Michael Alex

Michael is experienced in project-based learning, and emphasizes student choice, social justice, and democratically organized learning in his teaching. His work with young people is characterized by play, activity-based learning, and intelligently structured investigations which are challenging, developmentally appropriate and fun!

Most of Michael’s teaching career has been spent in alternative schools. He worked for the better part of two decades in a Toronto alternative school program for traveling students: young people whose interests/training/performance in the arts (dance, modeling, acting, etc.) and athletics (of all sorts, at a competitive level) would take them away from school for short or extended periods of time. As such, he built programming focused on this sort of differently structured learning and community building and gained experienced working with distance education long before Zoom and online learning really took off.

Michael’s current focus is in wellness learning, life skills development, and meta-learning: particularly learning about attention, self-care, using movement in learning and more. A key example of this work is a full-credit wellness course he created and delivered for seven years in Toronto public schools prior to the pandemic, and now delivers to Cicero students. The course uses yoga, meditation and mindfulness as jumping off points for self-study, kinaesthetic learning, ethics, understanding the “teenaged brain,” rehab/prehab-practices for learning and life, stress management, and practical skills for healthy habit formation and effective learning. Michael has more than 600 hours of yoga asana, mindfulness and meditation training, in addition to work in related movement and learning modalities.

Outside of class, Michael is constantly learning. He is currently studying fermentation, survival skills, movement modalities (think handstands and parkour in the park), and dog training. As a lifelong learner who is always reading several books at a time, Michael brings this mindset into his teaching to create an inspiring, ever-curious and probing context for his students.