Founder
Brenton Burnett
Former science and STEM teacher, Cherry Creek Schools · 22 years
This didn't start in the classroom. It started watching the world — the noise, the sorting, the certainty, the sheer volume of disagreement — and feeling something between exasperation and stubbornness. There have to be a few things we all agree on. Maybe not many. But a few. And if those few are the only things that survive vast differences in background, belief, and temperament, they must be unusually important — and they'd be the natural common ground for co-living.
I taught science for 22 years — physics among it, including units on quantum mechanics, relativity, the long search for a unified theory. The pattern in that search fascinated me: the more carefully you look, the more the apparent complexity resolves into a small number of fundamental things. I wondered if the same was true of people. What are the fundamental particles of being human — and how would you know one if you found it? Physicists find their fundamentals by stripping away everything that varies and seeing what's left. The human fundamentals, I figured, would show themselves the same way: as the few things that survive every difference of background, belief, and temperament. Which is just another name for the ground we already share. The fundamentals and the common ground would turn out to be the same short list.
And here the analogy broke in my favor. A physicist needs an accelerator to pin down a particle; the human fundamentals, I suspected early on, would be the kind of thing an ordinary person already recognizes in themselves. If that was right, you wouldn't only be able to find them — you could build with them. The everyday work the framework cares about — like actually helping someone make a decision — might be far more reachable than the size of the questions made it look.
I spent those 22 years in Cherry Creek Schools knowing the research. I knew what good teaching and mentoring looked like, what conditions made young people thrive, what the science said about development, belonging, and agency. And for 22 years, I largely couldn't use it — for lack of time, resources, and institutional design built around different goals. Thirty faces looked back at me every day, making the cost of that gap visible in real time. That gap — between knowing better and being unable to act on it — is the emotional engine of steamHouse. It isn't frustration with education in the abstract. It's specific, accumulated frustration that finally had to go somewhere.
What I found, after ten years of full-time work and more than 2,000 sources consulted, is that the fundamentals were already there. They didn't need to be invented — they needed to be found, mapped, and verified. And the early hunch held: these fundamentals are verifiable on any Tuesday morning — anyone who has lived consciously recognizes them when they see them. That's the confirmation, not the deflation. I think of it like a semi-lucky but plucky mediocre archaeologist who finds a forgotten map in a random library. The map was always there. The territory was always there. The contribution is making the connection visible — and then spending years checking that the map is actually accurate.
Long before any of this, my father was a Presbyterian minister, and I watched him do something from the pulpit that I didn't have language for until much later. He preached the gospel, of course. But the charge underneath it was always personal: take this in for yourself, work out what it means to you, and live from what you actually come to believe. What moved people wasn't the content of the charge. It was being asked to reflect on what they actually believed and to bring their lives into line with it — they told me as much. Most of the time, life doesn't ask that. Institutions don't ask that. Authority figures don't ask that. He did.
I have spent my own life trying to do the same thing — first with myself, then with the students in front of me, and now with the question of what a school or any human-serving system is actually for. The method behind everything that follows is some version of his charge — the same operation, asked at a different scale: take the person's real interior seriously, build the conditions that make alignment possible, and trust what happens.
What I couldn't fully see, over years, was the shape of what I was building (which also meant I could never quite say which door to bring someone in through). It started with a foundation — what's actually true about how people develop — and built up from there: the short list of commitments that follow once you take that seriously, and the specific forms those commitments can take. The deep work was the map. Everything else is downstream of it.
A spec like that asks for a lot of things to exist. So they got built, and they kept taking different shapes — a curriculum the Club runs on, a story world, books for different readers, civic essays, a website. None of it is the point on its own. It's the surface — what the framework looks like when it meets a reader, a family, a screen — and it's meant to keep changing. What doesn't change is the architecture underneath.
Ten years. A growing community of families in Golden, Colorado. A curriculum, a body of writing, a story world still in development. Still building. Still honest about what's proven and what isn't. The bet behind all of it: that a small number of teachable fundamentals are genuinely universal — and that their universality is exactly what makes every teaching moment count.
Meet the team — The studio crew — the people who make the work.
Explore the Commons— The frameworks, tools, and curriculu. How the four become teachable.
About the Club— What this looks like in practice, in Golden, Colorado
For Partners— The argument and the evicence, researchers, funders, and program collaborators.