Upcoming Events
Tue, Oct 28Authentic Learning Grab and Go Virtual PD
Why Visioning Matters
Too often, new school buildings are designed before a vision is fully defined—leading to spaces that feel shiny but disconnected. We help your district gain clarity around...
Collaboration with school communities
Support for teachers
Guidance for school leaders
And then use that clarity to guide every facility's decision ahead.
Educational Visioning for Facilities Planning
Design spaces that reflect your vision—not just your square footage.
Don’t build a new version of an old school building. Before a single blueprint is drawn, we help you ask the most important question: What kind of learning experience are we designing for?
Our Educational Visioning process aligns facilities planning with your district’s deepest beliefs and goals. Together, we define the desired student experience, identify the spaces needed to support it, and design a building that promotes and enhances your vision for the future.
Visioning Experiences
Each experience is designed to engage your school community and translate your learning vision into actionable design input. Visioning experiences include:
Leadership Foundations
Equipping Leaders Workshop
Leadership Analysis
Informational Meetings
This 2-2.5 hour workshop allows administrators to have dedicated time to consider the steps of leading organizational change, preview the staff visioning experience for themselves, and consider their next steps as this lengthy process unfolds.
One of the ways we begin to measure the degree to which a district has the capability to make the necessary changes in order to meet a defined vision for the student experience is to understand leadership's appetite for implementing change and all of the necessary steps to help change “stick.” This survey allows us to understand how the district is currently led, their comfort level with leading change, and the degree to which leaders would like to push into transitional or transformational design.
These 30 minute zooms sessions are a high level overview of the Educational Master Facilities Planning process designed to provide information to building level administrative and teacher leaders. We understand that when rolling out large scale initiatives, miscommunication can be a source of angst. Our goal is to provide more people with the needed information, so the “meeting after the meeting” is as accurate as possible.
Community & Stakeholder Engagement
Roles and Goals Workshop
Student Visioning Focus Groups
Staff Visioning Sessions
This 2-2.5 hour experience with the district administrative team and board representatives is designed to help our organization and the school district agree to the values and non-negotiables that will drive our process. Prior to any staff or community engagement, we will make clear, together, the direction of our work. During this process we will not only clarify values and non-negotiables, we will also determine the process for gathering and reviewing input as well as identifying the decision makers and the process by which we will make decisions (command, consult, vote, consensus).
During a 45-60 minute discussion with students, we focus not on design elements, but on what makes learning meaningful for students. When we can determine this, we can have a better understanding of how students and teachers will want to spend their time in a new facility. How people spend their time determines how space should be designed.
During a 2-2.5 hour interactive workshop teachers are asked to connect with their Best Days of learning and use this as a springboard to think about the skills and character traits we most hope to foster. This discussion leads us to the ways in which instruction is delivered. For architects, understanding how staff and students will spend their time is the best indicator of how design decisions should be made. At a high level, we will leave this session with a reminder of why and how we do our best work and the ways in which that is connected to facilities decisions. Eventually, information provided from staff members will help the district to create an Educational Master Facilities Plan which will include a set of Guiding Principles for Design.
Partners in the Process
We work in close collaboration with our exclusive architecture and engineering partner, Fanning Howey, to bring your educational vision to life.
Four Core Goals of Visioning
Our process supports your team in:
Defining the desired student experience
Identifying the spaces needed in order to achieve the desired student experience
Outlining educational facilities options to inform future decision making
Building stakeholder understanding and ownership of the chosen direction
