Taking Charge

STORY BY RACHEL FREEMAN

How Nueva Puts Students in the Driver’s Seat of Their Own Learning

There is an apocryphal origin story about Nueva.

As the story goes, according to Upper School Division Head Liza Raynal ’93, when Karen Stone McCown went about founding Nueva, she gathered a number of bigpicture thinkers together and asked them what they wished they had had in a school. To a one, they talked about wanting a place where they could pursue topics about which they were deeply curious, a place where questions were not pushed aside but were eagerly addressed head-on.

And so, when The Nueva School opened in 1967, student agency became one of the core tenets of the institution.

“Karen basically said, ‘If you are going to have a school for this particular population of kids, you need to create spaces for choice and exploration for them,’” Liza added.

The idea of student agency gets tossed around a lot in the world of education, and there seems to be universal agreement that it is an important aspect of a child’s development. But what exactly is student agency? And how does Nueva help students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade build this skill so they can become agents of change in their own lives and the world around them?

“Because we focus on how we can take the ‘ceiling’ off of learning, we are intentional about creating spaces where students can lean in and be leaders—spaces we might otherwise have overlooked,” said Megan Terra, lower school division head. “Kids are wildly capable, and we put a high level of trust in them.”

At Nueva, empowering students to make choices and advocate for themselves and others is integral to the school’s constructivist approach to gifted education. Teachers help students learn these two important lifelong skills so that they feel empowered to steer their educational journeys. This emphasis on personal agency—choice and self-advocacy— gives our gifted students more differentiated opportunities to tap into their intrinsic interests. This increases the likelihood that the choices they make will foster learning that is authentic, engaged, and lasting.

Freedom to Choose

As early as pre-kindergarten, Nueva students learn that life is a series of choices, big and small, and that those choices can lead to successes and failures and have immediate and long-term consequences, for themselves and for others.

Students are offered many choices—and a lot of flexibility about how they access those choices—because teachers want them to deeply understand that their interests matter. This is the most direct way to lead students to be engaged in their own education, in the school, and in the world.

Beginning in pre-kindergarten and throughout the lower school, faculty design emergent curricula—a process where teachers plan units of study, activities, and projects based on the the interests and passions of the specific group of students with whom they are working.

Choice, Megan explained, “is about students being able to recognize and feel a deep sense of their own capacity, both in terms of having important ideas and also being able to investigate them, explore them, and develop new understandings and knowledge.”

Throughout the day, teachers seek to provide lower school students with many opportunities for choice. Students can often choose how they show their understanding—through writing, performing, singing, art, and a myriad of other ways. They also have close to 15 options for how to spend their recess time, options ranging from building in the forts to playing games in the library to building and creating in the I-Lab.

In addition, built into the weekly lower school schedule is Choice Time, when students and parents lead projects in areas of curiosity and passion, and students can choose to dig in and try something new or continue to hone an existing interest. On a Friday afternoon in fall 2022, a kindergarten student taught his classmates how to play Chinese chess, a passion of his that he wanted to share with his peers.

The opportunity for students to choose for themselves areas of interest to pursue continues in the middle and upper schools.

“We have a lot of chances for students to think about what they love to do or what they’re curious about,” said Middle School Division Head Karen Tiegel. “Students can explore things that are interesting to them but also things that might push them outside their comfort zones a little bit, because we not only want them to thrive with what they are interested in but also to get them to consider other points of view that they might be curious about as well.”

When students have the autonomy to choose what they learn and how they approach their learning, they tend to get excited and go further and deeper in their learning.

By design, “there are multiple ways students can fulfill graduation requirements,” Liza said. “Maybe a student has chosen to take Chinese over Japanese or Number Theory over Computational Biology.”

And within their classes, students are also presented with choices that shape their learning.

“If students are studying slime mold, they can pick what substrate they want it to grow on. Or maybe they just read The Crucible and are writing a historical play set in a particular era of their choosing,” Liza added.

After senior Isabella Y. took her first economics course in a seventh grade elective with Patrick Berger and discovered how much she loved it, she knew it was a subject she wanted to continue studying. By the time she graduates in June, she’ll have taken “every single economics class offered at Nueva.”

“I took Patrick’s game theory class, and I really loved everything we were doing,” Isabella said. “So when I got to high school, I started taking every possible economics course. To be able to take all of my core classes—math, English, science, history—but still get to take one or two economics classes every semester has been so great.”

“I love the way that kids get so enthusiastic about their learning,” Karen said. “Students might be sharing their learning with a friend and then it turns into wanting to present to the whole class.”

This enthusiasm, Karen said, is borne out of students’ abilities to choose what and how they learn.

The Recital and Quest projects that eighth graders and high schoolers, respectively, take on each year are another example of student choice that is core to the Nueva experience.

“These are projects in which students say, ‘I have a vision, I have choice, and I have the ability to shape my trajectory,’” Liza said.

Prior to the high school’s opening in 2013, “Recital was originally created as a capstone project for our oldest students, before we sent them out into the world, to help them understand how you can take something that you are curious about and turn it into a prolonged experience,” Liza said.

Quest is a culminating upper school project that bridges the two main components of student agency: choice and self-advocacy. Students select whatever topic they’d like to explore in depth and then reach out to experts in this area of interest to serve as mentors.

“I’m a huge proponent of Quest,” Isabella shared. “It’s all about picking the right topic; in doing so, the project can go far.”

Isabella did a combined Quest for her sophomore and junior years, where she and Fiona Tan ’22 created a mentorship program that paired Nueva high school students with sixth grade students from the SMART program.

“We did that completely on our own,” she said, beaming. “We had [former Nueva teacher] John Feland and [former Director of Social Justice and Equity] Alegria Barclay in our back corner giving us advice and mentorship, but we were the ones who met with the students’ parents, gave them the information [about the partnership], organized everything, led the info session, and organized training for them. It was such a good experience. And along the way, everyone encouraged us to keep going. Every new person we connected with told us, ‘I’m here for you; reach out if you need anything.’ But they didn’t

↓ offer to step in, which propelled us forward and also allowed us to take charge.”

By developing close relationships with their teachers beginning in lower school, students build confidence in advocating for themselves, a life skill that carries through all of their at Nueva and beyond.

Finding and Using One’s Voice

It’s this “taking-charge” mindset that Nueva hopes all its graduates reach.

“At its core, student agency is about self-advocacy, and it is something we teach from a very early age,” Karen said. “I think it makes our school unique.”

One of the ways students in the lower school learn about self-advocacy is through curricula that introduce them to local and global changemakers.

“Our teachers center changemakers—people who were able to leverage resources, bring people together, and speak up for needed change,” Megan said. “So there is a lot of modeling for students and holding up this value of agency in support of the community and in support of advocacy for self and others.”

In the second grade, students study the history of the Bay Area region. As part of this study, they learn about the Chinese railroad workers who built the transcontinental railroad. In spring 2022, as an extension of their learning, students connected that underrepresented chapter in history to Nueva, and specifically to the history of the Hillsborough campus Crocker mansion, which is home to the lower school. The Crocker family built their wealth from the Central Pacific Railroad.

“Students were able to see that that is a piece of history that we are part of,” Megan said. “We are deeply connected to it. And yet they noticed, in all of the history of our school that lines our walls, we’re missing a really important piece of the story.”

Second graders applied design thinking to this observation—brainstorming, collaborating, providing feedback on ideas, receiving feedback and iterating. They built prototypes for how they would want to honor the Chinese railroad workers. They then presented their proposal in persuasive letters to Megan.

“They said, ‘We really feel it’s important to make this visible at Nueva. We should create some type of monument to honor the contributions of the Chinese workers and the ways that this land and this school has benefited from that,” Megan added.

Students felt empowered to speak up and voice their opinions on a topic of deep importance to them, a key aspect of self-advocacy.

“A real litmus test for how well we are engaging student agency,” Megan said, “is where we see student advocacy show up in spaces that are not necessarily part of the designed curriculum.”

In spring 2022, third graders demonstrated the ways in which they felt agency over their school experience when they collectively realized they wanted more physical education (PE) in their school week. A group of students collaborated with each other, did research about the benefits of PE during the school day for children their age, and collected the names of their classmates to determine if this was a widespread concern. (“All but one student felt very adamant that this was a concern,” Megan said with a laugh.)

“Then a group of students put together a list of all of the reasons why more PE time was really important to them,” Megan shared. “We met and I had an opportunity to hear more about their hopes and dreams. In true Nueva form, I shared with them the rationale of why our program is the way that it is—what some of our goals are for our PE program, what some of the constraints are, and the need for balance across subjects. I also shared with them about an expert who had worked with Nueva to help us think through our physical education and wellbeing programs.”

With that information and perspective, students were asked to think more comprehensively about the specific benefits of PE, as opposed to movement in other parts of their day. They created a digital presentation, which included a proposal both for where additional PE classes could be added to the third grade schedule and for ways that teachers across all disciplines could bring more movement into their classes.

“It was a wonderful opportunity for students to show leadership and to feel agency, and to do so in a way that was pretty rigorous,” Megan said. “They had to hold many perspectives and understand some of the competing challenges that we’re working to balance. Ultimately this initiative led to real change, and we were able to add more PE blocks throughout the third grade schedule.”

In the middle and upper schools, students have many opportunities to practice self-advocacy, ranging from scheduling tutorial times with teachers to creating clubs and events.

In spring 2022, a group of middle school students approached Karen about recognizing AsianAmerican and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. And so, on a Friday afternoon in late May 2022, the J Plaza on the Hillsborough campus was abuzz with middle school students gathered for the first Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Festival. Organized by the seventh and eighth grade social justice team and run entirely by students, the festival featured booths celebrating a number of Asian and Pacific Islander cultures.

“They were really thoughtful about their approach to making this new event happen,” Karen said.

When then-Senior Class Rep Cate Rose ’22 heard from her peers that they wanted to create a “Wall of Rejection” display adorned with real college rejection letters they had received, Cate brought this idea to Liza. To Cate and her classmates, the idea was simple: The college application process is taboo and in a culture that often does not talk about rejection and failure, the students wanted to normalize not being accepted everywhere one applies.

During the first conversation Cate and Liza had, “I shared some of the concerns the adults had about the display,” Liza recalled. “We were worried that our younger students—9th and 10th graders, who have yet to embark on the college application process—would become fearful and apprehensive about the process, and begin to think the process is all about rejection.”

Liza demonstrated the “Yes, and” approach that Nuevans know so well: acknowledge the need the seniors had for doing this, while conveying the necessary constraints to the initial idea. Cate went back to the drawing board, even consulting with the art teachers about how this idea could be transformed into something that both met the needs of the seniors and held the real concerns about the younger students.

“My job in situations like this one is to say to students, in a way that is compelling, what our constraints are and why we would like to consider changing directions,” Liza said. “I want students to know, ‘It’s not me against you.’ With this approach, students are able to recognize that addressing the constraint does not squash their need. I want them to think, ‘You just told me that it can’t be manifested in this way so I’m going to take my need and come up with a new solution.

“Then I have faith, trust, and respect in them to come up with something awesome. And they never fail to amaze me with what they invent.”

Ultimately, Cate and her classmates created a “Kaleidoscope of Butterflies” installation (“My favorite collective noun: a kaleidoscope of butterflies,” Liza said), in which students cut each rejection letter into the shape of a butterfly.

This approach of partnering with students and addressing constraints that an initial idea or proposal has helps prepare students for life beyond Nueva. The world is not designed so people get their way all the time; rather, it is about understanding the need and working within a structure to come up with a solution for that need.

↑ In spring 2022, second graders presented about the life of the Chinese-American changemakers they had researched.

↓ To open up a conversation about the oftentaboo college application process, students in the Class of 2022 created a “Kaleidoscope of Butterflies,” with cut-outs of college rejection letters they had received.

The comfort of going to a teacher or division head isn’t something that just happens. It is deliberately cultivated. When Isabella joined Nueva in the sixth grade, she remembers feeling like she had been thrown into the deep end.

“It was just so different from my elementary school; at first it was a big culture shock,” she said. “But I started reminding myself that I came to Nueva because I love to learn. I started believing that I deserve to learn just as much as everyone else. There was a big emphasis on how close the students were with the teachers. We were always encouraged to go talk to them, to flesh out our ideas. I realized how helpful it was.”

When Gabriel H. ’24 joined the high school at the start of his sophomore year, he took note of the student/teacher relationship.

“That was one of the things I liked about coming to Nueva,” he said. “Faculty are very responsive. Tutorials were not something that they had at my old school. If you needed help, it wasn’t built into the schedule. Here, everyone I know goes to tutorials, so it doesn’t feel like something that you should be ashamed of.

I feel like it’s a part of the culture at Nueva to get help from teachers.”

“When you start doing tutorials you build that confidence and you start to understand that you deserve that time with your teachers,” Karen explained. “Meeting with your teachers is not seen as something bad; it’s seen as an opportunity to clarify something. Then when you go into the larger world and college, you are comfortable going to professors’ office hours and asking them questions.

“If you don’t ask [for what you want], you never learn the answer. The answer could be no, but if you take that step of asking and understand that you have a choice, that you have the power to change things— or at least to negotiate and brainstorm—that’s incredibly empowering.”

When Choice and Self-Advocacy Come Together

When students know they have a choice and a voice, they are more equipped to follow their own paths both at school and in life. This is what Nueva hopes its students truly understand and embrace when they graduate and set out for life beyond Nueva.

Alumna Briana Das ’17 recently reflected on the impact this lesson had on her life after Nueva. When she couldn’t pursue the course of study she was interested in at Brown University, she decided to work with like-minded students and professors to create the class she envisioned.

“Together we were able to create something: a class in design engineering,” she said. “We even convinced [Brown] to fund it, found teachers for it, and made it happen. I give all credit to the Nueva faculty for creating this environment of learning. By the time I graduated from Nueva…I was someone who was ready to tackle the world.” (Read more about Briana’s experience at Nueva on the next page.)

And this—advocating for oneself and others and understanding the power in choice—may be the most profound and lasting lesson all Nueva students learn. [N]

FIRST PERSON BY BRIANA DAS ’17