Faculty
the teachers here helped write what they teach.
A curriculum is only as good as the person holding it.
A lesson plan cannot see the look on your child's face. It cannot decide when to ask one more question, when to step in, when to let a child struggle for another minute, or when a four-year-old needs reassurance more than instruction. Teachers make those calls, hundreds of times a day. So we hire for judgment, and then we spend the year sharpening it.
How we hire
Four things we will not compromise on.
Credentials get someone an interview. These four get someone a classroom. Every candidate spends a working morning with children before we make an offer — we watch what they do when a plan falls apart.
They can hold a question open
The hardest skill in this building is not answering. A child asks why, and a good teacher here says what do you think? — and then waits through the silence.
They are comfortable being wrong
We ask every candidate about a lesson that failed. The ones who describe it precisely, without blaming the children, are the ones we call back.
They notice out loud
Documentation is not paperwork here. A teacher who can tell you exactly what your child was trying at 10:15 this morning is a teacher who was actually watching.
They want to build the work
Teachers here write lessons, break them, and rewrite them. If someone wants a binder handed to them in August, this is the wrong school — kindly, but genuinely.
every teacher here is trained in the CAPE Method™ before they lead a room.
Every adult here is background-screened and cleared under Florida DCF requirements, and holds current CPR and first-aid certification.
Founder & CEO
Marnie Forestieri
Founder and Chief Executive of The Winter Park School · co-author of The Innovation Advantage™ curriculum and the CAPE Method™
Marnie Forestieri is the founder of The Winter Park School and one of the creators of the Innovation Advantage™ curriculum that guides its classrooms. An entrepreneur, educator, and author, she has spent her career exploring a central question: What should children learn today to thrive in a world shaped by rapid change and artificial intelligence?
Before founding The Winter Park School, Marnie founded Amazing Explorers Academy and Young Innovators Academy, growing her ideas from a single classroom into a network of early-learning schools.
Innovation Advantage™ grew from years of collaboration with educators, including Dr. Debby Mitchell, Sarah Sprinkle, university professors, school leaders, and classroom teachers. Most importantly, it has been developed, tested, and continually refined alongside the children it was created to serve. The approach encourages children to ask questions, investigate possibilities, create solutions, test their ideas, and learn to think for themselves.
Marnie is the author of thirteen books on early childhood education published by Gryphon House and a TEDx speaker on the future of learning and what children need to know when machines already know the answers.
Despite her work as an author and entrepreneur, Marnie remains closely connected to the classroom. On any given week, you may find her at The Winter Park School observing, experimenting, and learning alongside teachers and children—because she believes an educational idea isn't finished until it works with real children.
What she believes
Machines will always know more facts than your child. They will never know which question to ask next.
The team
The people who will actually be beside your child.
Not a stock photo of a smiling stranger. Each teacher here tells you their room, how long they've been teaching, and one thing they believe — in their own words, not ours. Ask any of them about a child's project on your tour and watch how fast they answer.
Misti Castner
Head of School
She runs a school small enough that she knows every child's current question. She reads every teacher observation, sits in on lessons weekly, and is the person who decides a lesson isn't working yet.
ask her anything on your tour — she will give you a straight answer.
Brittney Burr
Assistant principal & community liaison
Trained in the CAPE Method™ and has written lessons now taught in other Innovation Advantage Schools™.
ask her what your child is working on.
Dr. Debby Mitchell
Curriculum Director
Dr. Debby Mitchell is an educator, author, and curriculum specialist with extensive experience in early childhood education, movement, and active learning. She brings research and practice together to help create engaging learning experiences that support the whole child. Her expertise contributes to the development of Innovation Advantage™, ensuring the curriculum is practical, purposeful, and designed around how young children learn best.
ask her what your child is working on.
The full team, room by room, including assistants and specialists, is on the wall by the front office. Every adult in the building is screened and cleared under Florida DCF requirements.
How teachers grow here
Coaching attached to this week's lesson — not to an August training day.
Coaching happens in the room, in the middle of the work, by October. Here it runs on the same four steps we teach the children, every week of the year.
The teacher names the problem
Not "how was your week?" — something specific. The block area collapses into conflict every Tuesday. Half the room checks out during the share.
Someone comes and watches
A real observation of that real moment, in that real room. Notes are about what happened and what the children did — never a rubric score.
They change one thing
One move, tried next week. A different question at the start of the share. Two fewer children in the block area. Small enough to actually happen.
Did it work?
If it did, it goes into the lesson for everyone. If it didn't, it gets changed again. This is how a curriculum written in one building gets good enough to send to others.
the same cycle we teach the children. we'd be hypocrites otherwise.
Three things we hold to. Three we don't do.
We hold to
A structure, and the authority to leave it
A lesson plan lasts until the first genuinely interesting question. Teachers here get a clear structure and the authority to follow the children inside it.
We hold to
The same adults, all year
Young children attach to people, not buildings. Keeping the same teachers with the same children is a curriculum decision, and the timetable is built around it.
We hold to
Observation is about practice
A teacher is coached on what happens between them and a child — the question they asked, the pause they held — and that is what an observation records.
Working here
We hire teachers who want to build the curriculum.
If you have ever closed a teacher's manual and thought I could write a better version of this — that instinct is the job description. Come and write it here.
Open roles are always listed on the careers page.
Don't take our word for any of this.
Come on a working morning and ask a teacher what your child's age group is currently trying to figure out. You will learn more in ninety seconds than this page can tell you.
they will know. that's the whole point.
Come watch them think →