After helping launch Boulder’s New Vista High School more than three decades ago, longtime teachers Jaye and John Zola still think about an early student named Daniel.
“Daniel had a stutter,” Jaye says. “One of the things New Vista was going to be was this place where students would be respected — it would be a safe environment.”
Daniel is one of many students they remember fondly.
“He had fascinating ideas,” Jaye says. And their hope for inclusion came to fruition: “He was respected, carte-blanche.”
The pair strove to demonstrate mutual respect in all their interactions, a philosophy they outline in their new book, Teaching as if Students Matter: A Guide to Creating Classrooms Based on Relationships and Engaged Learning.
Jaye recalls an incident on the first day of class when a kid repetitively bounced a ball in the classroom, disrupting the peace. Instead of reacting immediately and initiating conflict, as many other teachers might have done, she took a pause.
“I wait and hold my tongue,” Jaye remembers. An errant bounce sent the ball in her direction. “I pick up the ball, look at it, and then bounce it back to him. I give him a smile and a nod that implies, ‘Enough.’ He catches his ball, puts it in his pocket, and we continue the activity.”
Jaye says she was focusing on “building relationships” and successfully “avoided a power struggle.” In fact, after that interaction, she and the student “developed a great relationship over the semester.”
Be here now
Teaching as if Students Matter includes many lessons for teachers, but it’s also designed for those who want more fruitful, patient and equal relationships in the workplace and at home.
Despite many references to Buddhist philosophies in Teaching as if Students Matter, the Zolas are not themselves Buddhists. But New Vista, a Boulder Valley School District public school, allowed them to weave in principles like mindfulness and active learning alongside traditional academics.
The school “didn’t have an obsessive compulsion about college entrance,” John explains. “In a sort of Buddhist way, kids at New Vista had these core requirements that were only half the district requirements, and the other [was] your ‘path.’”
This offered more of a chance to “be present in the moment and be joyful” and to “have fun with the thing that you’re learning now,” he says.
‘Not about legacy’
New Vista has historically been “a place where we really had the institutional support, the parental support, ultimately the kid support, to actually teach the way we wanted to teach,” John says.
Neither Zola is retired, exactly, but they spend most of their time teaching teachers these days, rather than students. Teaching as if Students Matter is just a small part of that effort.
“We wrote it because education is so abysmal for teachers becoming teachers, and there’s no support for first-year teachers,” Jaye says. “If I’d had this book when I was a beginning teacher, it would have made my life easier.”
“We became teachers in this amazing time,” John adds. “We were really fortunate. Originally, we were going to write a book of teaching strategies, and then I think that we, in all due modesty, believed we had something to say about how teaching should happen because of the way we learned to teach. And it all came to fruition at New Vista.”
The book is “not about a legacy,” though, John says. “It’s, like, somebody’s got to write this shit down.”
‘Life is relationships’
As New Vista finishes construction on a new building with plans to move in early next year, the Zolas express pride in what the school became with their help.
“It’s one of the very rare principle-driven, values-driven schools that actually worked,” John says.
In the 30 years since they helped found New Vista, Boulder “has become more privileged, more white and less quirky,” Jaye says. The median price of a home here has soared by almost 20 times since then, while the average teacher salary has tripled.
The Zolas were able to buy a home in Martin Acres back in 1984 for $80,000, while they made about $25,000 a year combined, splitting one full-time teaching job so they could raise their children together.
The average salary for a teacher in Boulder today is around $61,000, while the median home price is well over a million dollars.
Boulder kids can still get a high-school education at New Vista in the spirit of the methods the Zolas write about in Teaching as if Students Matter, but their teachers almost certainly won’t be able to own homes here.
Still, students, teachers and even parents can get a lot of mileage from the book, because, as Jaye explains, “life is relationships.”
ON THE PAGE: Teaching as if Students Matter: A Guide to Creating Classrooms Based on Relationships and Engaged Learning is out now via State University of New York Press.