The 11th AERO Online School Starter Course will begin on September 26th, 2016. It will run until January.

 

AERO has helped start more that 100 educational alternatives that we know of. You can see a partial list here. Since AERO's mission is the Education Revolution, we try to help people create as many learner-centered alternatives as we can. This course has been the most effective way we have discovered to help people go from their dream and vision to the reality of a new, vibrant educational alternative.

 

The course is limited to 25 participating sites, although up to five people can participate from each site. Last year the course was quickly filled with an amazing variety of participants from around the country and around the world. This has been the case for the last few years, so you should enroll quickly to guarantee a space.

 

The course is generally not in real time except for an occasional optional live Skype or Google chat. The course is on a dedicated website that you access as you have time, responding to each section as we open it and responding to the posts of other students in the course. The site has videos, audio interviews, book excerpts, etc. So you can access it as you are able from anywhere in the world.

 

The two instructors are Jerry Mintz, director of AERO, and Chris Mercogliano, author of How to Grow a School and long-time director of Albany Free School.  But the key to the course is the interaction between the students.

 

Again you can take the course for 2 or 3 graduate credits from Antioch University New England. The full course is now $1000 but will rise to $1200 as the course fills up. It is now $1500 if you want graduate credit.

 

You can get more information about the course or sign up for it here. It has already started to fill up for this year!

 

If you have questions you can write to  Jerryaero@aol.com

By  ALISON GOPNIK

Parents and policy makers have become obsessed with getting young children to learn more, faster. But the picture of early learning that drives them is exactly the opposite of the one that emerges from developmental science.

In the last 30 years, the United States has completed its transformation to an information economy. Knowledge is as important in the 21st century as capital was in the 19th, or land in the 18th. In the same 30 years, scientists have discovered that even very young children learn more than we once thought possible. Put those together and our preoccupation with making children learn is no surprise.

Read the rest here to find out about their research.

Last month, six of the best teachers in the United States traveled to the country known for its top-performing education system: Finland. 

The teachers-who are the state teachers of the year for Texas, Virginia, New Jersey, Colorado, Georgia, and Kentucky-were in Finland for three full days, where they visited a school and went to lectures and workshops on education trends.  Then, they traveled to the Netherlands for EF Education First's Global Student Leaders Summit, which lasted for two days and was centered around human rights. 

EF, an international educational tours company, and the Council of Chief State School Officers had partnered to bring the teachers abroad (five received EF-CCSSO scholarships and one received a scholarship through a different EF program). The teachers were chosen because of an essay they wrote on preparing students for success in a global society. 

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