Videos

• What Is Self-Directed Education? An introductory illustration from Peter Gray and the Alliance for Self-Directed Education

• Overview of Agile Learning Centers- Featuring our very own Director/Facilitator Rebekah Canu

• Peter Gray: Mother Nature's Pedagogy: Insights from Evolutionary Psychology- Excellent summary of Evolutionary Psychologist Peter Gray's research on children’s ability to educate themselves.

  The Crisis of an Outdated Paradigm Tomis, ALC Facilitator on the crisis created by our outdated educational paradigm.

• The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us An articulate RSA Animate of Dan Pink’s famous talk.

• Hackschooling Makes Me Happy A 13 year old homeschooler, Logan LaPlante, describes how he hacks his own education to create the life he wants for himself.

• What If We Trusted You? A great talk by Jerry Michalski about how traditional schools are set up around the belief that children do not want to learn.

• Do Schools Kill Creativity? Famous talk from Ken Robinson.

• Exploring the Realm of Self-Directed Education Akilah S. Richards and Laura Kriegel from the Alliance for Self-Directed Education explain how free/democratic schools, learning centers, co-ops and more relate.

• Changing Education Paradigms An RSA Animate of another great Ken Robinson talk on Education.

Articles

The Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE)

• ASDE’s main website, self-directed.org contains a primer on Self-Directed Education (SDE), as well other videos and resources to better understand SDE. For the must-read primer on SDE, start with “What is Self-Directed Education?” and click on the bottom of each page to continue to “The Four Educative Drives,” “The Six Optimizing Conditions” (which describes the environment we aim to create at Wildwood), “Why Do People Choose Self-Directed Education?,” and “How Do People Practice Self-Directed Education?”.

• ASDE’s online magazine, Tipping Points is full of stories and first-hand experiences from the diverse perspectives that make up the SDE movement.

A Thousand Rivers by Carol Black

This essay really makes self-directed learning real. "How did you learn to use a computer? Did a friend help you? Did you read the manual? Did you just sit down and start playing around with it? Did you do a little bit of all of those things? Do you even remember? You just learned it, right?"

Freedom to Learn: Dr. Peter Gray's blog
Peter Gray is a professor in psychology, renowned child development expert, self-directed learning advocate.

Some recommended articles by Peter Grey:

• The Value of Play

• Survey of Grown Unschoolers (research on the long-term outcomes of self-directed education)

• Children Teach Themselves to Read 

Books

 Free to Learn by Peter Gray 

Well-built and researched study of history of compulsory education, and a persuasive call to arms for a self-directed education revolution. Formative in Wildwood’s founders' thinking.

How Children Learn by John Holt

Instead of Education by John Holt

Quite possibly the most concise and well-spoken thinker on self-directed education.  

Free at Last by Daniel Greenberg
Overview of Sudbury Valley school by founder and former physics teacher. Provides slice-of-life as well as applied philosophy and history of school. Free E-book here.

Legacy of Trust by Greenberg and Sadofsky
Comprehensive study with in-depth interviews of the first generations of Sudbury Valley alumni.

Academic Articles

PLAY AND LEARNING

• Sugata Mitra. Minimally invasive education: A progress report on the ‘hole-in-the-wall’ experiments.

• P. Gray. The special value of age-mixed play.

• P. Gray. Playing in the Zone of Proximal Development: Qualities of Self-Directed Age Mixing Between Adolescents and Young Children at a Democratic School.

STUDENT INTEREST AND LEARNING

Ainley, Mary. 2012. “Students’ Interest and Engagement in Classroom Activities.” In Handbook of Research on Student Engagement, edited by S. L. Christenson, A. L. Reschly, and C. Wylie, 283–302. New York: Springer.

Engel, Susan. 2011. “Children’s Need to Know: Curiosity in Schools.” Harvard Educational Review 81 (4). Harvard Education Publishing Group: 625–45.

Harackiewicz, Judith M., and Chris S. Hulleman. 2010. “The Importance of Interest: The Role of Achievement Goals and Task Values in Promoting the Development of Interest.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4 (1). Blackwell Publishing Ltd: 42–52.

Schiefele, Ulrich, Andreas Krapp, and Adolf Winteler. 1992. “Interest as a Predictor of Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Research.” Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Seel, Norbert M. 2012. Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Boston, MA: Springer US.

SOCIAL LEARNING

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning : Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Tenenberg, Josh, and Maria Knobelsdorf. 2014. “Out of Our Minds: A Review of Sociocultural Cognition Theory.” Computer Science Education 24 (1). Routledge: 1–24.

Thomas, Douglas, and John Seely Brown. 2011. A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change. Vol. 219. CreateSpace Lexington, KY.

Vygotskii, L. S., and Michael Cole. 1978. Mind in Society : The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Weinberger, David. 2014. Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. Basic Books.

Wenger, Etienne. 1998. Communities of Practice : Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge, U.K.; New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press.

Wertsch, James V. 1985. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

AUTONOMY AND LEARNING

•  Black, Aaron E., and Edward L. Deci. 2000. “The Effects of Instructors’ Autonomy Support and Students' Autonomous Motivation on Learning Organic Chemistry: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective.” Science Education 84 (6): 740.

• Dickinson, Leslie. 1995. “Autonomy and Motivation a Literature Review.” System 23 (2): 165–74.

• Evans, Miriam, and Alyssa R. Boucher. 2015. “Optimizing the Power of Choice: Supporting Student Autonomy to Foster Motivation and Engagement in Learning.” Mind, Brain and Education: The Official Journal of the International Mind, Brain, and Education Society 9 (2): 87–91.

• León, Jaime, Juan L. Núñez, and Jeffrey Liew. 2015. “Self-Determination and STEM Education: Effects of Autonomy, Motivation, and Self-Regulated Learning on High School Math Achievement.” Learning and Individual Differences 43 (October): 156–63.

• Passe, Jeff. 1996. When Students Choose Content: A Guide to Increasing Motivation, Autonomy, and Achievement.Thousand Oaks: CA: Corwin Press, Inc.

ALUMNI STUDIES

• P. Gray and D. Chanoff. Democratic schooling: What happens to young people who have charge of their own education?

• D. Greenberg, M. Sadofsky, and J. Lempka. The Pursuit of Happiness: The Lives of Sudbury Valley Alumni.

• P. Gray.  A Survey of Grown Unschoolers I: Overview of Findings.

• Idzie Desmarais.  Blogs, Interviews, & Other Writing by Grown Unschoolers.