The School We All Want (Big Cheese Update + Showcase VIDEOS!)

January 11, 2022 | Craig Doerksen

Waterloo Social Frame Trimseters PLAY

I can’t tell you how many times we’ve described Waterloo to a friend, family member, or parent exploring Waterloo and they say, “I wish my high school was like this. Can I be a student here?”. As adults, we realize these crucial years are not best spent cramming a ton of information to take a test, but rather should be a chance to actually discover and develop what one might do. It’s a time to understand things on a deeper level, an opportunity to practice creating things of value for others, and finally a time to become an adult.

Our Big Cheese campaign has one more week! Your gifts allows us to keep building this and making the it available to more students. As we continue to grow into our fourth year, your gift will help:

  • Enhance science lab and project-making equipment,
  • Create a sense of place in spaces for learning, meeting, and study,
  • Develop athletic and student life opportunities, and
  • Recruit more great classmates

Your generous contributions enable our students to experiment, build, learn, and grow – to have that kind of school we all wish we had.

2021 Fall Student Showcase Videos

Our end of year Showcases are a great way to see how Waterloo impacts its students through project based learning. You’ll find video recaps of each fall student showcase project below!

Highlight Reel

What do you do that is valuable? How can you get better at it? How can you do more of it? These are questions for our students — because they are also questions that drive US! When they drive learning, learning gets real.

Click to watch

Data Science

How can data be analyzed to tell a story? How can we use data to form a prediction or describe patterns? How can we make sure a data set is valid and does not display bias?

Click to watch

Rhetoric and Writing

In this dual enrollment course created by the University of Texas at Austin, RHE 306 students learned the fundamentals of argumentation and discovered that rhetoric is everywhere.

Click to watch

Law and Government

Students learn to argue — the productive way — to become the inaugural Waterloo Mock Trial Team!

Click to watch

Spanish II

This year students applied what they learned by writing and illustrating Spanish children’s books to present to our neighbors at Academia Preescolar.

Click to watch

Craig Doerksen

Craig Doerksen

Prior to becoming the director of Waterloo School, Craig provided leadership for a number of prominent institutions, including Regents School of Austin; the Bluetower Arts Foundation in Eugene, OR; and Trinity School in Raleigh, NC. Craig holds a master’s degree in English from the University of Ireland and graduated from the University of Oregon with a bachelor’s degree in English.