Who We Are

About Our Purpose

Full-Circle Learning, as an organization, exists to help young people embrace their role as society’s humanitarians and change agents.

Educators from almost every continent have discovered their capacity to transform their communities through Full-Circle Learning teacher training programs and direct service to students and schools.

Full-Circle Learning’s team of pro bono service providers includes board members, community members, parents, and organizations –all supporting teachers in their noble role of molding a generation of world citizens who apply their skills to serve the human family.

All who embrace a common vision have come together over the years to collaborate in wisdom exchanges and to practice strategies of truly transformational education. For a basic grasp of the philosophy and pedagogy of Full-Circle Learning, see the statements that follow: Philosophy Statement and Twenty Marks of a Full-Circle Learning School.

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.