Updated 2025-03-10
Cottonwood Community Learning Center
Cottonwood offers a self-directed homeschool cooperative, virtual learning community for tweens/teens, tween/teen group travel and summer camps! Join us!
Sara Casey Taleff executive director
(+1) 929-298-0306
203 Driggs Ave.
Brooklyn, NY 11222
United States
Brooklyn, NY 11222
United States
New York City
Description
At Cottonwood students, facilitators and other involved community members are free to explore, tinker, dabble and invent. We share ideas and interests, set intentions and collaborate to fulfill them. We solve problems together, ask questions to understand and find solutions to help one another. We support one another’s autonomy, showing empathy and respect for all people, places and things.
SDE Optimizing Conditions
ASDE surveys all SDE communities/programs about how they provide, enhance,
or align with each of the Six Optimizing Conditions
for young people to succeed in SDE. Survey answers:
- Responsibility – We have structures that support learners to choose what they want to learn and explore each day and support them to share their learning with others.
- Youth Autonomy – We respect the autonomy of young people at Cottonwood. Kids always have the option to pass , observe or join in to what is being offered.
- Access to Tools and Technology – Technology is a tool and we use it! In addition to computers and 3D printers, kids have access to sewing machines, cooking supplies and more.
- Adult Allies – We call our staff facilitators, and they support the learning process with questions from deep listening and care, rather than from coercion or judgment.
- Free Age Mixing – We have a mixed age community of young people ages 5-14.
- Community – We are a cooperative and every member (young people, facilitators, parents/families) have voice in how the school runs, and those voices and values are shared in our weekly, community-wide change up meeting.
If any information about this resource is out of date, please let us know.