Baxter Academy for Technology and Science sits in a flood zone in the rapidly transitioning Bayside Area of Portland, Maine, and serves nearly 400 students. The neighborhood is home to many social services in the city, and the new real estate developments, including eateries, recreational businesses, and offices, overshadow Bayside’s historically working-class residences, warehouses, undeveloped lots, and junkyards. Baxter is a STEM-focused charter school drawing from over 50 districts and a geographic region four times the size of Rhode Island, welcoming rural, suburban, and urban students. Our school comprises 17 percent of students with IEPs,Footnote 1 or individualized special education plans, and 18 percent have 504Footnote 2 plans, which help students with a disability access their education. Students choose Baxter for its STEM focus, innovative academic program, and for some, as a new community to start again. We are a young school, only just approaching our tenth year.

Among our founding principles is that of co-creating knowledge between educators and students. An entire day of each week, called Flex Friday, is spent on student-led, student-designed, teacher-coached project-based learning that engages STEM tools of research, design, or making, to serve community needs; the remainder of the week is structured daily with five periods of classes in STEM, Humanities, and Design, plus an Advisory block. Town halls are among our most important all-school gatherings and are jointly orchestrated by students and administrators. Representatives from each grade meet regularly with the school’s principal and assistant principal to discuss and plan for the structures, climate, and culture of the school. Last year, student leaders launched a quantitative and qualitative investigation of the Advisory program over many months. This effort culminated in a student-run faculty and staff meeting where together we interrogated the assets and potential of the Advisory program.

At Baxter, students encounter our real world while gaining tools to design ways to understand that world and envision new ways to meet humanity’s challenges. We have courses such as Confronting Genocide and Science Technology and Ethics; it is quite common to step into our Fabrications Lab (FABLAB) and find students with their computer-aided designs open on their laptops to guide their creative projects. One student researched ways that city sidewalks can absorb carbon dioxide to build a working first model, and another group of students looked at ways to clear space debris to protect satellite investments. Engineering students developed an award-winning scalable low-cost ventilator during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two students who spend Flex Fridays interning in veterinary science have helped to develop our school’s ethical guidelines for scientific research on vertebrates and their work will now be integrated into our internal review board process for future student proposals of Flex Friday projects. One of our talented digital arts students made portraits of persecuted Uighur women; another student interviewed her own family members from Myanmar. Teachers connect students with community partnerships and use the entire Portland peninsula and range of public transportation, as our campus.

Through our Baxter Speaker Series, we welcome leaders of STEM into our building so that our students learn about the needs and assets of our community and the possible ways in which they too may contribute. Speakers have included a climate change artist who appeared on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, medical helicopter entrepreneurs, plant and mushroom field researchers, and Atlantic Black Box, an organization that researches and reckons with New England’s role in the economics of enslavement, to name just a few. Most recently, a student-led group proposed more green spaces in our city, which was shared with presenters of our Speaker Series, the city of Portland Department of Planning and Urban Development. This student effort then spurred on one of our teachers, Alex Waters, to create a new humanities course, entitled The Maine Housing Crisis.

At Baxter, we spend time understanding who we are in relation to who has come before us. Scholars of education like John Dewey (1916), Deborah Meier (2002), and Ted Sizer (1997) inspired the idea of letting schools be driven in part by the power of student’s ideas; and during this time, there were some schools that grew into existence that challenged our conception of what school could be: Sudbury Valley Schools, the Met School, Coalition of Essential Schools. Within the past 40 years, the economic imperatives of A Nation At Risk, No Child Left Behind, and Race to the Top were the public calls for accountability that led to common core standards and data-driven and data-informed decisions—we know now that how you ask the question matters and that collecting data that reflects the persistence of inequity requires innovative tools of justice; the data itself is not the tool. Today schools like High Tech High and Science Leadership Academy hold some of the progressive ideas described by Jal Mehta (2019). As more scholars of color in education, such as W.E.B. Du Bois (1935), Richard Valencia (1997, 2010), Tara Yosso (2005), Daniel Liou (Liou & Rojas, 2019), Zaretta Hammond (2018), and Lisa Delpit (2006) were heard, the pedagogical sails shifted course: we’ll do better by our students with anti-deficit thinking and an acknowledgment that we serve students who are complex individuals who hold assets in community cultural wealth. While the innovations of the earlier scholars led to some reconstruction of the industrial model of American schooling, including new structures like mastery transcripts and open-ended student projects, these ideas led to some practitioner tensions between rigor that got pitted against strong relationships with students. The latter scholars pushed us to think that equity can’t exist in the absence of high rigor. Baxter invites scholars and school innovators like Linda F. Nathan, author of The Hardest Questions Aren’t on the Test (2009), to work with us to develop dispositions of learning, anchored in our mission and values, which can provide a unifying framework of learning for our school. After a year of spending time with our mission and vision, our school worked on a unifying framework for dispositions of learning. We spent several faculty meetings and then a retreat at the Wells Reserve to arrive at guiding questions for us as learners. We developed an overarching framework—that at Baxter, we make SPACE for inquiry. At present, we are testing these guiding questions for our learning community, including students and educators:

  • S: What stories are at play?

  • P: What’s possible here in innovation or iteration?

  • A: What assets do I have?

  • C: What is the community impact?

  • E: What engages my curiosity?

These guiding questions hold our educators’ learning about high expectations and rigorous learning in service of our community.

Most recently, Baxter educators looked at the ways in which our assessments illuminate deeper, richer, and different capacities about our students that counter the reductive stories gleaned from standardized tests that our school is obligated to administer; an analysis of our standardized test scores shows that students performing in the lower range demonstrate high growth and students on the other end show no growth, and meanwhile, students across the school demonstrate the capacity for envisioning, collaboration, and project management. The ideas of all of these scholars find their way into our faculty and staff meetings and our new teacher formation group. We are committed to knowing if our innovation advances our equity goals or if they become a reemergence of another structure to enable persistence of old patterns of privilege; in the early days of the school, student choice was a deeply held value; however, it also led to pressures on teacher sustainability, and eventually, the students who were already independent learners were the ones who could most benefit from more choices.

During our Flex Fridays, students work in their clusters with educator coaches, mostly in teams, sometimes individually, to develop an ethical, innovative STEM project. These project proposals go to a panel of educators and are accepted or sent back to coaches for further working. At the end of the year, top projects are selected for presentation, TEDx style, in our school’s Great Room; all students, whether selected to present in the Great Room or not, can exhibit in conference poster style throughout the school. Many of our teachers did not participate in teacher preparation programs that gave them the tools to be responsive to student inquiry to the degree in which we make space for at Baxter and most school communities aren’t asked to provide the administrative lift to coordinate such an effort across a year. By growing into this innovation, we experience a set of enduring tensions that have felt in conflict with each other. As school leaders, we tried with great difficulty to “fix” these conflicts, only to realize that these tensions mark the work of a strong school (Fig. 31.1).

Fig. 31.1
A chart presents 4 integrated critical tensions from the data. 1. Teacher expertise and diverse student interests 2. Holding a high bar for expectations and heterogeneous students. 3. In flow and dragging students. 4. Centering community and individualized needs.

Critical tensions of student inquiry identified by educators and school leaders

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What are these tensions? If we prioritize teacher expertise, we may curb student interest; if we allow student interest to be the only driver, our educators may feel stretched too thin and far from their source of strength. It feels difficult to hold high expectations in a traditional sense of achievement when our students come from disparate places; does high rigor mean that every student must achieve calculus-based functionality? We want to protect structures that enable students to be in what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls “flow” and yet how to work with students whom educators feel they are dragging along? Too much structure stifles those who are independent learners and too much release can lead to floundering for more dependent learners.

I have started saying that Baxter isn’t a place where members take away an education—that being members of a community means that we are responsive not just to individual needs but to common ones as well. We are a place of commitment and that means staying at the table for the common good. We have worked to have our teachers know students as whole people, part of families and part of communities—that any school design must be informed by what our community wants for the education of our students. These tensions surrounding design and practice have caused some colleagues to walk away from conversations in anger, caused the formations of tribes, and even led to reductionist stories about other members of the community. Tensions were so tightly wound up that for one department, we relied on the help of Craig Freshley (2022), winner of a 2019 Civvy award, whose work along the coastal communities of Maine sought to promote discourse and heal political divides and to help us better listen to each other. If you also work in an innovative school with impassioned colleagues, you’ll know that we are made up of individuals who dare and those who dare can be deeply committed to value systems that anchor and justify their daring. A school of innovation allows greater risk-taking among its teachers, but it also assumes a higher rate of learning that calls on collective and individual humility in order to come out of the learning as a stronger community. Our school, by design, holds weekly faculty and staff meetings in addition to department meetings, committee meetings, and other efforts that may emerge from year to year. These many tables enable discourse and collective wisdom to enrich our direction, listen to each other, and commit even when we might disagree.

Challenging encounters between colleagues can emerge as we defend the core of our identities as teachers, our sense of pragmatic and big picture success. A tension that was formerly a fracturing fight existed about whether our STEM school is first and foremost about high technological training or transformative adolescent development, both in a community context. Through discourse, we arrived at an understanding that neither a technocrat nor a sentimentalist approach alone can be the sole approach. While our school doesn’t dwell on dress code or about what to do about hats, like all schools, we do care about engagement for our diverse students, some of whom carry home-, community-, and school-based gifts and traumas. And that in becoming warm demanders (Hammond, 2018), we need to move past the pathologization tendency born from compassion for amygdala hijacking in our students to that of having a deep belief in their capacity—that traumas are intimately tied to strengths (Liou & Rojas, 2019).

Baxter is a heterogeneous space, and just as we have diverse students, so too do our educators come with previous professional and life experiences that spur on their commitment to be members of an innovative learning community. The teacher who loves their discipline and wishes to hold high expectations for students may, at times, find themselves at odds with the teacher who is muscling hard to lift a student’s confidence and counter the narrative of deficiency that the student has internalized. The most important conversation at our school involves understanding that we can’t allow these tensions to be destructive; we must learn to embrace our tensions (Lencioni, 2002). Sometimes we might set one tension down to keep going, but we must trust that a colleague is holding that other tension up while we shift focus for a while or regain our vitality. Our Assistant Principal Mary King recently introduced a new concept in a faculty and staff meeting: the wedge that separates us. She asserted that we are stronger together and to be aware of a wedge narrative when listening to people who ask things of us. We are a school, not a battlefield, and we will do more for our students if we are asset oriented toward each other and assume goodness in that which we and others bring to our common table.

School as a humanitarian endeavor requires that our work is motivated by justice and equity, especially in a school of innovation; STEM is a tool of inquiry and intellectual concept. Baxter is a STEM school that strives to be both a humanitarian endeavor and a place of inquiry. At this year’s graduation, our commencement speaker was Phil Coupe, who founded and leads the largest solar energy company in our state, Revision Energy. He spent his lifetime carving out hope and possibility for the common good in a political and economic landscape that challenged his work for sustainability. Coupe’s STEM work is deeply connected to justice and equity. He opened by saying that we achieve great things by pulling strong people together for a common cause; he asserts that when we learn what others want, we can help them achieve it and in the process achieve our own goals. As Coupe has learned, we at Baxter, a place made of diverse voices, where community matters and inclusivity is really valued, have no foes, except the wedges that scatter our efforts. Leadership, Baxter students learn, starts with listening. Through some programmatic flux, students held disappointments and hopes about our advisory program. There were feelings of anger about the decisions of school leadership around budgetary adjustments. We built a new table for discourse that involved students and leaders and, over the course of a year, developed a protocol for interviews and investigations conducted by students about advisory that would then empower them to build a professional development workshop for our educators about advisory. They had to first reorient to hold belief in best intent among all members of our community and then to listen to competing wants and needs for our advisory program. Our students turned the wedges into partnership. Through our conflicts and tensions, we learn that democratic spaces are not about agreement or an energy-less sense of peace; rather, we discover through acceptance of our diverse assets and perspectives that we have many opportunities to help our common good in building bridges of understanding and common purpose.