Tomorrow morning, Science Leadership Academy opens its doors for the 20th time. To say that it has been a heck of a run is purely an understatement. In that time, we’ve worked with thousands of kids, and we’ve done all that we can to show the world that an inquiry driven, project based, caring school really can make a difference in the lives of the students and the educators who inhabit it.

I say all the time that I am incredibly lucky. I wake up every day and get to work in service of the best idea I ever had with students and teachers and parents who make that idea so much better. Being able to be the leader of this community of learners for 20 years has been a pure joy and a true honor beyond anything I can really fully articulate.

The world looked a lot different when we opened our doors in September 2006. At the time, being a 1:1 laptop school was, in and of itself, revolutionary. Back then, the big thing we had to worry about with the laptops was how the kids were going to try to use AOL Instant Messenger to pass notes during class. When it comes to technology, the questions we had and issues we faced back then feel a little quaint right now. But the interesting thing is that the promise of what a technology rich school could provide for kids as far as giving us the tools we needed to create a more modern, more authentic learning environment was as true then as it is today – even if the challenges we face with the intersection of modern technology, the surveillance state, social media, and the growing question of what AI means for our classrooms, and our schools mean that we have to be ever more intentional and thoughtful in the ways in which we use the tools.

So what have we learned? What has 20 years taught us as the little school that could?

Most importantly, we learned that trying to do something different is hard but worth it. I can think of dozens of times when the easy way out presented itself, but doing so would’ve meant losing a major piece of the puzzle of what makes SLA SLA. And at every moment, our community said, “This is who we are, and we will work hard to retain that identity, even in the face of challenges.” Navigating the landscape of public education over the last 20 years hasn’t been easy, and in that time we have seen schools start with great promise only to struggle with maintaining their model when things got difficult. Have we had great support and has that been a major piece of our success? Of course. The folks both in and out of Philadelphia who have served as champions of our school are many, and nobody does this alone, but at the heart of what we have done, have been the people of SLA, who have always been able to work hard to sustain what we have done and evolve it so that it only gets better.

And that’s probably the second biggest lesson we’ve learned. We made a decision early on that the only way out is through. And the way we were going to thrive as a school was when we ran up against challenges in our model, we would get better at the model. That’s why, 20 years later, the core values that make up SLA and the core processes that allow us to manifest our vision have held. We have never taken a 90° turn away from the things that we believe in the most. And that has meant that we have been able to iterate and evolve, getting better and better at what we do even as new teachers and students and families join our school. It is so important to understand that we have to give educators time to get good at the pedagogical models that we believe in the most. There are no panaceas in education and no educational model is flawless or easy, but when we give teachers time and support to get good at a thing – and the whole school can pull in that same direction – we can do amazing things together.

We’ve learned that there really is a powerful intersection between inquiry and care. When we started the school, I admit that I thought that an inquiry driven education was the way in which we learned and caring school was the way in which we took care of one another, and while I thought those two ideas were complementary, I saw them as parallel tracks in what we did in the school. One of my most powerful personal learnings in 20 years has been understanding how intertwined those two ideas really are. I started really crystallizing what I thought all the way back at EduCon 2.2 in 2010 when I talked about how “What do you think?” was a question that we could always ask of kids that we didn’t know the answer to. Since then, we have worked hard to be much more intentional about understanding that our ability to engage in open inquiry with the kids allows us to engage in a caring education that isn’t paternalistic, but rather genuinely seeks to be of use and value to the kids we care for. That has led us to get much better at asking questions like “What do you think?” and “How do you feel?” and “What do you need?” and learning how to listen to those answers in ways that inform our actions so we can better take care of our kids. And when kids feel authentically listened to and cared for, there really is no end to what they can achieve in school.

We’ve had to learn that there was a difference between startup energy and sustainability energy. I think back on those early years of the school when there was really no other way to get everything done than to just out work everyone all of the time. This was a staff that – quite literally – put together the furniture that first year to make sure the school opened on time. You can do that in the beginning. But no one can sustain that energy over time, especially given how hard teaching is normally. We had to figure out how to build systems and structures in our school. That meant that, over time, we could rely on those systems rather than having to always rely on reaching back and throwing fastball after fastball until our arm figuratively fell off. People will work incredibly hard for a vision of a school they believe in, and to this day, I am in awe of how hard SLA teachers work, and it’s my job to make sure that working at SLA is a job that teachers can do for a long, long time. That has meant understanding that sustainability energy is how folks iterate and evolve and spend the bulk of their time doing the work of teaching, not the work of trying to build something new every time. If everything requires Herculean effort every time, you can’t sustain excellence for long.

We’ve learned that you have to have a powerful vision of what you want your school to be, that vision must be shared by everyone, and then you have to build systems and structures where everything you do is connected to and build upon that vision. Schools have to be unified wholes. Your pedagogy isn’t just for the classroom. It’s how kids walk in the building every day, it’s how you deal with the most challenging moments of student behavior, it informs how you talk with parents, it simply has to be the oxygen you breathe all the time. And the systems you build have to serve your best ideas at all times and in all moments. And this is the standard you try to hold yourself to all the time, knowing that you’ll probably fall short a lot. But having that north star of what you believe your school can be, and understanding that building dynamic, human systems that allow teachers and students and parents to ramp up to those best ideas quickly and powerfully can be the thing that allows you to constantly approach your best ideals.

Finally, we’ve learned that it’s really a bit bizarre to go from being the new kids on the block to being the old heads. I was 35 years old – and looked about 26 – when SLA opened its doors in 2006. I look every bit of my 55 years today. When we started, I was the young kid in the principal meetings, and our school was often referred to as an experiment. It was harder than you think for me – and for several of our longtime SLA teachers – to really get our heads around what it meant when we were no longer the new kids, because in many ways what we are trying to do still feels fragile, and still feels like it flies in the face of what many people think traditional education is supposed to be. But SLA isn’t new anymore, and the world doesn’t see us that way anymore. There are moments when that feels really good, and there are moments when we still feel like we have to remind everyone that just because we’ve been around for a while, it doesn’t mean that we’re done evolving or that we no longer think we have something to contribute to the wider dialogue. But being a little bit older as a school – and as a principal – does mean that folks expect you to speak with a little more wisdom and a lot less brashness than you did when you were young. And I have to admit, that’s probably a good thing.

Nearly 2000 words into this post, I’m realizing that I am only scratching the surface of everything we’ve learned in 20 years of SLA. And the kids show up tomorrow. When they do, it’s important that they understand that 20 years is just the beginning, and that it is their time and their turn to teach us something that will move our school to a better place. And maybe that’s the most important lesson – 20 years really is just the beginning, and we have so much more to learn.

Two Important Notes:

• EduCon 2026 is open for registration! EduCon is SLA’s educational innovation conference where hundreds of educators come from all the country to spend three days talking and thinking about how we can make schools more modern and authentic for all who we serve. EduCon 2026 will be January 30th through February 1st at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA. This year’s theme is Intentionality. Proposals to facilitate a session are open through Sept. 15th. Join us!
• Give a listen to Re:Building School 2.0 — the podcast where Zac Chase and I take apart a different chapter of our book Building School 2.0 every week. We’re examining what we thought then, what we think now, and what we need to have the schools our students and teachers need and deserve.