Experiences.
A chance to bring my learning together.
This is the final step in the CARE journey and it is the most demanding. The ideas here require genuine foundations. If you are just beginning, start with Culture. When learners have real agency, visit Agency. When you are ready to examine how learning happens, explore Roles. When all of that is in place, you are ready for this.
Experiences begins before a unit starts or a question is asked. It begins with how we shape the learning environment itself. When we design spaces that are open, flexible, and rich with possibility, we create room for learners to follow their curiosity and build understanding that is personal and lasting.
This is where the whole CARE journey comes together. Culture created the conditions. Agency gave learners the confidence to lead. Roles shifted how learning happens. Now Experiences asks the biggest question of all: what does learning look like when it connects to something larger than the classroom, something that matters to the world?
This stage is no longer about grades or performance. It is about creation for self and giving back to the greater world. Learners are asked to take everything they know, everything they feel, and everything they can do, and use it in service of something beyond themselves. This is the moment where independence transforms into something even more powerful: a lifelong learner who chooses to keep growing, keep contributing, and keep asking what more they can offer to the communities they are part of.
The goal of education is not to fill a bucket
but to light a fire.
W.B. Yeats
Experiences are like a high school learner.
Think of a learner in the final years of their schooling journey. Their head is no longer just making connections between ideas. It is reasoning through evidence, questioning assumptions, and thinking in systems. They understand not just what they know, but what they can do with what they know, and that distinction is everything. Learning at this stage becomes cross-disciplinary, reaching across subject boundaries to build a picture of the world that no single discipline could ever contain on its own.
But the head alone does not make a well-rounded person. The heart has to be present too. High school learners are ready to feel deeply about what they are learning. They are capable of genuine empathy for the societal issues their learning touches, and they want their work to matter beyond the classroom. When learning connects to something they care about, when it asks them to reflect honestly on their own thinking and examine how their perspective has shifted, they stop performing for a grade and start investing in something real.
A capable young person is not simply one who has mastered a curriculum. They are someone who can reason through evidence, feel the weight of what they are learning, and use their hands to make an informed plan and follow it through with resilience.
This is where the hands carry the full weight of the CARE journey. High school learners are ready to make action plans, implement them, and assess honestly what worked and what did not. They trial ideas within their community, make changes to their practice when the evidence tells them to, and develop the resilience to keep going when the process is harder than they expected. This is how we create genuinely independent learners, not by preparing them for what school expects, but by trusting them to shape what comes next for themselves and for the world they are about to enter.
Three big ideas. Three deeper connections.
Each pairing moves from a concept you may already know toward the larger idea it points to. The back of each card holds a redesign prompt. It is not a question to answer quickly. It is a lens to hold up against your own practice.
Cross-disciplinary
Learning that reaches beyond subject boundaries. Big ideas connect across disciplines so learners see patterns, not just content areas.
Conceptual Understanding → Cross-disciplinary
Tap for your redesign prompt
Take a unit you teach. Now remove all the subject labels. What big idea remains? Could a learner in another subject arrive at the same idea through completely different content?
Service Learning
Learning that reaches beyond the classroom into the real world. Learners do not just study problems. They act on them with purpose.
Action → Service Learning
Tap for your redesign prompt
In your unit, who benefits from the learning besides the learner? If the answer is no one yet, what one change would connect it to a real need in your community or world?
Systems Thinking
The ability to see how parts connect to form a whole, and how changing one thing changes everything. This is the largest idea in learning.
Lifelong Learning → Systems Thinking
Tap for your redesign prompt
What system does your unit live inside? What would learners need to understand about how that system works before they could genuinely change any part of it?
Take a unit you know well. Now look at it differently.
This is not a planning template. It is a series of lenses. Work through each step with a real unit in mind. You do not need to redesign everything. You need to see it with new eyes.
Your unit redesign challenge
Click each step to open it. Work through them in order, or follow your curiosity.
What is the big idea of your unit or quarter?
Not the topic. Not the subject. The big idea. The transferable insight that a learner could carry into a completely different context and still find useful. Write it in one sentence without naming a subject area.
If you cannot write it without naming a subject, the unit may be organised around content rather than understanding. That is worth noticing.
Where does this idea appear in the real world right now?
Not in a textbook. In today's news, in your community, in a system your learners already live inside. The more specific and current the connection, the more the learning will feel urgent and meaningful rather than academic.
If you are struggling to find a real-world connection, this is the gap the unit needs to close. The connection is not decoration. It is the point.
Which other discipline could explore this same idea from a different angle?
Cross-disciplinary thinking asks us to look at a big idea from multiple directions. A scientist and a historian and an artist can all study the same big idea and arrive at completely different but equally valid understandings. What would your unit look like if it invited that kind of cross-disciplinary thinking?
You do not need to redesign the whole curriculum. You need to find the one moment where you could open a door into another discipline and let the learner walk through it.
What could a learner do with this understanding that would matter to someone else?
Service learning is not a charity project added to the end of a unit. It is the act of designing learning so that the understanding it builds has somewhere meaningful to go. Who in your community or your world needs what your learners are learning to understand? How could the unit end with genuine action rather than a final assessment?
The question to ask is not "What will learners produce?" but "Who will be better off because of what learners learned?"
What system is this unit part of, and what would change if one part of that system shifted?
Systems thinking asks learners to see beyond the individual lesson or unit and understand the larger web of relationships it lives inside. What forces shape the issue your unit examines? What would need to change for the problem to look different? What unintended consequences might follow from that change?
When learners can ask these questions about their own learning, they have moved from being recipients of knowledge to being architects of understanding. That is the heart of Experiences.
Worth your time
- National Service-Learning Clearinghouse · practical resources for service learning at every level
- Learning for Justice · frameworks for connecting learning to the real world
- Roots and Shoots · Jane Goodall's global youth action network
- Waters Foundation · systems thinking tools and habits of mind for educators
- Think IB · cross-disciplinary learning through the IB lens
- IDEO U · systems thinking resources curated for practitioners
- Banyan Global Learning · systems thinking in education
- Cult of Pedagogy · Jennifer Gonzalez on innovative teaching and meaningful learning
- Getting Smart Podcast · future of learning, project-based and community-connected education
- TED Talks Education · ideas worth teaching from the world's leading thinkers
- The Future of Education · Michael Horn on redesigning learning for tomorrow
- Confessions of a PYP Teacher · thinkchat podcast
- Thinking in Systems · Donella Meadows · the essential primer on systems thinking
- Concept-Based Inquiry in Action · Marschall and French · cross-disciplinary thinking in practice
- Teaching for Transfer · Hattie and Donoghue · making learning stick beyond the classroom
- Service Learning That Makes a Difference · Toole and Toole · a practical guide for educators
- The Future of Smart · Ulcca Joshi Hansen · reimagining what schools are for
Cross-disciplinary learning
What is conceptual understanding?
This is service learning
Lifelong learning benefits
What will you carry into your classroom?
The redesign challenge is not a one-time exercise. It is a way of seeing. The more you practice asking these questions about your units, the more naturally they will appear when you are planning. This is what lifelong learning looks like for educators.
Question 1 of 3
Which of the three pairings feels most alive in your current practice?
You have reached the end of the CARE journey.
Take the school readiness questionnaire to see where your school sits across all four pillars and what to focus on next.
Take the Questionnaire Experiences Workshops