More than a decade ago, Aitabé Fornés left her job teaching high school science in New York City to follow another path.

This fall, she returns to the classroom as LightHouse's new 10th grade advisor. Our competency-based model is built around individualized learning—one of the things that drew her back to school. She brings years of classroom experience, along with fourteen years spent exploring Family Constellations, somatic listening, coaching, and an approach she developed called Sensethinking.

Her work asks people to pay attention to what is happening beneath the surface: in relationships, in patterns, in the body, and in the stories we carry about ourselves and one another.

What led you to leave high school teaching? What felt missing at the time?

I have been fortunate to work at innovative high schools for my whole career, starting way back in 2000. But in 2012, I had reached an impasse: I was teaching at a new school where, despite the hard work and good intentions of the faculty and staff, the individualized needs of the students were at conflict with the inflexible demands of the larger school system. It taught me that even the best teachers are limited by the system.

This is one of the things I recognized right away about LightHouse - that the structure of the school is organized around the priority of individualized learning.

Aitabé describes herself as a teacher at heart, even in the years her work took her far from the classroom.

Did you ever feel you had stopped being a teacher? Where did teaching keep showing up in your work?

Though I stepped away from classroom teaching in 2012, I did not walk away from education. I discovered the practice of Family Constellations, a powerful healing modality that incorporates somatic practices with knowledge of family systems, and immersed myself in it. I was struck by how much insight and understanding becomes available to people when they combine thoughtful inquiry with body-centered sensing. This inspired the pedagogical approach that I developed called Sensethinking.

So what does that look like in practice?

How do you describe Sensethinking in your own words? What does it help us notice that we might otherwise miss?

Here’s a simple way to understand Sensethinking: If I ask my students to read a story that involves a conflict between two characters, we are typically reading, writing, and thinking about the story. But if we pause and draw a picture of the two characters and how we imagine them to feel about each other, that drawing literally creates a new perspective on the reading.

It is activating the senses by bringing in new visual elements, such as size and distance, as well as more spontaneous elements, such as how the reader imagines the emotions the characters are feeling.This practice generates new ideas and creates a more dynamic, sensing + thinking experience.

Adults can be quick to interpret teenagers, especially when they aren't following the plan we've asked of them. We call them unmotivated. Defiant. Distracted. Anxious. Disengaged. Too much. Not enough.

But behavior is information, not the whole story.

At LightHouse, advising begins with curiosity about the person underneath the most visible behavior.

When a young person seems stuck, shut down, or resistant, what do you pay attention to first? What do adults most often misunderstand about teenagers?

Honestly, first, I check in with myself. Am I feeling calm and well-resourced, or tired and stressed? If I’m tired and stressed, I give myself a moment to breathe and make sure I can be fully present to the young person in front of me.

Teens want what we all want: connection. When I am calm, present, and open, I am available for connection and support.

Advisors at LightHouse help young people navigate our competency-based program toward graduation. But they are also often the adults outside a teen's family who know them best over time—helping them understand where they are, what they need, what may be getting in the way, and where they want to go next.

That takes balance. Young people need freedom without neglect and support without constant direction. They need adults who hold high expectations without reducing those expectations to compliance.

Aitabé's work also asks us to see a young person in context—not as an isolated set of behaviors, strengths, or needs, but as someone shaped by relationships and by the larger systems to which they belong.

How has your work with families and systems changed how you understand a young person who is struggling? What does it mean to see a student in context?

Our lives and our student’s lives are part of an interconnected web comprising all of the systems we belong to. While there is much to be critical of about the larger social, economic, and political systems, my work with systems actually helps me feel quite positive and optimistic because I have seen repeatedly that systems have an organizing impulse to move into greater health and wholeness.

One way that can happen is when a dysregulated young person meets an adult with a calm, regulated nervous system. It doesn’t mean that the young person instantly becomes calm! But it does create a culture where they can feel that they are safe, they belong, and they matter.

Aitabé comes back to school understanding education as deeply relational. Young people need adults who teach and challenge them, but also listen closely, notice patterns, ask meaningful questions, and stay alongside them as they figure out who they are becoming.

At LightHouse, we talk often about young people developing vision and agency. No one can hand those things to them. They emerge through experience, reflection, relationships, experimentation, mistakes, interests, questions, and time.

Our job is to create the conditions: safety and belonging, clear expectations, meaningful challenge, real responsibility, and adults who remain curious about the person underneath the behavior—and about who that person might be becoming.

What do you most hope to make possible for your students this year?

I am most excited to introduce students to the breadth of their intelligence. Once a learner expands how they know by including all of their senses, they will feel like they have a sense-thinking super power!

Aitabé left the classroom to learn more about people. Fourteen years later, she is bringing what she learned back to school.

We are very glad she chose LightHouse.