On Five Years at Nueva
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When visiting educators would ask — how could we possibly build an academic program without facilities like yours? — I always say: “Culture, Program, Facilities. In that order.” With the right culture, there are no glass ceilings.
July 2013. Two months from launching the upper school. Our home for the year: a tiny, awkward hallway in the College of San Mateo.
The ten founding faculty sat around a table. We could do that then. (There are over seventy of us now. It’s hard to find a table that big.)
The expansion task force 3-ring binders, hundreds of pages prepared by trustees, school leaders, middle school teachers and parents, were in front of us. Truth be told, I remember very little of what was written inside. I will never forget, however, the words on the first page: “Expanding possibilities: Reimagining the High School Experience.”
I shivered with excitement when I read those lines. Five years later, I still shiver, both because of what we have accomplished and because of what we have set up to beaccomplished soon. We are reimagining PK-12 education.
“We’ll make many mistakes. Program. People. But culture — we need to get that right from the beginning.” These are the words our head of school, Diane Rosenberg, said on my interview in the fall of 2012. And so began my interest and study of culture. Edgar Schein, a leading thinker in organizational culture, wrote: “The culture of a group can now be defined as a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”
Students are and should be, of course, the ultimate mirror of a school’s culture. We do this work, after all, because we care about and believe in kids. I asked our students, as I walked through the halls one day: What do you love about Nueva? I asked this question so as to get at the underlying assumptions about the culture that has been created and shaped at the Nueva upper school. Their responses beautifully capture why it has been for me (and everyone else involved) such a joy and privilege to be have worked here. They responded: “I love being encouraged to do wild and risky interdisciplinary thinking; I love the community because it is like a big warm hug; I loved when we were talking about the election in Chinese, US history, and one of my elective because by talking about it all of my classes, and seeing how the election connected to each class in different ways I saw how truly interdisciplinary it was; I love the student-teacher relationships; that someone taught me to code in javascript in the lunch line… how Nueva is that.” Our students are grateful for Nueva, recognizing how fortunate they are to be learning here. The last student I spoke to said: “I love Quest… obviously,” and all the other students around her nodded.
The Quest program: four, year-long explorations where students explore and learn with and from a mentor; true apprenticeship-model learning where students are encouraged to pursue something they have always wanted but never before had the courage to explore. It is in these Quest projects that our students’ trailblazing spirit is most clear: screen printing clothing inspired by a summer class at RISD; studying surrealism as a 9th grader and then returned to it 12th grade to improve on it — reflection and iteration is in their DNA; creating craft furniture; becoming a contortionist, subverting the normal rules for what the human body can and should do; building a fully-functioning pool table; publishing books; starting a school newspaper; studying the impact of antibiotics on the vegetarian gut biome; recording stories of WWIII vets and Holocaust survivors; investigating campaign finance econometrics; launching theater companies; building exoskeletons; creating a flying machine… that will be flown across the country.
While our students are grateful for Nueva, recognizing how fortunate they are to be learning here, it should of course not go unsaid how lucky we have been to work with such intrinsically motivated, deeply curious students who leap at the opportunity to create, dream, and do great things.
A few years ago, Frank Bruni (author of Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be) spoke to our students. Bruni has been one of many thought-leaders who has spoken and left a great impact on our school and school culture. At one point, when Frank Bruni was speaking, it felt to me that his words were speaking directly to the culture we have created here at Nueva: “Be hugely, deeply engaged in the work you do; find something that speaks to you in it; be alert to what is turning you on in your education because then it is not sacrifice but what you love…” I see students who have found and are finding such purpose in the work they are doing. You can hear that in their stories. For example, one of our seniors said:
“This thing happened that was quintessentially nueva…In my environmental class, we had been working on modeling the Coriolis effect … I could not grasp it…so I was encouraged to build a model… I went to I-Lab and got George, our I-Lab engineer. So we found a mixing bowl from the kitchen and got a motor. We laser cut a mount for the motor, hot glued it to the bowl, dropped glycerin in and were able to visualize the Coriolis Effect. Holding it over my head to visualize, people — as they were walking by the hallway where this was taking place — kept asking what was going on, so I had to over and over again explain what I was doing. George said: I love working with models because when you have a model and have to think about it, and explain over and over again. It forces you to have laser focus and hone in on what is happening to be able to describe succinctly.” The student went: “It encapsulated rapid prototyping at the most fundamental level: mixing bowl… engine … test… iterate.”
Another talked about their 11th grade English-history Conferences. The students research independent topics, are grouped into panels via common themes, and then run a student-led conference for students, parents and community members. The audience is authentic; the messages are impactful. This student said: “I am in awe of my peers. I love learning with and from them. And I love the feedback my peers give me.” Nueva is by far the most collaborative and cooperative learning ecosystem I have ever witnessed. We learn through collaboration and from the feedback we receive through it. This is, at least according to Bruni, best practice. He implored the students to: “Get feedback. It is collaboration and it is just smart to get others’ advice.”
Getting feedback, and iterating, is just one of the many ways that design thinking permeates throughout our culture. In fact, one student talked about using design thinking on herself, as a means of a self-science. The student was looking for a way to be more patient in their learning. She said: “I mean I know there is a solution.” With a great belief in growth possibilities, this student was embracing the words that Bruni had shared with our students: “pause long enough to survey the breath of what is available.” She was surveying what was available. And then she would design, and reflect, and create. And then share, with an eye toward positive impact.
Like the particular student above, our students learn to focus and search internally so that they can better understand and make sense of the world around them — like on a Nat’l Parks trip, when seniors repelled down 30ft cliffs outside of Zion, rushing with adrenaline, joyful to do that with their classmates; and in doing so, together they developed a personal relationship with Zion. They learned about the underfunding of the National Parks. This inspired many of them to take action, to raise awareness, and to commit to conservation efforts. On an Urban Studies trip, hopping across the Bay to Oakland, students realized how much there is to learn in their surrounding communities. They saw first hand the impact of gentrification, exploring this from multiple angles, such as politics and architecture. They asked an architecture firm: “how are you building new buildings such as these instead of combatting gentrification?” to which the firm provided a trickle-down theory that our students had a hard time accepting; but it helped them realize that gentrification is a more complicated problem to tackle than they initially thought. And through that trip, through deep self-awareness, they began to understand what it means to live in and preserve on to community. On an incarceration trip, the inmates and workers in the jails were humanized through students’ conversations with them. Our students were struck by the power of systems. We travel to complicate how we see things.
The student reflections and experiences capture a culture of kindness and respect, a culture or purposeful inquiry, and a culture designing through empathy. As adults in the Nueva community, we step out of the way of young people and empower them because we know that our students are capable of extraordinary things. When you walk onto campus (and do so — some and visit!), you see students who are already having an enormous impact on their local and global communities. Our teachers, as “experienced learners” rather than “sages on the stage”, create the right conditions and curricula to activate students’ passion and efficacy as leaders. Walk onto campus and you see students investigating, playing, exploring and laughing. Students learn by doing and are called to action by that work. By activating the learner and the doer, Nueva students see themselves as the dynamic problem solvers that they are. At the very core, the driving factor behind Nueva’s culture is simple: we believe deeply in young people, in their ability to do great things now.
Speaking of now, I am pausing to look out the window. It is almost 4:00pm on Wednesday, June 20, 2018. I have two days left at Nueva. Blink, and it will be over. In less than 48 hours, I will have to hand over my keys and computer, a transactional end to a beautifully rewarding five years. Outside my office window, construction trucks and jackhammers are a-buzz — summer construction is a sign of schools doing well. (It is the type of scene that would make my 2.5 year-old go wild, which is a much better reaction than the headache it is giving me.) Despite the banging, I am smiling. Five years ago, this campus that serves as our home-away-from-home was nothing. Just a pile of dirt. Now we are busily constructing Phase Two of our Bay Meadows campus because we are bursting at the seams in our current facilities.
It is time to build.
Our programs are mostly built. (Some refining is of course needed.)
Our culture is strong.
“Culture, Program, Facilities.
In that order.”