Suvemäe MTÜ

Tallinn Art School is a municipal school located in the Northern area of the Estonian capital, and has been recognized locally and nationally during the last 6 years for its innovative learning offer - such as language immersion for Russian speaking kids, interest-based lessons open to participation for children in the same stage of development but perhaps different classes, project-based learning initiatives, and engagement with the local community. As a democratic branch, Suvemäe school started to serve children from 6 to 16 years of age (1st to 9th class, with the perspective of opening further educational levels in the next years) in September 2019. Serving around 65 students, from which around 25 percent come from Russian speaking families, Suvemäe staff is composed of a dynamic and enthusiastic team of 6 full-time paid coaches and a part/time handicraft specialist who offer a wide range of activities to kids. Trying to find a balance between the State academic requirements and students’ own interests and vocations, our school follows most of the foundation of democratic education, namely self-directed learning, shared decision-making practices, age-mixing and free play and movement. Briefly explained, our approach to self-directed learning established a range of 1.5 hours a day of structured teaching/learning including subjects such as mathematics, Estonian language and the natural sciences. Additionally, students spend around two hours a week in autonomous learning supported by their coaches on two or more subjects, such as the human sciences, history, social sciences, etc. - depending on their class and the State requirements. In this sense, the team of coaches works hard to support students identify their learning styles and develop key skills, such as critical and divergent thinking, learn to learn capabilities, creativity and initiative. At the same time, students are encouraged to suggest workshops and learning possibilities that are co-facilitated with the school staff. Some those clubs and learning activities deal with world cultures, information technology, language learning (English, Spanish and Russian), design thinking, chemistry and biology experiments, drama, ceramics and carpentry, cooking and gardening, history and “fundamental questions”. This last workshop has raised great interest, as it looks forward to exploring the questions that students themselves have about any kind of topic, for instance, whether blind people can see in their dreams, why the kamikaze pilots made such drastic decisions, will it be possible to live in Mars, and how exactly were WW1 and WW2 related. In regards to the shared decision-making processes at the school, the whole school community gathers once a week to discuss topics of importance to us. Some of those topics have dealt with the establishment of minimum living-together agreements, excursions and events, invitation of guests, agreement on academic loads, allocation of school resources, and disciplinary issues. Nevertheless, regarding this last topic, the school has adopted a different approach during the last months with the implementation of the Judicial Committee (JC). The JC idea was mirrored from the mechanism used by the Sudbury-like schools, where 5 students and at least one member of staff help kids solve conflicts and “exercise” justice when a member of the school community has breached a school agreement. The first step towards the implementation of this mechanism had to do with an open election by the school community of those members who should make part of the JC, then they were trained in non-violent communication strategies (NVC), such as active listening, empathetic mirroring, and restorative justice (as opposed to punitive justice). In a few words, whenever there is a conflict between school members, the goal is to help them “fix” the relation, rather than allocating guilt and punishment. The experience so far has been very positive, with students taking a