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.