Today we’d like to introduce you to Deborah Hale
Deborah, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
After I’d been teaching for around 25 years, my mother’s best friend, Alicia helped me see the value in getting a Masters Degree. It took me a summer to prepare for the GRE. I became my own teacher, and with great GRE prep books, I was finally able to understand Algebra. I worked on my Master’s degree for 6 years. Through the entire time, I was “guinea pigging” my third grade students at St. Francis School by designing all my curriculum projects for whatever graduate class I was taking especially for them. My students never wanted to be absent. Several years later, I moved to a nature based charter school with an amazing charter that I deeply resonated with, but I burned out quickly because of the class size and state testing. I took a sabbatical year with the intention of writing children’s books. A few months in, I signed up for a 7-week course in awakening the feminine power. In a guided meditation one afternoon, I was invited to pull my optimal destiny out of the quantum field. It was a school, and because I had a lot of valuable Whole Foods Market stocks to sell, I could actually afford to manifest it. I spent a year dreaming up the school with my original partner. We visited other schools, created an advisory board, read hundreds of books about other schools, methodologies, paradigms of education, and most importantly, we read, Educating for Human Greatness by Lynn Stoddard. I purchased a wooded 7 acre property along Gilleland Creek in 2011. We created a nature based micro school with a small student teacher ratio. Our huge campus has beautiful student gardens, including fairy gardens. The school participates in integrated thematic learning, which is project based. Students learn the 3Rs, as well as learning how to care for living things, how to self regulate, and how to resolve conflict. The beauty is that we teach the children rather than teach the curriculum, even though we do have all kinds of wonderful curriculum to choose from. We can teach inside in our warm homelike classrooms, outside on the driveway, on one of our many covered porches or under the canopy of trees next to the creek.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Our greatest challenge was getting through Covid. Over spring break, we went from being the Inside Outside School, to being an inside school, learning on computers. Most of us had internet issues. One teacher was teaching kindergartners on Zoom, while she and her three daughters were trying to share a spotty bandwidth, all on different Zooms. When we came back to campus, we were completely an outside school. We held classes outdoors through all kinds of weather. I did love it when birds occasionally flew through my classroom, and we were able to add two outdoor pergolas which now often serve as outdoor performance areas.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
At Inside Outside School, we offer children unstructured time in nature each day. Students experience changes in the forest over the seasons and also begin to see longer cycles in nature, like the 3 year cycles of the pecan trees. They see species of insects emerge that they haven’t seen in previous years. In our democratic Hive meetings, even a kindergarten student is confident enough to hold the talking stick, and speak to the student body, proposing a plan for sharing stumps during Nature Literacy time, or suggest a royalty dress up day. To illustrate how we are nature based; one class has an incubator and learns to carefully candle the eggs to look for developing embryos. Another class grows lettuce varieties for their upcoming market and a third is writing haiku about beetles.In addition to learning to sweep and mop the kitchen, empty the trash and compost, children are learning how to care for goats, a cat and a donkey, and raise chickens.
My vision has always been that an ideal school has natural science at its core and it is integrated throughout every thing we do. Through place based learning and authentic unstructured time in nature, we are encouraging all children to become NATURE LOVERS and life long learners.
I was so inspired by all my wonderful professors in grad school, but especially a science teacher at Texas State who introduced me to the book, Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv. The book along with the entire experience of being in her class would have a big star on the timeline of IOS. I have come to believe it is very important for children to be outside more, and to fall in love with nature, learning to be good stewards of plants and animals rather than hearing only about the growing overwhelming environmental threats which can feel paralyzing for all of us.
Through story, community stewardship and role play we explore the 7 dimensions of human greatness together. Imagination, Interaction, Initiative. Integrity, Identity, and Intuition, form the stratum of our bedrock. We focus on one of these dimensions every week. Another thing we are is a democratic school. We practice Honeybee Democracy, inspired by a book written by Thomas D. Seeley. In our structure of school democracy, we have honeycomb meetings with our classes, a whole school hive meeting on Fridays, and chamber meetings with the staff on Wednesdays. The chamber is in our second year of apprentice beekeeping. My name, Deborah, comes from the Hebrew word for bee.
We offer students choice in their learning, which is empowering. We also do our best to make sure they become fluent readers, confident writers, and capable mathematicians who know how important integrity is.
What were you like growing up?
I lived in San Diego in a house that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. I spent many hours catching crabs in the tide pools. My sister and I played outside, skating, biking, climbing trees, building forts and bamboo dens and making mud pies. When I moved to Texas, my sister and I played school in the garage. We both became teachers. I suddenly became a prolific poet in 4th grade. I became a songwriter in 7th grade when I got my first guitar. I started meditating when I was 16 and have kept my daily practice over these many decades. My grandmother was in the National Storytelling League, and inspired my love of storytelling, puppetry and theater. She raised my sister and I after we lost both of our parents. We spent a lot of time with “old” folks throughout our adolescence. I felt like I had a whole village of adoring grandparents. I was a hippie teenager, and I’m really thankful that I got my values shaped by that time. I’m still a tree hugger.
Pricing:
- School tuition is $1,500
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.insideoutsideschool.org/
