Gareth Manning Education for Regeneration

A practical guide for educators

Start where you are.

Move from familiar classroom and service-learning work toward credible regenerative practice—without pretending every green activity is regenerative.

Find your starting point What regeneration means
01My classroom02An existing project03School structures04A whole programme

Regeneration, in plain language

Help people and places become healthier over time.

Regeneration is not a theme, a nature project, or a flattering label. It is a direction of travel: strengthening the relationships, knowledge, capability, feedback and stewardship that allow a social-ecological system to keep improving.

01

Reduce harm

Use less, waste less, exclude less. Worthwhile, but not yet regenerative.

02

Restore

Repair damage or rebuild a capacity that has been depleted.

03

Regenerate

Create conditions that can keep increasing health, agency and adaptability.

Four credible starting points

You do not need to redesign the entire school.

Choose the scale you can genuinely influence. The guide will tell you what to add, which claims are defensible, and which open education skills can help.

A lesson sequence to six weeks

Improve one unit you already teach

Start with education for regeneration: stronger knowledge, attention to place, systems thinking, and a small responsible response.

Make these moves

  1. Anchor learning in a real place, relationship, or living system.
  2. Build disciplinary knowledge before asking learners to act.
  3. Use a reversible experiment, recommendation, or prototype.
  4. Assess individual learning separately from any real-world effect.

Useful skills

backwards-design-unit-plannerplace-based-curriculum-orchestratorsystems-awareness-icebergassessment-validity-checker

Strongest likely starting claimA unit designed as education for regeneration

Build my starting prompt

Improve what already exists

Small shifts can change the quality of the work.

The point is not to rename familiar activities. It is to deepen their knowledge, reciprocity, leverage, responsibility and ability to learn from consequences.

01

A clean-up day

Investigate why waste accumulates, who controls the flows, and which rule or routine could prevent it.

02

Tree planting

Study local ecology, soil, water, heat and stewardship; plant only with a resourced multi-year care plan.

03

Required service hours

Start with a partner-defined need, reciprocity and reflection—not hours completed or students cast as rescuers.

04

A sustainability committee

Give it bounded decision rights, adult sponsorship, a budget, health indicators and a route to change policy.

Five guardrails

Regenerative ambition needs intellectual honesty.

  1. 01Build knowledge before action.
  2. 02Let affected people help define the need and the meaning of health.
  3. 03Keep student agency real and bounded; adults retain adult duties.
  4. 04Separate evidence of learning from evidence of system effects.
  5. 05Do not call an outcome regenerative before longitudinal evidence exists.

Your first ten minutes

Build a prompt for your actual context.

Describe what you already have, choose the AI you use, and decide whether this is a one-off design session or an ongoing workspace. The prompt will build a living Regenerative Learning Design Record—not just generate ideas.

01Learning architectureKnowledge, curriculum, competencies and valid evidence
02System and legitimacyPlace, affected people, power and decision rights
03Responsible responseOptions, leverage, safeguards and the smallest useful move
04Learning over timeHealth indicators, adaptation, stewardship and honest claims
1. Where are you starting?
6. Which AI do you use?
7. What do you want to do?

Skills Library Bridge

Give your AI the library—not only one prompt.

The generated prompt works by itself. For greater long-term value, connect the open Education Agent Skills Library using the cheapest route your AI currently supports. Start free; use hosted MCP only when the other routes cannot do the job.

01

Already included

A safe starter method

Your prompt includes the regenerative workflow, the most relevant skill names, and rules against inventing inaccessible skill content. This works in any capable AI.

02

Recommended for ChatGPT

Use the GitHub app when your plan exposes it

  1. Keep the generated Project instructions as the dependable starting point.
  2. In ChatGPT, check Settings → Apps for GitHub. If it is available in normal chat, connect it and grant access to the public Education Agent Skills repository.
  3. Inside the Project, ask ChatGPT to search the repository for the named skills before applying them. GitHub availability varies by plan and ChatGPT surface.
github.com/GarethManning/education-agent-skills

Custom MCP is not the universal ChatGPT route yet. Pro can use some read/fetch MCP connections; fuller custom MCP support is mainly Business and Enterprise/Edu.

ChatGPT GitHub instructions
03

Advanced fallback

Request hosted MCP access

MCP gives compatible AI tools live discovery across all 165 skills, including search, recommendations, metadata, and skill details. It also creates real infrastructure costs, so use the free plugin, import, or local routes first.

Claude supports remote MCP broadly. ChatGPT support depends heavily on plan and administrator settings. Standard Gemini users should use repository import instead.

Request hosted MCP access

What are Education Agent Skills?

Open instructions that help AI reason like a careful education designer.

Each skill is a reusable, evidence-aware workflow for a specific educational task: mapping a system, designing a unit, building a learning progression, checking an assessment, or deciding whether action is warranted.

The orchestrator does not use every skill. It selects the smallest coherent chain, states what each step needs, and stops when local knowledge, authority, safety or evidence is missing.

You do not need to install these skills or know what GitHub is to use the prompt above. The open source is provided for educators, researchers, and AI builders who want to inspect, adapt, or contribute to the underlying method.

Inspect the open-source method
Regenerative Project Design Orchestrator Full Education Agent Skills Library