You Might Be a Guide and Not Know It Yet.

There are people who spend years becoming very good at leading, coaching, organizing, building teams, solving problems, developing people, and keeping their heads when everything around them gets messy. Most of them never think about working in a school, and we think some of them should. Chisholm Creek Academy is looking for an unusual kind of person. You may not be a teacher. You may never have worked in a school. You may be a coach, camp leader, entrepreneur, restaurant manager, artist, youth mentor, outdoor educator, small-business operator, stage manager, maker, nonprofit leader, or someone whose career has taken a path we have not thought of yet. That is not a problem. In fact, it may be exactly why we want to meet you.

So, What Is a Guide?

At Chisholm Creek Academy, adults are called Guides. A Guide is not a traditional classroom teacher standing at the front of the room delivering information all day. A Guide is a coach, mentor, culture builder, question asker, and leader. Our learners are expected to take increasing ownership of their education, prove mastery, solve problems, work through conflict, make decisions, and become increasingly independent. The Guide’s job is not to make those things easy, nor is it to remove every obstacle from a learner’s path. The Guide’s job is to create the conditions in which young people can do hard things, discover what they are capable of, and gradually learn to lead themselves.

You May Already Be Doing This

You may already understand this work better than you realize. Think about the best coach you ever had. They challenged you, encouraged you, noticed things you could not yet see in yourself, and helped you grow, but they did not run onto the field and play the game for you. That is much closer to Guide work than traditional teaching. If you have ever coached a team, led a camp, managed a restaurant, built a business, directed a production, mentored younger employees, led volunteers, taught a craft, managed a difficult team, organized an event, or helped young people learn through experience, you may already have many of the instincts we value. We care much more about how you lead, think, respond, and develop people than whether your résumé follows a conventional education path.

We Believe Young People Are Capable

We are looking for someone who believes young people are capable of more than adults often allow. We want someone who is warm but not afraid to hold a standard, someone who can encourage without rescuing, and someone who can remain calm when things become messy. A strong Guide can watch a young person struggle and think, “I believe you can figure this out,” rather than rushing in to make the discomfort disappear. That mindset matters deeply here because our learners are not simply completing assignments. They are learning how to make decisions, recover from mistakes, work with other people, handle responsibility, solve problems, and build the confidence that comes from doing hard things themselves.

You Have to Be Comfortable With a Little Chaos

You should be comfortable with ambiguity because not every day will unfold exactly as planned. Learners will make surprising choices. Projects will fail. Teams will argue. Someone will forget something important. A plan that looked brilliant on Monday may look ridiculous by Thursday. We are not interested in manufacturing the appearance of perfect order at the expense of real growth. Sometimes meaningful learning is noisy. Sometimes it is messy. Sometimes it involves frustration, disagreement, failed attempts, and starting over. A strong Guide does not need every moment to look controlled in order to recognize that something valuable is happening. In fact, part of the work is learning when to step in and when to let the learners wrestle with the problem themselves.

Failure Is Part of the Work

This matters enough to say plainly: we do not believe the goal is to protect young people from every failure. Sometimes a learner needs to give the presentation they did not properly prepare for. Sometimes a team needs to experience the consequences of a poor decision. Sometimes a learner needs to realize that waiting until the last minute created a problem that an adult is not going to solve for them. In those moments, the most helpful response may not be, “Let me fix this for you.” It may be, “What are you going to do now?” That does not mean being cold, detached, or uncaring. It means caring enough to let someone experience reasonable consequences, reflect on what happened, and build the muscles they will eventually need when no adult is standing beside them.

The People Who Thrive Here

The people who thrive here tend to take ownership. They notice problems and act. They enjoy developing people, stay steady under pressure, and are willing to admit when something did not work. They can receive feedback without becoming defensive, ask good questions, hold high expectations, and do not need to be the center of attention. They can lead without controlling. They are curious, adaptable, and comfortable building things that are still evolving. They believe responsibility should increase with competence, and they understand that independence is something young people earn and practice rather than something adults simply declare. They enjoy working with young people, and they have enough perspective to laugh when a carefully designed plan takes an unexpected turn.

We Need Builders

CCA is growing and changing, and that means we need builders. We experiment, learn, revise, and improve. Some systems are established and some are still being built. Some ideas will work beautifully and others will need to be reconsidered. If you need every process to be completely finished before you begin, this environment may be frustrating. But if hearing, “Here is the goal. Here are the guardrails. Go build something,” sounds exciting, then you may find this work energizing. We are not looking for someone who simply wants to maintain a system that has already been perfected by someone else. We are looking for someone who wants to help create, refine, and strengthen something alongside the people around them.

The Goal Is to Become Less Necessary

Success here does not look like a room full of children quietly waiting for an adult to tell them what to do. Success looks like a community of young people who increasingly know what needs to be done and take responsibility for doing it. In fact, the strongest Guide gradually becomes less necessary. That may sound strange, but it is intentional. A great Guide builds learners who can solve problems, lead themselves, hold one another accountable, recover from mistakes, navigate conflict, and contribute meaningfully to their community. The question is not, “How much can these learners accomplish because I am here?” The better question is, “What can they accomplish when I am not?” Our work is successful when learners develop the judgment, confidence, character, and independence to carry more and more of the responsibility themselves.

You Do Not Need to Know Everything About Education

We do not need you to arrive knowing everything about education. We can teach systems. We can explain our tools. We can help you understand our model, our language, and the rhythms of the Studio. What is much harder to teach is judgment, curiosity, initiative, emotional steadiness, humility, and the ability to care deeply about someone without taking over their life. We can show you how CCA works. We are much more interested in whether you know how to work with people, whether you take responsibility when something goes wrong, whether you can remain steady when a situation becomes difficult, and whether you genuinely believe young people are capable of becoming increasingly responsible for their own lives. If you already possess those things, the rest is worth exploring.

Maybe This Sounds Strangely Familiar

This might be for you if you have ever wondered whether your ability to coach, lead, organize, mentor, build culture, or develop people could be used for something more meaningful. It might be for you if you look at young people and see capability rather than fragility, if you want work where the human stakes are real, and if you want to be somewhere that expects you to think rather than simply execute a script. It might be for you if you enjoy the challenge of building something, if you would rather ask a great question than immediately provide an answer, and if you find the idea of helping young people become less dependent on adults genuinely exciting. Perhaps most importantly, this might be for you if some part of you is reading this and thinking, “I have never considered working in a school, but this sounds strangely like me.”

Tell Us Why CCA

If that is you, we would like to hear from you. Do not send us a generic cover letter telling us that you are passionate about education or that you enjoy working with children. Instead, send us one or two sentences telling us why you would specifically want to work at Chisholm Creek Academy. Not why you want a job. Not why you like working with kids. Why this place? What about this way of thinking about young people, learning, responsibility, failure, independence, or leadership made you stop and think that this might be worth exploring? If you can answer that clearly, that is a very good place for us to start.