People, Parts, and Interactions: A Day in the Life of a Learning Community

Over the past few weeks, I’ve used Harvard Project Zero’s People, Parts, and Interactions thinking routine to explore how learning communities take shape.

First, I zoomed in on the people—the students, teachers, and support personnel who make up the system. Then, we looked at the parts—the structures, routines, and resources that hold everything together.

Now, it’s time to bring it all to life through the interactions.

If people are the heart and parts are the structure, then interactions are the glue that holds the whole thing together. Interactions turn people and parts into a community that moves, breathes, and learns together. And they aren’t abstract—they show up in the rhythms of a single day.

A Day in the Life

To make this concept more concrete, I decided to relive a random Wednesday in my Grade 3 learning community life. While you read on, look for the different interactions that team of teachers (and students) work with one another.

• Before School: There’s a familiar buzz in the air—we're checking in with one another, prepping materials, and skimming through time-sensitive emails. But what you might also see is something else: a burst of blue-sky thinking that gathers the entire team around a new idea. These moments often start early—someone brings an idea sparked during a morning run or commute—and within minutes, the group is huddled together, rethinking an approach, shifting plans, or designing something new. The energy is immediate and collective, driven by a shared belief that every improvement serves our students best.

• Morning Meeting: The day began with this co-created routine. The weekly theme was designed collaboratively, and one teacher prepared the daily activities for the team, ensuring each class started with the same grounding experience.

• Math Groups: Students were reorganized into heterogeneous groups based on pre-assessment data for a given unit (in this example, we were working on problem-solving strategies—using manipulatives, drawings, or numbers). They shared their highlighted strategies, becoming teachers themselves. In the math space I was working in, the EAL teacher and I co-taught parallel instruction—one of us modeling with numbers and the other with pictures. In another room, the Learning Support teacher led a quieter small group with a few mathematicians supported by one of the team teachers.

• Morning Recess Duty: Half the team was on duty, intentionally observing a few students flagged in last week’s meeting. Their insights fed back into the cycle of support later in the day.

• Integrated Science & Literacy: This week, the team flipped the schedule to give extra time to the “tuning in” phase of an integrated unit. Each day, students rotated through different classrooms to conduct science experiments connected to the study, then reflected in writing using scientific vocabulary—laying the groundwork for next week’s learning.

• Recess & Lunch: The other half of the team took duty, dealing with playground concerns or behaviors carried over from previous days. On Wednesdays, the full team also ate lunch together with one rule: no shop talk. It was a way to connect as people, not just colleagues.

• Specialist Time & Team Meeting: While students attended specialist classes, the team gathered. On Wednesdays, the counselor and (when possible) the assistant principal joined. Together, more than ten educators shared stories, updated notes, and spotted trends across students’ social, emotional, and academic progress. Themes for next week’s morning meetings were often generated during this meeting, groups adjusted, and plans were tweaked. Decisions were practical and immediate: two students struggling together would be separated for now, with a mentor teacher (not their own) stepping in to mediate a discussion. The meeting wrapped early so teachers could break off to complete smaller tasks—prepping differentiation, organizing materials, or managing parent communication.

• DEAR Time: As students returned from specials (sometimes unsettled after recess and two specialist classes), the team used this 20-minute slot strategically. Instructional assistants pulled students for fluency checks, two teachers handled student concerns, and others circulated across the learning spaces to check in on previously taught reading skills, recording progress in a shared document.

• Social-Emotional Learning: Wednesdays ended with an SEL session. Students stayed with their home base teacher—the group they started and finished each day with. The plan for the week included a discussion about how their bodies feel when uncomfortable, while the counselor led a deeper dive with one homebase group.

• Wrapping It Up: Dismissal time was buzzing. Teachers helped students organize cubbies, redirected them to after-school spaces, or connected briefly with families. Because cubbies were mixed across the community, teachers naturally engaged with students beyond their own homebase groups—helping to paint a fuller picture of each learner.

• End of the Day: Even after dismissal, Grade 3 was still humming. A homebase teacher and the EAL teacher met with a parent, two teachers reviewed math data to design a more meaningful assessment, the Learning Support teacher updated photos in students’ Toddle journals, and another teacher tidied a colleague’s room—taking the lead to set up tomorrow’s science experiments.

Understanding by Design

This well-orchestrated machine worked not by chance, but by design.

The interactions weren’t accidental—they were agreed upon, intentional, and shared.

When people, parts, and interactions align, learning communities don’t just function—they thrive. Every student gets what they need, and no educator is left to do it alone.

How to Start

This week, choose one routine—morning meetings, recess duty, or a team meeting—and make the interactions more visible, intentional, and shared. Small tweaks can ripple across the whole community.

If your team is experimenting with new interactions, I’d love to hear how it’s going! Tag me or share your reflections on social media so we can keep learning together.