In this phase, school leaders listen to the community, form a Design Team, get inspired by other models, and determine an entry point and goals for school redesign. 

A strong Design Team is essential for a successful school redesign initiative, serving as both vision-shapers and trust-builders. The most effective teams reflect the whole school ecosystem, including leaders, educators, staff, learners, community members, and families. Design Teams typically include 7-10 participants. 

When selecting Design Team participants, it’s important to consider your system’s culture carriers. These are people who influence morale and mindsets throughout the system, regardless of job title or role. It’s imperative to include them on your Design Team.

Clear communication is also critical. This work must be framed as an opportunity to co-design learner-centered systems and be transparent about the time commitment for participating. Equally important is creating space for learners and families to lead and drive decisions, not just participate. 

Multiple School Design Teams come together for a day of redesign planning in Escondido Union School District. 

Once the Design Team is formed, the first task is to listen and observe. You can’t change what you don’t know, and each member of a school has a uniquely different perspective. The first step is bringing those perspectives together to identify: 

• What is going well

• Opportunities for change

• The community’s aspirations for their learners and their school

Gathering these insights helps establish the redesign goals, and it creates buy-in from the community for sustainable, learner-centered change. 

While there are many approaches to learning about the school’s current state, some key steps include:

1. Classroom Observations: spending time observing what teaching and learning looks like across a range of classrooms and learning environments

2. Empathy Interviews & Focus Groups: listening directly to learners, educators, and families about what they like about their school experience and what they would like to see change in the future

3. Surveys: a combination of qualitative and quantitative data from learners, educators, and families will help tell the story more comprehensively

4. Asset Mapping: identifying what is working in the system to build off of Bright Spots, tap into the strengths of the community and the people who are already leaning into this work

Families from West Campus in Colorado Springs District 11 gather to give input to the Design Team. 

In addition to looking inward, finding inspiration from other schools helps teams and the broader community see that a different way of doing school is possible. These Inspiration Visits can help a team experience different collaborative learning models, bell schedules, and assessment practices in real-world settings, while leaders can learn about the challenges and obstacles a school encountered along its journey.

West Campus' Design Team at La Luz School in Denver

By gathering information from a school community and looking for inspiration from others, the redesign process both anchors in what’s already going well and helps the community begin to envision what is possible.

School redesign does not follow a single path; communities can begin from different entry points depending on their context, needs, and aspirations. Identifying and building on the assets in your community is critical to a successful redesign as it will help you identify the entry point and honor what has worked as well as opportunities that exist.

Some options include: 

• Lead a full redesign effort that rethinks schedules, programs, courses, cohorting of learners, and structures of teaching teams to realize a learner-centered vision. Read more about an example of this in Vista Unified at VIDA or West in Colorado Springs District 11. 

• Start small by thinking about tweaks to the schedule such as creating a community-connected week each year to test practices before the community is ready for a full redesign effort. Read more about how Círculos, an XQ school in Santa Ana Unified School District, uses community week to get learners connected to real-world learning opportunities. 

• Establish an innovation center that serves as a regional hub connecting learners with industry pathways, certifications, and authentic work-based learning opportunities that traditional schools may not be able to offer. Read more about an example of this at Opportunity Central in Forney ISD. 

• Launch a microschool, a small, agile learning environment that enables rapid prototyping and proof points for new practices, which can later scale across the system. This could look like piloting a grade-level cohort model by starting with one cohort (such as 6th or 9th grade) to design new learning experiences and structures that will expand to other grade levels as the cohort advances. Read more about an example of a microschool as a lever for school redesign at Hidden Valley Middle School in Escondido USD. 

• Create concurrent learning options that empower learners to design flexible schedules combining coursework across multiple campuses, online platforms, and community-based opportunities. This can broaden access to pathways aligned with individual interests. Read more about an example of this at Alexandria City High School in Alexandria, VA. 

Ultimately, the path forward is less about choosing a single model and more about recognizing that redesign can start anywhere—with one bold step that reflects community voice and opens new possibilities for learning.

Once the Design Team has a better sense of the community’s assets, needs and what’s possible from inspiration visits, it’s critical to define the goals of the redesign effort. Framing these as opportunity statements allows the Design Team, and the community, to understand the goal from an asset-based lens. For example, in one school redesign effort, a Design Team identified that students felt school was being “done to” them. They realized that students had a need for agency and their opportunity statement, or larger goal, became about personalizing student learning so there is relevance in all that they do. As they began the designing and planning phase they were able to focus on this goal. Further in the process, it also helped serve as a guide for defining success on their redesign efforts and identifying specific success metrics for measuring progress along the way.