The opportunity to start an alternative program for high school students, with a steady green light from the top administration, doesn’t present itself all that often. In my own education career, about thirty-five years worth, I can think of one summer camp, one public parks program, and one school that gave the space and time to go out on a limb with truly cutting edge programming. And now again, Fall 2026, another school is providing that opportunity.

We’ve set the curriculum up as a pull system, something I learned about over the last ten years and have written about a few times. Pull systems encourage taking on the next task when you have space and time for it. When that new task is most needed and helpful. When it fits with what you already know and what you need to know. 

Maybe thinking about the opposite of pull makes a pull system clearer. The opposite is of course a push system. I would classify our traditional approach to schooling as a push system. The curriculum is usually prepared before the teacher meets any students, instruction is sometimes planned and scheduled with limited ability to react to what students actually demonstrate in knowledge and ability, and the students themselves are grouped by age level, making the teacher’s job with both curriculum and instruction difficult. Tests are pushed out at certain times, standards are pre-set, Push, push, push.

So we opted for a pull system. We have lots of resources and activities that are ready to be pulled into class, week by week or even day by day. Students pull specific work into the class period according to what they believe will be most helpful for them. We’ll coach along the way, of course, but our default position is learning from observing the choices students make. Do they see what can be helpful, what they need to learn next? And do they learn from the process of having to make decisions about what to learn? We believe they will.

Here are two examples from our first week of the IMPACT program that give me a whole lot of confidence. They both happened on the first Friday of the program. (Names are pseudonyms.)

Brad and I have ten minutes for some informal coaching. The point is simply for me to hear from him what personal passion project he is thinking about. I know he has several projects in mind, so I go into our short meeting thinking I’ll help him narrow his focus. But Brad opens his computer and begins with a professional-looking pitch for the creation of a Learning Management System (LMS) for our program. He isn’t trying to sell me on Moodle, Canvas, or Powerschool. He wants to build an LMS himself. He starts with the Why (the students discussed good pitching the day before) and gives examples of how the LMS would help students and coaches focus more on their projects and less on the administration of the program.

Brad and I talk about possible next steps. I ask who he might collaborate with. There isn’t any reason not to see what Brad, and hopefully a few of peers, could put together for us. He has clearly shown me that the work could have a positive impact on the program. After we consider possible next steps for a bit, Brad sits back and wonders aloud whether or not the school’s administration is already working on an LMS. He decides he had better talk to the administration. My role is mostly to nod and agree. He’s pulled a meaningful project into the curriculum, he is personally motivated, he knows what to do next. I couldn’t be more satisfied.

Nancy has asked for some time to speak with the cohort of students and coaches. There is a sticky note on the board, reserving her place in the afternoon’s agenda. “Student Projects – Nancy.” So we turn our attention to her. Nancy would like to make a movie. She describes to us all, as we sit in a circle around pushed-together tables, what she has in mind. And then she  summarizes with a polite shrug, “So yeah, that’s it.” 

Students immediately begin asking questions and offering suggestions. That’s a great idea! What genre do you think? How long do you think it will be? You should be the producer, but yes, you can be an actor, too. Who is going to write the script? Where will you show it, how about YouTube. You’ll need to get permission from anyone in the movie. Can I have a role? 

I’m guessing these are the type of students who would jump in and ask questions like this simply because of who they are. I also think it doesn’t hurt that we’ve been specifically practicing a Harkness-type round table approach where we look out for each other, try to be inclusive, and avoid dominating the conversation. In fact, after class I have a chance to quietly compliment Lance on how politely he took the floor and how politely he passed control back to others. “Oh, I had more to say,” he told me. “But I didn’t want to dominate.” Right, excellent. There’s a skill that goes far beyond any specific content area! Another student, Ethan, asks me during the break if he can have time on Monday to talk about his project. Sure, I tell him, we’ll make a sticky note, you can propose it when we build the schedule for the week. I’m guessing he’s pulling a personal project topic into the curriculum, just as Nancy modeled for us earlier. We’ll hear more on Monday. 

Pulling, not pushing. It isn’t exactly turning curriculum and instruction on their head. I wouldn’t say it is radical. But it is fairly far from the norm. We are collaboratively building a curriculum in real time through the perceived needs of students and their own motivation. We’ve given them a goal (a passion project that has personal and external impact, with deliverables in six weeks time) and they are working toward the solution. Brad wants to manage the oncoming flurry of work by building an LMS for everyone. Nancy wants to make a movie, and Ethan is going to share his proposal with us on Monday. I’d say everyone has caught on to the pull system very quickly. Maybe, just maybe, this is a repositioning for curriculum and instruction that gracefully aligns with how we think and act. 

And maybe there’s a pedagogical nugget here for all of us, a piece of learning that is applicable in most any teaching context. Entrust your students with responsibility. They will most likely amaze you, not fail you.

Sometimes the juxtaposition of two ways of thinking makes you sit up really straight or feel that you’ve skipped a heartbeat or two. The feeling of worlds colliding, and in my case this past week, bouncing off each other. Some of the LinkedIn posts I’m seeing are messing with me. Really!

We’ve been working hard at Eastwood Montreux to prepare for the start of the academic year, the inaugural academic year at this unique school. Together, my colleagues and I are building a process in which teachers and students co-create curriculum. It’s our attempt to make as much space for authentic student agency as possible. Not just a choice between A or B and not merely tinkering at the edges of traditional curricula, and certainly not student-input-for-show on decisions that have already been made by the adults. We are trying to go all in on co-creation. Processes, materials, timing, projects, groups, feedback, demonstrations, all to be co-determined with students. If you are going to teach agency, after all, you gotta make space for students (and teachers) to practice agency. 

Daring. Scary. Visionary? Maybe. Decidedly out of the box, that’s for sure.

So we’ve been talking about our values for the program and modeling for each other processes and sample content. It hasn‘t been easy for us adults. We have to constantly remind ourselves not to over-structure the curriculum, determining when, by whom, and in what way. We’re having to ask questions, not provide answers. And we are unlearning very ingrained habits of teaching. We’ll be asking the students to unlearn equally ingrained habits of schooling, too. I don’t anticipate this will be easy. In fact, from previous alternative programs I’ve been involved with, I know it won’t be easy. Unlearning many of the central assumptions of school, assumptions that individuals have rehearsed for years and generations have grown comfortable with, is heaving lifting. 

I’m happy to say we’re making progress in our initial iterations and that we’ll continue to make progress after the students arrive, iteration by iteration. All year long and beyond.

But those LinkedIn posts. Lots of them now, at the beginning of the school year. Some of the posts inspire me and many give me that jolt when worlds collide. It’s their schoolishness I’m reacting to, I realize. Grading policies, assuming a single teacher at the head of the room, the emphasis on rewards (and punishments), the predictability of curriculum, putting students in classes by age instead of readiness. It’s so schooly, which yes, has sometimes served well. But it’s so not the mindset we’re working on, it’s not our vision for the future of education.

Summer 2002, at an IBM training facility north of Milan, Italy. We’re running an English immersion summer camp for kids of IBM employees, mostly Italians. My colleague Jeff and I had created a curriculum that simulates a town, giving radical agency to students. We set some initial conditions and turned them loose. Once the program took off, there was no way to know what specific interactions to expect and where it all would lead. We had talked it through with our staff members, we were pretty sure it would work even if we had never taught in quite that way, and now after lunch on the first day of the program we were walking down the hall to tell kids how wonderful it would be. Or at least, how we hoped it was going to be wonderful.

“Whatever happens,” we agreed with each other, “make sure your face looks like you believe in this simulation one hundred percent. It’s going to work.”

We looked at each other one last time, eyebrows raised, not really sure if it was going to work, and pushed through the swinging doors into the large meeting room. Staff were getting students to sit. Most of the eyes in the room swung toward us as we positioned ourselves at the front of the room. I was smiling like I had never smiled before and I saw out of the corner of my eye that Jeff was doing the same. Game on.

I’ve pushed through a whole lot of metaphorical swinging doors into situations where I had to convey more confidence than I felt. When I was well planned things generally went well. If I was underplanned my face hurt from smiling, my cheeks burned, and things were a bit dicey.

I’m having that feeling again this week during the orientation meetings with my new colleagues at this new school as we prepare to open its doors for the first time. I’m going to lead an as-of-yet untried progressive afternoon program. I need to do my best to help faculty members feel secure in their roles before the students arrive. 

Comfortingly, I’ve had a lot of practice in life now, a quarter of a century after Jeff and I pushed into the meeting room at the IBM center. Even more comforting is the talent all these educators have. In the first few days together, the faculty, known as coaches, have been sharing their own passion projects, the things they love to do. We’ve heard about flower arranging and inventing card games, authoring and baking. Without fail, when my new colleagues start talking about their passion projects, their faces light up, their eyes shine brighter. Smiles are contagious and we all smile with them. Tears are contagious, too, when the passion sometimes overwhelms. 

This is our collective game face, I realize. The face that we have when we are truly invested in what we are doing, the face we have when we get to share our passion with people who really want to listen, who really want to support us. And we don’t have to fake a thing, because the passion is real.

Now, just how do we pass that on to the students?

This coming academic year I’m focused on creating the best possible progressive high school program I can, collaborating with the students and my colleagues at Eastwood Montreux. I’ve had some successes with progressive programs in the past – and some failures – and am painfully aware that the deck is stacked against us. It’s a little Don Quixote, perhaps, a little naive, perhaps a little too hopeful.

But here we go.

Henry David Thoreau, the American thinker, writer, and activist of the 1800s, quit his first teaching job after two weeks because he refused to hit the children. He started a new school, in line with his own thinking, but it did not last all that long. I share Thoreau’s irritation of not fitting into many of the assumptions of our current schooling (fortunately corporal punishment isn’t often the issue!). I have shared the disappointment of starting something different only to see it fade and end. I also agree with Thoreau that there is a little bit of the divine in all us, in all students and teachers. We don’t hit what is divine, not physically or metaphorically. On my better days maybe I’m just a little transcendental. Maybe.

The school opens its doors on September 1, 2026. I’ll be a coach and I just updated my LinkedIn profile, adding “Coach at Eastwood Montreux” to my professional roles. The school will have a traditional academic curriculum, taught by online teachers in the mornings. I am familiar, in a general sense, with that curriculum, whether IB, IGSCE, Cambridge … There are the expected subject areas, students who are taught in age groups according to preset curriculum; standards to reach by the end of the course, regardless of where students were in their learning at the beginning of the course; and external assessments that sort and rank. I am critical of the approach, but also pragmatic – it is the approach we have co-evolved across the world. It is about as ubiquitous as water is to fish. It is the strange attractor that makes it so difficult for alternate versions of education to survive.

My passion is the afternoon program, when the students learn face-to-face with each other and their coaches, working toward ever higher degrees of agency and self-awareness. I see the afternoons as trying to establish an alternative strange attractor in education, one of collaborative student-led projects, one of design thinking, small bets, iterations, networking, and reflection. A learning environment that the students co-create and co-lead.

The program is called IMPACT and we hope to make one, demonstrating what school could be.

I’ve written down a few guiding statements for myself as I work to shape the afternoon program. They are the ideals I do not want to forget when schoolishness exerts its pull, as I know it will, often and forcefully. These are:

1. Everything starts with the student. Curriculum, instruction, assessment, timetables, year grades, academic grades, standards, etc. do not form the organizational principles of school, rather, the individual student is the organizational principle. Everything must be able to flex with the individual needs of the student.
2.  When the adults, through the benefit of greater maturity and experience, find it appropriate to teach, they do so standing shoulder to shoulder with students, looking out at the horizon of possibilities. When the students are able to teach, they teach, with us at their shoulder.
3. Keep it Simple. 

I plan to say to myself, before I answer a question, before commenting on the direction we might take with whatever issue we are wrestling with, “Start with the student, stand shoulder to shoulder, keep it simple.”

“Student, shoulder, simple.” Now let’s see where that takes us.