Designing for Collaboration

Transformative Educational Leadership Journal | ISSUE Fall 2025

In this piece, Rosa Fazio brings together physical design and design for adult collaboration and learning in a beautiful treatise to the power of intention in both spaces. In grounding the nuances and potential of collaborative professional inquiry in the structural aesthetic of physical architecture, Rosa offers new insights into ideas that have, in some ways, become overly familiar.

By Rosa Fazio

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“For years, we have been aspiring to create a 10/10 school – that is, a school where learning is a 10 and so are the learning spaces. Rosa launched and led a school where the design and pedagogy are seamlessly interconnected – like green leaves and sunlight.”

— Randy Fielding, Founding Principal and Lead Architect, Fielding International

Randy Fielding’s words have stayed with me. They remind me that when design and pedagogy intertwine, schools become living ecosystems—dynamic, adaptive, and full of life. Yet as an educational consultant working with schools and systems, I’m reminded how difficult it remains to sustain cultures of collaboration—even in the most beautifully designed spaces.

Recently, I visited six learning environments—some K to 12 schools and some adult learning spaces. In several of them, collaborative spaces designed for connection had transformed into storage rooms or individual offices. A collaborative culture is not built by accident; it is designed through intentional processes that make learning visible, share leadership, and nurture conversations.

Relational Architecture

Physical design can inspire collaboration, but it cannot sustain it. What keeps collaboration alive is the architecture of relationships—the intentional structures through which people make meaning, solve problems, and learn together. It shapes how people feel, think, and work as a team. When those structures are strong, collaboration feels natural. When they are fragmented, even the most visionary initiatives fail to take root.

Educators gather in teams, sit around tables, and share ideas. But too often, what we call collaboration is merely sharing or cooperating: polite exchanges, agenda-driven updates, or compliance with external mandates. True collaboration is messier. It demands curiosity, vulnerability, and courage. It requires time to inquire rather than rush to action, to explore assumptions rather than defend positions. It invites discomfort—the kind that signals growth and transformation.

Relational architecture is not built through policy or position—it’s built through practice. Leaders design it every time they choose to listen deeply, invite diverse perspectives, and create conditions where every voice matters. Everyone wants to feel seen, heard, and valued. Designing such conditions doesn’t require more funding or infrastructure. It requires an intentional time-for-conversation-investment—the deliberate slowing down to reflect, reconnect, and make meaning together. This is where the most transformative learning begins.

Sustained Professional Learning

Many schools still rely on what a colleague affectionately calls “Shazam Days”—one-off professional development sessions meant to ignite change in a single burst of inspiration, with the dominant voice being that of the presenter. While often energizing, these events rarely lead to sustained growth. As O’Brien and Jones (2014) note, such professional development evokes outdated, hierarchical models of compliance-driven training. What’s missing is not passion or expertise, but design for continuity—a way to ensure that professional learning is woven into the daily life of the organization. Webster-Wright (2009) reframes this shift through the concept of professional learning—embedded, reflective, and contextual—“the lived experience of continuing to learn as a professional” (p. 714).

To design a culture of collaboration is therefore to treat design as a verb, not a noun. It is something lived daily—through every meeting, every question, every act of learning together. It’s about fostering sustained inquiry beyond the Shazam Day. It’s about nurturing a shared learning journey that aligns with the real work of everyday practice and the collective responsibility for growth. Designing such conditions does not require more infrastructure; such conditions require an intentional investment of time—for conversation, reflection, and reconnection. That is where transformation begins.

Frameworks that Hold Complexity

Schools rarely lack expertise; often, they lack a shared framework to hold complexity without losing coherence. Two tools have consistently transformed the teams I work with: The Spiral of Inquiry and Liberating Structures.

The Spiral of Inquiry, developed by Drs. Judy Halbert and Linda Kaser (2022), offers a disciplined process for moving from curiosity to action. It invites educators to ask powerful questions: What’s going on for our learners? How do we know? Why does it matter? These questions create space for evidence-informed reflection and dialogue. As teams cycle through scanning, focusing, developing hunches, learning, taking action, and checking impact, they build both capacity and coherence—an outcome of healthy professional learning.

Liberating Structures, developed by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless (2013), provide practical microstructures that democratize participation. Instead of a few voices dominating, these processes—like 1-2-4-All, Appreciative Interviews, or Wise Crowds—ensure that everyone contributes ideas and insights.

Together, these frameworks transform shared values into lived experience and turn isolated effort into collective purpose. The Spiral of Inquiry grounds teams in purpose and evidence, while Liberating Structures offer the conversational tools to explore that purpose collectively. The result is better decisions that build a culture where agency, belonging, and shared joy in learning thrive.

The Green Leaves and Sunlight

When Randy Fielding compared design and pedagogy to green leaves and sunlight, he named something profound: learning environments and learning relationships are symbiotic. Each nourishes the other. Beautiful spaces invite engagement, but it is the human connections within them that make schools truly come alive.

While a well-designed building can inspire collaboration, leadership cultivates capacity. That capacity grows when leaders engage with the Spiral of Inquiry: listening before leading, wondering before deciding, and connecting before proceeding. Our challenge is not only to design better schools, but to design better conversations within them.