At Círculos, students meet in circles where they are seen and heard every day and given the opportunity to develop and cultivate their voices. Students come together in circles to discuss their personal goals, victories, and setbacks. These candid discussions set the students’ trajectory for their daily learning. Beyond their focus on wellness and emotional health, these circles also have an academic focus. They serve to develop students’ abilities to engage in academic discourse and take the form of a Socratic workshop. This unique approach to community building allows students to develop their abilities to collaborate, communicate, engage in, and practice academic discourse. For example, students may engage in a critical discussion of an assigned reading, an activity that fosters their critical thinking and analysis skills. At Círculos, circles exist in a broader sense as well. Students regularly meet with mentors and community leaders outside the classroom to expand their network and connections across the city.

Students at Círculos are held to high academic standards and receive support in reaching their goals. To help students progress toward post-secondary readiness, thematic interdisciplinary units are organized into seasons. These seasons are broken into 12-16 episodes that follow a path of increasing cognitive demand. The learning cycle includes launch, investigate, create, share, and curate with “reflect” and “revise” as the inner cogwheel that drives the learning cycle. Students move from making meaning to investigating and creating to presenting and sharing, and, finally, to reflecting and curating. The life cycle of a season allows students to engage in synthesis and analysis.

The team at Círculos is rolling out a digital platform to monitor student progress and provide students, parents, and teachers with data on each student’s path. A data dashboard will illuminate each student’s success through detailed information about rigorous college- and career-ready standards across the curriculum. Moreover, the scheduling tool allows students to personalize their schedules during “Power Flex” weeks.

Orange County, home to beautiful beaches and theme parks, is among the wealthiest areas in the country—but it’s also a place of great income disparity and stark economic contrasts. Círculos students, most of whom are first-generation Americans and 100 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch, go into the community with place-based residencies to visit and work on competency-based projects with businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations partnering with the school. . Through these partnerships, Círculos helps students build social capital and make connections, and in doing so creates more access to the resources of Orange County for students of all backgrounds. Ultimately, the school’s community builds students’ identities as empowered community members. The school’s leaders aim to break the structures that have isolated the low-income communities of Orange County from access to new opportunities. For example, students can enroll in dual-credit classes at Santa Ana College, a local community college, while still in high school.

Students at Círculos work on projects and in partnership with a wide range of local organizations including the Santa Ana Business Council, Santa Ana Public Works Department, Well-Beings Studio, Visioneering Studios, and Latino Health Access. Educators at Círculos integrate these place-based projects with interdisciplinary courses. These projects inspire students’ learning goals that align to the school’s competency framework. To ensure that community partners share an authentic understanding of these competencies, Círculos educators work with community partners to co-create lessons and project ideas, co-teach the interdisciplinary material, connect these projects to core content areas, and conduct pre- and post-project surveys to measure student growth in specific competencies.