Nate Smalley
See what is actually there.
My second day of teaching was September 11, 2001. I watched the smoke roll across the Hudson and fill our school parking lot. Two days later I broke up my first hallway fight - I w would break up thirteen more over the next two months and then stop counting.
I have been trying to understand what happened in that building ever since.
Twenty-five years followed, roughly the same question at roughly increasing scale — teaching in Jersey City, founding a KIPP high school in Newark, coaching principals in Harlem and the South Bronx, eventually leading leadership development for KIPP nationally. What I learned, slowly, is that the most consequential work in any organization is rarely the work that gets named. It happens in how leaders see, what they refuse to see, and whether they have the nerve to act on what they finally do see.
Along the way I picked up a PhD and received dharma transmission in the Soto Zen lineage. The first gave me a vocabulary for what the second had already shown me: most of the work is seeing what is actually there.
I write Unknow — essays and fiction about what we have agreed not to see, especially as we lead.
Through Conscious Schools, the practice I founded in 2017, I work with leaders and change agents across the country — people trying to move systems that resist movement, in conditions that do not forgive sloppy seeing. The premise is simple: transformation is a conditions problem, not a program problem, and the difference between those two framings is most of the work.
If you're learning more, I'd love to hear from you.