From Capstone to Classroom: What We Saw in Springville

There is a difference between talking about changing education and walking into a school where educators are actually doing it. Evin and I recently traveled to Springville for a day that captured so much of what we have been trying to build through the Thinkering Collective. We came to work alongside educators and school leaders in a Thinkering workshop, helping them begin imagining projects rooted in their own curiosities, their students, and their community. But we also came to see something that had already been built, and that might have been the most important part of the trip.

We got to visit The Nest, a Thinkering Fellow capstone project that had moved beyond the proposal, beyond the presentation, and beyond the idea stage. It was real. There were instruments, a drum set, and a space completely reimagined around what young people might create when someone gives them permission and a place to explore.

Check out a bit of Ben’s journey here:

Thinkering began with a relatively simple idea: find the people already doing things differently and bring them together. Find the educators, leaders, organizations, and changemakers who are not necessarily waiting for permission to make learning better and create a community where they can learn from one another.

Over time, our conversations with educators kept pointing toward two needs: community and mentorship. Innovative educators can sometimes feel like outliers inside their own buildings. They have an idea. They see something that could be different. They want to try it. But turning that spark into something tangible can be difficult without people around them who will ask questions, open doors, make introductions, or simply tell them to keep going.

That is a big part of what the Thinkering Fellowship is designed to provide. Fellows move from curiosity toward real world action, supported by mentors, peers, experts, and community partners. The goal is not simply to complete a project. It is to build the relationships, agency, and confidence necessary to make something meaningful happen.

Springville gave us a chance to see what that process can look like when it moves from an idea into an actual school community.

The story of The Nest began with curiosity. After seeing modern bands performing at a conference, one Springville educator had the kind of reaction that probably sounds familiar to anyone who has ever started a meaningful project: Why don’t we have this for our kids?

That question came back to Springville and eventually led to another question: Where could we put it? The answer was a space that had essentially served as storage for years. Instead of accepting the room for what it had been, the team began imagining what it could become.

That is Thinkering. It is not about starting with a predetermined solution. It is about noticing something, becoming curious about it, pulling other people into the process, and beginning to make. The project also moved beyond the walls of the school because part of the capstone process encourages Fellows to consider who in their communities could become collaborators in their work.

In Springville, that led to the Springville Community Foundation, which contributed $2,000 toward the project. That funding helped purchase equipment, including the drum set that Evin eventually got to sit behind during our visit. But the money represents something bigger. The community did not simply fund something happening inside a school. They became part of the learning.

The team even created a plaque recognizing the Foundation’s contribution because, as we heard during the visit, “they’re a part of this.” That sentence stayed with me because it captures something we believe deeply at Thinkering. The most meaningful learning does not have to stop at the classroom door.

Walking into The Nest immediately raises a bigger question:

Why do not more learning spaces look and feel like this?

The room invites experimentation. Students can play, record, make something, try something that does not work, collaborate with somebody else, and discover an ability or interest they did not know they had.

The vision is eventually bigger than students alone. The hope is to open the space to community education so other people can come in, explore, create, and perhaps record something themselves. That is an entirely different conception of what a classroom, or even a school, can be.

A school does not have to be a building where knowledge is delivered to students between certain hours. It can be infrastructure for curiosity. It can be a community asset. It can be a place where students, educators, families, and neighbors make things together. That is where project based learning becomes something much more interesting than simply assigning a project. The project becomes a vehicle for relationships, curiosity, and community.

What made the day particularly meaningful was that we were not only visiting the result of a Thinkering project. We were there to help another group begin. During the workshop, we worked with educators and school leaders as they started thinking about the projects they might pursue themselves.

That created an incredible full circle moment. In one part of the building was evidence of what can happen when an educator follows a curiosity far enough. Elsewhere, another group of educators was beginning that same process. Somewhere inside those early conversations could be the next Nest. We do not know what it is yet, and that is exactly the point.

Thinkering is not about handing educators a blueprint and asking them to replicate someone else’s innovation. It is about creating the conditions where they can recognize possibilities within their own students, schools, interests, and communities. Our mentorship model intentionally positions mentors as facilitators, thought partners, and guides rather than people who simply prescribe answers. Fellows are supported in designing, testing, reflecting, and adapting their work while maintaining ownership of it.

Sustainable change rarely starts with someone outside a community arriving with the answer. It starts with someone inside that community asking a better question and finding other people willing to explore it with them.

At the end of the day, we were exhausted. The camera battery was dying after a day spent talking, listening, facilitating, exploring, and, yes, playing some music. But before leaving Springville, Evin captured the moment perfectly.

We had just watched something travel through the entire Thinkering process. An educator noticed something and became curious. That curiosity became an idea. The idea became a capstone. The capstone brought in the community. The community helped create a space. Now students can walk into that space and make something that did not exist before.

As I reflected while we were leaving, seeing a project move from an idea during the Fellowship to actually sitting behind its drum set and playing was “100% why we do what we do.” I could not agree more, because ultimately Thinkering is not about workshops, fellowships, or even projects. Those are structures we use to create the conditions for something bigger.

The real work is helping people see that the world immediately around them is something they have agency to shape. Sometimes that means redesigning a lesson. Sometimes it means bringing an unexpected community partner into a school. Sometimes it means gathering educators in a room and giving them the time and community to imagine something new. And sometimes it means looking at a storage room that has been sitting there for twenty years and imagining a music studio instead.

That is what we saw in Springville, and we cannot wait to see what they build next.