Meet our new Middle School principal

HPA is delighted to welcome new Middle School Principal Glenn Chickering and his family to our ‘ohana. Chickering’s career encompasses diverse educational roles in Colorado, New Orleans, Taiwan, and Indonesia. He brings to HPA a rich background in sustainability education from his time at Green School, Bali, where he wore many hats during more than a decade of service. He looks forward to doing lots of “listening and learning” in his first year, and to throwing a baseball whenever he has a free moment.

Where did you grow up?
I was born in Detroit and also grew up in the Motor City.

Did you always want to be an educator?
I think I was naturally inclined toward education from an early age, but I’ve also always had an entrepreneurial streak, so when it came time for college, I let my friends and father sway me toward business. I majored in interpersonal and public communications at Central Michigan University, but I always felt a pull toward education and coaching.

While I was an undergraduate, I was introduced to skiing, and fell in love with Colorado. As soon as I graduated, I left for the Rockies with hopes of competing as a mogul skier. In those early days, I skied all day and then bartended at night. Later on, I became a night club manager, and eventually the owner of my own night club. In the off seasons, I traveled. One year I would go overseas; the next I would travel throughout the United States.

How did you transition to teaching as a career?
After I’d been in Colorado for a while, I started coaching skiing. I worked with 9- to 12-year-olds and found I had a nice rapport with them. This led me to explore the idea of teaching, and soon I became a regular substitute in the Vail public schools. While this was my first exposure to education, I gained so many insights in those early days. Perhaps most importantly, I realized quickly the extent to which traditional modes of education (lectures, textbooks, mandated curricula) can feel stale and uninspiring for many students …and that good, life-changing education needs to be about a whole lot more than just the intellectual aspect. To be truly meaningful, education has to nurture passions and build confidence.

When did you make the switch to full-time?
In the mid-2000s, my then partner, and now wife, Melinda, was accepted into graduate school at Tulane. By that time, I’d let go of my ambition to ski professionally in favor of teaching. I sold my bar, and together we moved to New Orleans.

This was really a time of rebirth and renewal for the city. Hurricane Katrina had devastated many of the parishes just a year earlier, and city leaders were eager to re-envision the educational landscape there. I got engaged in New Orleans’ emerging charter school scene soon after we arrived, and this marked my transition into full-time teaching.

How did you end up on Bali?
After Melinda finished grad school, we decided we wanted to live and work overseas, and Asia became a focus as we did our research. We ended up settling in Taiwan and taught there for a year before Melinda was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to teach in Indonesia. Interestingly, at around this same time, we learned about Green School, which was very nascent at that point, but also very intriguing. We were drawn to Bali for these reasons, and serendipitously, we had always planned to marry there.

You’re coming to HPA with sustainability experience you gained on Bali. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
When we arrived in Indonesia in 2008, Green School was just getting started in the jungle outside of Ubud, which is a town on Bali. It was really the brainchild of John Hardy, a longtime and renowned jewelry maker on the island, and his wife, Cynthia. They supplied the land and the grand vision … that the school would be experiential, sustainable and connected to the surrounding community. I was lucky enough to get hired as one of the founding faculty members and ended up staying for 11 years. During that time, I helped to build Green School from the ground up.

Over the course of this same period, I decided to return to grad school. I selected Antioch University in Keene, New Hampshire, because they offered a low-residency master’s program in Educating for Sustainability. My work at Antioch introduced me to systems thinking, which is a holistic way of looking at how simple and complex systems interact with and inform each other. While the systems approach certainly can and should be applied to the natural world, it also considers one’s health and wellness, family dynamics, and community interactions. In that sense, it is a great educational tool … one that allows us to consider the impact of our choices on ourselves and the world around us. At the Academy, I will be looking for ways to leverage the systems approach within the mālama kaiaulu framework of HPA’s Sustainability Plan while simultaneously nurturing 21st century skills like critical thinking, collaboration and nimble adaptation.