Hearts of the Mountain: Adolescents, a Teacher, and a Living School

About Tal Birdsey

Tal Birdsey is the head teacher co-founder and director of the school. He teaches writing literature social studies art student government and ethics and serves as the school counselor soccer coach and newsletter and literary magazine editor. He's been State of Vermont licensed and certified and has taught previously at the Paideia School in Atlanta Georgia and abroad in Taiwan. He has published poetry in journals around the country and is a working visual artist. In 2008 he published a book about the founding and first year of North Branch School entitled A Room for Learning: The Making of a School in Vermont (St. Martin's Press). He has a second book forthcoming from Green Writers Press (spring 2019) Hearts of the Mountain about a year in the life of teaching and learning at the North Branch School. Deborah Meier has been working in public education as a teacher principal writer advocate since the early 1960s and ranks among the most acclaimed leaders of the school reform movement in the U.S.She is the author of many books and articles including The Power of Their Ideas Lessons to America from a Small School in Harlem and In Schools We Trust. She is an outspoken critic of state-mandated curriculum and high stakes standardized testing and has written extensively on their unreliability and class/race biases. She is on the board of FairTest Save Our Schools Center for Collaborative Education and the Association for Union Democracy. She is also on the editorial board of The Nation The Harvard Education Letter and Dissent magazines.