation for entrepreneurship, college, vocational, or just adult life itself, we can bring in experts that will help properly prepare them. In the evolving years, as we continue their self-directed learning path together, children will begin to explore potential career paths and imagine their futures.
The Agile Cycle of Learning
* What do you want to experience today?
In an Agile Learning Community, we communicate how we want to spend our time, individually and as a group.
* How can you make it happen?
Agile Learners spend their days exploring, investigating, playing, creating, collaborating, imagining, inventing – once we know what we want, we make it happen!
"I feel bored." When I hear these words from children, I respond with, "Great, I wonder what you might experience next." Children are too often directed to the next activity, and the next, all day long, and boredom is not something they have experience with. When we choose our own path for a full 7 hours, there will be lulls, and in these lulls comes creation. Whether that's inviting others to an outdoor game, painting, choosing a recipe to bake- sky is the limit when your day is wide open!
* What did you learn from your choices?
Reflecting back on our days together, we develop awareness of what worked and what did not, so we can move forward more powerfully.
* How can you share it with the world?
We document our experiences to share with others.
The Roots of the
Agile Learning Model
The soil we draw from is trust in children, in each other, in you. The four assumptions - roots - which ground us are as follows:
Learning: Learning is natural. It is happening all the time.
Self-Direction People learn best by making their own decisions, and children are people.
Experience: People learn more from their culture and environment than from the content they are taught. The medium is the message.
Growth: Self-awareness and collective intelligence is catalyzed through cycles of intention, creation, reflection, and sharing.
