a typical day

What does a typical day at ALC look like?

School is open at 8:30 AM and students start arriving. We have slow, easy mornings spent in conversation, breakfast making (for some), and transitioning into a busy day. Students are not required to be at the school right on time, and this makes mornings less stressful, low pressure, and community-centric. The first official activity in our day is our morning intention sharing meeting at 10:15 AM. Students are required to attend morning meeting and set their intentions for the day.

The week starts with a schedule-coordinating meeting that we call Set-The-Week. All students and staff gather to determine days and times for offerings, workshops, trips, projects, and meetings that will take place during the week. These opportunities come from students, staff, parents, and community members.

From Set-The-Week on Mondays, or to start the day Tuesday through Friday, students gather in their “Spawn Points.” (Spawn Points are similar to homerooms.) The facilitator reminds them of the activities scheduled for the day while they update their kanbans. Students take on the roles of meeting facilitator and Trello (digital Kanban) keeper, starting the meeting and making sure each person gets a chance to share their intentions for the day. The meeting is usually ten to fifteen minutes; when it ends, everyone has heard each other’s plans—useful for sharing inspiration and scheduling—and had their intentions documented for checking-in with later.

Sometimes, the description for what happens between 10:15 am and 3 pm is best described simply as “magic.” It changes monthly, weekly, daily. The days are full of trips, classes, games, discussions, stories, creation, collaboration, and surprises. It’s all work and it’s all play. Check out any ALC social media site to see what kinds of things are going on.

In the afternoon, everyone participates in a quick school clean-up. They then move into the reflection-focused part of the day. They have a short meeting in which they check in on their intentions from the morning, document the things they did during the day, and reflect on whether they accomplished what they wanted to. Our afternoon reflection meeting involves sharing out loud a "high" of our day, a "low" of our day, and something for which we are grateful. Ending the day together gives us a final chance to connect and appreciate each other before we disperse into our separate evenings.