Schools Around The World: find too many cool schools

There must be more than 3 million schools in the world and many more educational programs, libraries, makerspaces, learning communities and other setups where learning is intentionally nurtured. We will refer to all of them as “schools*”. So, if you are a learner that wants to design her own university, a learning designer, a teacher, a parent, a school principal or an entrepreneur … how do you find the schools* that can be a source of inspiration and learning?

In the context of the Schools Around The World project, we have our first challenge: find too many cool schools. I’m dropping here some quick ideas for the starting the search and an invitation to help improve this.

Research online:

• Use diigo in your research. It makes it easy (browser button) to save links, organize them in tags and share them.  Join the Schools Around the World group and/or use the #saw18 tag;
• Use google, of course, but also …
• Go through some articles about your specific topic and try to find examples of schools and search terms. Some nice places to start could be Edutopia or MindShift.
• Look for books like Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education and fish for examples; (for some books on Amazon you can see the Table of Contents and Index without buying; try looking there)
• Go to Quora, Medium, Reddit and use their search options;

Ask:

• Write a short description of what kind of “schools” you would like to find; This is a divergent phase when you would like to go wide and receive unexpected recommendations, so give specific “tags” (like: #life-skills, #science-education, #life-long-learning, #self-directed-learning) and examples (like Summerhill School) but also leave room for people to come up with whatever they know; Here is what I wrote once;
• Directly (email) ask the people who’s projects or vision around learning you admire;
• Try asking on popular facebook groups related to the kind of learning you are interested in. Some options: RestartEdu, Learning How To Learn, World Schoolers, The Learning Revolution, alternativestoschool, Unschooling, freeyourkids;
• Ask everybody you meet, it is a nice conversation starter and you never know who stumbled on a fascinating school online or in real life;

A few lists as an appetizer:

•  hundred.org/en: a list of 100 global innovations carefuly selected and curated; Wonderful!
• http://mapa.reevo.org/: open map of 1560+ alternative education projects;
• My list of 150 projects to look at for “Break Free From University”; 
• An article about  Schools for Life – 10 schools that change the way we see education;
• Multiversidade’s list of Inspiring Universities
• Members of AERO – more than 200 members of Alternative Education Resource Organization

Please post your suggestion as a comment.