Who We Are

Full-Circle Learning Board Philosophy Statement 

This philosophy statement guides the way the organization strives to conduct collaborative relationships and should also influence its approach to teaching students about global project development, capacity building, and learning partnerships that promote sustainable development. 

The Full-Circle Learning organization recognizes the value of: 

• The basic human right of all people to an integrated education with a world-embracing vision. 
• The nobility of people of all cultural and ethnic backgrounds. 
• Increasing socio-economic equity among all peoples.
• The equality of the station of women and men. 
• The importance of developing the qualities of respectful communication, integrity and sacrifice in the future leaders who will address the challenges that face the world. 
• The relationship of the personal character development, cognitive development and creative development of the individual and the social development of a whole community. 
• The setting aside of differences to embrace the common vision of helping to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization through the love, nurturing and careful education of each new generation of world citizens. 

To help students in their formative years enjoy purposeful lives today and a vision for the future, and to assist communities in facilitating this process, the organization shall encourage capacity building in the communities it serves: 

In general, by:

• Responding to community needs as its primary focus and serving as a resource or a partner to agencies, institutions, community groups, learning organizations or sponsors in communities requesting assistance. 

Twenty Marks of a Full-Circle Learning School

1. Learners see giving as the purpose of learning. 
2. Learners feel motivated by their empathic membership in one human family. 
3. These commitments inspire peak experiences and creative, compassionate action toward members of an ever-widening circle of humans and living things. 
4. Expressions of process-based learning and critical thinking integrate all academic content areas and art forms, as learners strive to uplift, advocate, remedy, build, advance solutions and otherwise contribute to the well-being of others. 
5. Service to humanity finds parallels in the world community, through global wisdom exchange projects linked to local transformation projects. 
6. One specific character trait brings thematic continuity to all the subjects within a learning unit.
7. Each new learning unit contributes to an overall year-long identity, specific to that grade level. (For example, four successive traits may occur over the year for the Humanitarians class.)
8. Teachers customize learning units for regional education standards and for the community needs they target through projects. 
9. A student absorbs 60 or more habits-of-heart over a school career, one at a time. 
10. Each habit-of-heart becomes the theme for an integrative unit plan with service outcomes, based on the teacher’s integration of the universal13-S steps (incorporating researched, scaffolded steps). 
11. In their service-learning actions, learners frequently define teaching as service. 
12. Deliberate classroom management strategies and teaching methods: 1) nurture altruistic identities, 2) promote self-mastery and 3) engender a collaborative peer culture among students and across classrooms. 
13. Students receive opportunities to appreciate differences, to bond with positive role models and to problem solve through hardship (challenging scenarios). 
14. Within each learning unit, conflict resolution applications help learners understand the need for inner growth and outward collaboration in personal, local, and world-stage dilemmas. 
15. Students experience daily opportunities to see the good in others. 
16. Students receive opportunities to reinforce habits-of-heart at home, to teach and learn from family members, and to honor the habits-of-heart in family members. 
17. Broad opportunities, over time, present a chance to engage with adult role models through community transformation and service-learning field trips, helping learners develop multiple strengths, entrepreneurial skills and options for civic-minded career paths. 
18. Educators bond, train and plan based on a shared local vision, foreseeing the end results of their planning from the start. 
19. Schools recognize the nobility of each individual and the equality of women, men and people of all cultural, ethnic and national backgrounds and belief systems. 
20. Teachers express their own nobility and sense of purpose as they foster a generation of change agents and humanitarians. 

Primary Corporate and Foundation Donors (2022 and Beyond)

For documentation of participating schools and sites around the world, see the Map. 

For a complete list of projects and supporters, visit here.

Board members Lily Ning (upper left) and Rene Sprattling (center, in blue) posed with teacher Katie (Smith) Wada, online editor Daven Mathias and participants of the 2018 Climate Change Agents Camp. 

Below, left: Dr. Jin-mei Gan (left) instructed the teachers of Zhejiang Province, China, in the Full-Circle Learning approach that guided their development for more than a decade. 

Right: A visit to Zambia’s Cry School included visits with children and parents and and a service project for seniors.