For Jon Anderson, trust is the foundation of learning. Now in his 16th year as a teacher at Eagle Rock, a nationally recognized tuition-free residential high school in Estes Park for students nationwide who commit to reengaging in their education, Anderson’s ability to connect with his students through the nontraditional nature of their curriculum has allowed him to make a substantial impact far beyond the classroom.

This month, Anderson’s dedication to building meaningful relationships with his students and his unique teaching style are being celebrated by Honored, a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping great teachers in the classroom and inspiring a new generation of talent to pursue teaching.

Through his recognition, Anderson will receive a $5,000 grant in addition to a $1,000 DonorsChoose gift card, allowing him to pay it forward to another teacher.

Anderson also had his story immortalized in a profile article by Outside Senior Editor, Matt Skenazy. In the profile featured on Honored’s website, Skenazy tells of the immeasurable impact that Anderson made on the life of one former student, Vidal Carrillo:

“If I hadn’t gone to Eagle Rock and met Jon, I probably would have dropped out of high school,” said Carrillo, who now studies biology at Colorado State University and works as an Alpine hotshot during the summer. “I would be a completely different person.”

Carrillo’s story started in Los Angeles, where his father abandoned their family and his brother had been in and out of jail. In search for new beginnings, Carrillo’s mother found Eagle Rock School as an option for which he applied and enrolled, and where Carrillo met a teacher who would soon change his life.

Though intimidated at first, Carrillo could tell that Anderson was a man of character, someone he could look up to. The two developed a bond that helped Carrillo grow intellectually and personally.

“Not only did he help me in class, but he would be there for me outside of class if I was struggling with something in my personal life,” Carrillo said. “He was interested in my future.”

Anderson credits Eagle Rock with the opportunity to connect with his students in a unique way. Incoming students begin their personal development journey with a 24-day backpacking adventure through the Rocky Mountains. This nontraditional learning atmosphere is what Anderson had long been searching for.

“Eagle Rock’s structure allows me to focus on my students as individuals and get to know them on a deeper level,” said Anderson. “All of this means I get to build trust, and when we trust each other, all kinds of learning can happen.”

Read Anderson’s full story at http://www.honored.org/honoree/Jon-Anderson/.

Has a teacher changed your life? Honored wants to share your story and give your teacher some well-deserved recognition! To nominate a teacher, visit honored.org/nominate.

Eagle Rock, a nonprofit Corporate Social Responsibility initiative of the American Honda Motor Company, is both a school for high school age students and a professional development center for educators. The school is a year-round, residential, and full-scholarship school that enrolls young people ages 15-17 from around the United States in an innovative learning program with national recognition.

The Professional Development Center works with educators from around the country who are interested in engaging in education renewal and reform. The Professional Development Center works with educators committed to making high school a more engaging experience for our country’s youth.

For more information visit www.eaglerockschool.org.

Honored is a national nonprofit, nonpartisan organization dedicated to keeping great teachers in the classroom and inspiring a new generation of talent to pursue teaching. Each month, Honored shines a spotlight on a teacher who has changed the life of a single student.

For more information about Honored, visit honored.org.

STORY BY: Matt Skenazy, Senior Editor, Outside Magazine

The experiential nature of Eagle Rock’s curriculum allows teachers and students to get out of the classroom and take learning to a new level

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When I came to Eagle Rock, I ran the Wilderness Program for five years—a 24-day, new student wilderness orientation course that happens at the beginning of every trimester. This position is what originally brought me to Eagle Rock, but what really drew me to the organization was this idea that a wilderness program could fit inside the context of a school. That doesn’t occur often, and I found a great deal of interest in that. I would work with these students for 24 days in the field, and then I would have another couple of years with them back at the school to see their growth and development. Most other outdoor programs sort of stand on their own. You take their course and go back to wherever you’re going.

The other piece that inspired me was Eagle Rock’s Professional Development Center. We not only want to serve the 72 students on our campus really well, but we also want to have a bigger impact around the country. That was really intriguing to me. I was at a point in my career where I wanted to be working with young people but with a bigger impact. It always seemed this was an either-or dilemma. You’re either working for an association where you’re putting on conferences and creating professional development experiences but not working with young people; or, you’re working with young people and not having this broader impact. Eagle Rock had both.

I think one of the big things in our shift back to focusing on the five expectations was that the instructors felt like the things they wanted to do—and felt the students wanted to do—were no longer possible. Given the traditional route the curriculum had begun to take, they had to get through all of this “stuff.” We were able to resurface our five expectations and re-emphasize the holistic nature of our curriculum through the support of the instructors and students.

When you have this predominant paradigm that tells you to organize your curriculum by discipline, using scope and sequence, you develop a belief that if you don’t do that, your students are going to die. When push comes to shove and you’re in uncharted territory, you tend to gravitate toward what you know. I think many innovative schools that start out really cutting edge get fearful over time, and ask themselves if they might need to pull back and reimplement old techniques.

It’s important to note this is a slow drift. You don’t wake up one day and say you’re going to throw everything out and go back to the traditional framework. Rather, you do a tweak here and a tweak there and before you know it you take a step back and go, “Whoa, what happened?”

Q: What is the long-term impact of the wilderness expedition learners embark on as their introduction to Eagle Rock School?

A: It’s fundamental in a way. I always tell people, I can’t imagine this piece of Eagle Rock ever going away. I can almost see every other aspect shifting or changing but not the expedition. One reason for this is the fact we get our students from all over the country. They are disengaged, and the schools that served them did not serve them well. That can be for a whole host of reasons—the individual student and their learning style might be incongruent with sitting in a classroom; it could mean the student is growing up in a family system that is not conducive to them being successful in school; or, it could even mean the student is in a school that is poorly performing even by traditional standards. Also, some of our students have experience in the juvenile justice system, having engaged in criminal activity or participated in using drugs and alcohol. The students at Eagle Rock come from a host of backgrounds, creating a diverse mix of experience, race, culture, and gender.

All of these students show up at Eagle Rock with all the coping skills that have helped them survive whatever context they’ve been in. And, those coping strategies aren’t usually conducive to living in an intentional, residential community. It can be a real mess when they show up—they’re struggling and acting out in ways that can be dysfunctional for the community.

For the expedition, we’ll have eight young people in the middle of the wilderness, and they have to figure out how to work together in order to travel on the course. It’s a skill-building oriented program, so we do a lot of work around effective communication, conflict resolution, and restorative practices to help them understand how to take responsibility for their actions and how to interact with people in a way that helps them sort things out. We believe conflict can be generative, and when it comes up, if you lean into it and utilize the skills we teach, you can generate a new future you couldn’t have imagined when that conflict first arose.

Overall, we get students comfortable being uncomfortable. We get them comfortable as learners, being vulnerable, and taking responsibility for their own lives. I believe all of those things are critical for them to come to Eagle Rock and be successful. It gives them 24 days to create a frame of reference. They will refer back to their experiences on the course all the time when they’re at school.

For example, many of our students like to blame other people for their shortcomings. Wilderness has such a clear, natural, and logical consequence built into the experience that students discover pretty quickly that they can’t blame anybody if they didn’t listen to how to put the tarp up when it rained and they got wet. This makes sense, right? But, there are so many arbitrary things in the world, and rules that don’t make sense to them, that they develop this habit of not taking responsibility.

Oftentimes, there’s some legitimacy to thinking the system is working against you. At Eagle Rock, we say, “You choose all of your own behaviors.” You’re not in control of the external circumstances of your life, but you are in control of how you respond to them. The wilderness trip really bakes all that in, which then facilitates their ownership of their learning when they’re back in school. When they’re struggling with something, we often ask, “What can you do to shift that? What is in your control that you can utilize to make your learning more yours?” The wilderness trip builds the foundation for that reflection to take place.

Q: How do you see this wilderness orientation being translatable to learning communities across the country that don’t necessarily have access to something like an Estes Park?

A: We realized a number of years ago that we can’t export Eagle Rock. We can’t tell a school in Albuquerque, New Mexico that they ought to be doing a 24-day wilderness expedition—let us help you design that. We’re so different, and in the early days, it caused people to easily discount our work, saying, “Oh, of course you can do that. You have this, that, and the other thing.” It was too easy for people to write us off.

We took a step back and asked: “What are the paradigms working in community change models?” What we found was you have to listen more than you tell, build on what assets exist in that community, and support those organizations with their own goals inside their own contexts.

Having said all that, if a school came to us and said, “We’re really interested in taking your wilderness program and integrating it into our experience here, help us with that,” we would do that. But, we would begin with the community’s assets and see what already exists that would make this program possible. Something like helping form a partnership with an outdoor organization that already exists in the community and helping develop a curriculum around their program.

When this isn’t an option, which is often the case, we look at the principles that capture the essence of the wilderness program and seek out multiple assets in the community that, when combined, can cultivate the full experience. For example, we might find an organization that offers a two-day ropes course experience that can get the wheels churning in incorporating that kind of experience into the curriculum.

Overall, our real motivation is to help communities discover ways to orient young people to their school where they learn how to take risks and be vulnerable within a safe environment. That’s the bottom line of what the wilderness course is looking to accomplish.

Q: What’s a story from your experience at Eagle Rock that captures the possibility available to learners who live and learn there?

A: If I were to tell a story that captured the idea that who a young person is at a single point in time is not necessarily indicative of who they’re going to be, I would have to talk about Calvin King.

Calvin King was interviewed to attend Eagle Rock while in lockup. I should mention, I always hesitate to tell these stories because, when I say “lockup,” people’s gut reaction is to think of our program as a place that is only serving students in the juvenile justice system. We certainly have young people who have been involved with the law, but everyone comes here by choice.

When Calvin came to Eagle Rock, you could tell he was very street-wise, very charismatic, and could work the system. He got into some discipline problems at Eagle Rock and was disenrolled. He went home for quite some time because, when you get suspended from Eagle Rock, it can be for up to a trimester or two. Calvin was likely home for six months before returning. When students are suspended, they have tasks they must complete before re-enrolling in our program. These tasks are specific to each student and the actions they’ve committed—it can range from getting a job, seeking counseling, etc.

Upon Calvin’s return to Eagle Rock, we held a restorative circle to repair the harm he had caused through his actions. He was reintegrated into the community with a lot of hesitation from students and some staff. But, he reintegrated, eventually graduated, and received a full scholarship to Morehouse College in Atlanta. After he graduated from there, he came back to Eagle Rock as a Public Allies Teaching Fellow for two years. Then, he went to the Christina Seix Academy in Trenton, New Jersey, where they focus on serving underserved youth. Calvin is the Director of Residential Life at the Academy.

Calvin’s story really captures what Eagle Rock is all about and this idea that what happens today does not predict what will happen tomorrow. In his words, if Eagle Rock hadn’t shown up for him, he might not be alive right now. In his view, Eagle Rock saved his life in a lot of ways.

From our viewpoint, Eagle Rock showed up at the right time for him, and through our school, he was able to save his own life. It was a process. He didn’t just show up, and it was all roses. He made some mistakes, we stuck with each other, and now he’s an amazing person doing amazing things—serving Trenton youth.

We talk with all of our staff about this, particularly in instances when someone has convinced themselves a student will not be able to succeed here. We come back to that idea. We have to remind ourselves that what has happened in this moment is not predictive of what could be in a few years.

By Nic Wackerly

Eagle Rock School in Estes Park is approaching their summer break and graduation.

The school operates on a trimester schedule.  Each trimester includes three months of school in Estes and a one month break.  However, the uniqueness of Eagle Rock extends beyond the schedule.  The program is focused on helping students that did not have success at a previous school.

When new students arrive in September, they will go on a 24 wilderness trip after a week of preparation.

“Our experience is that going out on the wilderness trip is a way to disconnect from the distractions of society,” Jen Frickey said, director of curriculum for Eagle Rock School.  “Over 24 days, students have to look deeply within themselves and how they interact with people.”

Students choose to come to Eagle Rock.  The application process is student led and helps ensure they are passionate about attending Eagle Rock.  The school accepts students from around the country who have not had success in a traditional learning environment.

When students return to Eagle Rock, they will continue learning with interdisciplinary project based classes.  The teachers use state curriculum standards and common core, but also focus on developing creative curriculum.  examples of this are classes about the psychology of rock climbing or the physics of a roller coaster.

Along with innovative curriculum, Eagle Rock School will feature a new Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) lab.

“We think it is a great way to explore,” Frickey said.  “Students can become creators of technology and solutions instead of just consumers.”

In addition to helping students and developing new curriculum, the Eagle Rock School Professional Development Center works with educators to help make the high school experience more engaging.  Staff at the development center consults with other schools to help them make changes and learn from what is being done at Eagle Rock.

Service remains an important value for Eagle Rock School and Development Center.

Three times a year students participate in EagleServe, which gets students out and working in the community.

“Serve the Eagle Rock and other communities through the contribution of my labors,” is one of the 10 commitments that are a part of the Eagle Rock School Values.

This next year will be an exciting one as Eagle Rock will celebrate their 25th anniversary next summer.  There will also be a documentary coming out this fall about the student wilderness program.

Eagle Rock School is an initiative of the American Honda Education Corporation, a nonprofit subsidiary of the American Honda Motor Company.  It is a full scholarship high school for students and a low-cost professional development center for secondary school educators, according to