Align to Thrive

Align to Thrive is a workshop to identify misalignments between a school’s vision, learning environment, and educational program and create actions to address them.

What's an aligned learning ecosystem?

An aligned learning ecosystem is one where vision, environment, and the educational program work together as interdependent parts to strengthen and sustain one another.

Environment

Environments should be designed for learner agency and collective well-being, ensuring that every child is seen, heard, valued, and loved. They should be more agile & welcoming; less rigid & institutional.

The environment considers spatial elements including lighting, acoustics, furniture, adjacencies, layouts, indoor-outdoor connections, and functionality.

Vision

A living vision is collectively owned and should uniquely capture the local context for equitable learning where all people are in a position to flourish. More learner-centered; less school-centered.

Vision describes a school’s holistic belief system including mission, vision, learner goals (i.e. skills & dispositions), ideal roles, and core values.

Educational Program

Educational program includes curriculum, pedagogy, and educational structures such as use of time and assessments.

An equitable, learner-centered education program adapts to the unique gifts, needs, interests and life experiences of every individual.

What's the workshop experience?

Align to Thrive is an interactive workshop comprised of two sessions. It is geared for schools or districts who are looking to build awareness of their current ecosystem and develop an action plan to cultivate more a equitable, learner-centered future.

Participants

This workshop is ideal for a single school or district community. It functions best for groups up to 25 participants, often a mix of a school/district’s senior leadership team, board, and educational leaders. Anyone who is contributing leadership in the learning ecosystem is welcome to be part of the workshop.

Takeaways

Schools that go through the workshop will leave with a community-sourced list of ecosystem misalignments and customized alignment recommendations the Fielding team will produce after the sessions. The participants will also leave armed with a common language and understanding of learning ecosystems as a whole, and how the components of the ecosystem can work together.

What's the purpose of the workshop?

Solve the Right Problem

We see similar versions of the same story all the time. Schools and districts want to make learning more student-centered, more equitable, more relevant for the 21st century, more connected to community… the list goes on and on. Trying to change education is not a new problem, but too often we hear that efforts by smart, capable, and hard working people fall short. Why is this?

Schools try to solve the wrong problem.

The right problem to solve is aligning your learning ecosystem so that vision, environment, and the educational program work together to serve each student’s unique learning journey.

What are the objectives of the workshop?

Understand...

Understand the interdependent parts of your unique learning ecosystem

Recognize...

Recognize where your misalignments exist.

Build...

Build deeper coherence for the vision of your school or district.

So that...

Workshop Facilitators

Randy Fielding

Founding Partner at Fielding International, Randy has been creating environments where learners thrive for several decades, winning prestigious school design awards along the way. In Align to Thrive, Randy will share best design practices to move towards an aligned learning ecosystem.

Jill Ackers

As a Senior Learning Designer at Fielding International, Jill leverages her background in project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, and language acquisition to authentically coach teachers to grow their capacity.

Nathan Strenge

Senior Learning Designer at Fielding International and USA Country Lead at HundrED, Nathan approaches school design with an inventive educator lens. In Align to Thrive, Nathan will be the primary facilitator of the joyful, relevant, and engaging learning activities.

Case Study: The Alignment Journey

Fielding International architects and learning designers worked closely with Strathcona-Tweedsmuir in Alberta, Canada to align their vision and human capacity with a new school facility. Students, educators, and community members came together through facilitated workshops and planning to align their learning ecosystem by design.

This animation video was created to help teachers and students visualize the future of learning they helped to shape. We hope it helps others now see what can come out walking the walk of an alignment journey.

Align to Thrive can be the first step of your alignment journey.

Who We Are
Fielding International exists to make the world better by improving environments for learning. As an interdisciplinary team of architects and educators, we partner with school organizations to design learning spaces and experiences that promote student agency, enrich well-being, and cultivate authentic learning communities. With nearly two decades of award-winning educational facilities across 50+ countries, we remain deeply committed to reimagining the future of education alongside the communities we serve.

We're Here to Support You

Name
First Last
Email
Phone
Title
Organization
What's on your mind?
Name
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.