Cirque Studio

The Studio

That’s the question that drives everything: Who are you, and how do you fit into the world? The schools, the adult learning, the organizational culture work, the residencies — all of it is just different expressions of the same inquiry.

Cirque Studio is a design studio for human transformation. We design experiences, conditions, and organizations where people encounter awe, surface their own brilliance, and do work worth doing beautifully.

We work in education because that’s where we come from. But the question that drives us belongs to every human community, institution, and organization trying to get it right.

The name comes from geology. A glacial cirque is formed by sustained rotational movement — ice grinding against rock, season after season, until the landscape is permanently changed. It’s not the ice that matters. It’s what the ice makes.

We apply sustained presence until something permanently different emerges — then we move on, and the change outlasts us.

The Team

Two practitioners.
One shared mission.

Miguel Gonzalez

Co-Founder · Coaching & Strategic Design

Miguel is an educator, systems designer, and strategic advisor who has spent his career at the intersection of innovation, community, and transformation. He founded Embark Education, embedding real learning inside small businesses — reimagining school as a living relationship with the community.

He’s led organizations from founding to scale, managed multi-million dollar budgets, built coalitions across ideological boundaries, and served as Head of School at Sussex School in Missoula, Montana. He brings experience across three countries and five organizations — always in service of the same question.

Miguel is a fellow of the Pahara Network, Joyful Impact Accelerator, and Moonshot Fellowship, and serves on the Board of Lyra Colorado and National Advisory Council of The Canopy Project. Based in Missoula, MT.

Systems Design Leadership Coaching Strategic Advising Narrative Strategy

Megan Parry

Co-Founder · Partnerships & Learning Design

Meg is a strategic partnership builder, facilitator, and learning designer with over two decades in education transformation. She currently serves as Director of Strategic Partnerships at Learner Centered Collaborative, leading district and community coalitions toward whole-learner outcomes.

She co-led Embark Education as Director — holding the throughline between vision and execution while coaching leaders, designing learner-centered ecosystems, and building relationships with partners and funders. She brings deep expertise from PBLWorks, where she designed national PD systems, and from her roots as a classroom teacher committed to real-world learning.

Meg brings the discipline of someone who has built systems that stick — and the warmth of someone who knows transformation happens through relationships, not programs. Based in Denver, CO.

Strategic Partnerships Learning Design PBL Coalition Building

Philosophy

Awe. Brilliance. Beauty.

Not adjectives. A sequence. A philosophy of conditions for human flourishing.

Awe

The Entry Condition

The disruption — the moment of scale, surprise, or mystery that cracks open what someone thought they knew. It stops the clock. It’s the view from the ridge, the question no one has asked before. You cannot learn at depth without it. Awe is not decoration. It is the opening move.

Brilliance

What Emerges When the Conditions Are Right

Not installed from outside — surfaced from within. Educators, students, communities already have it. Our job is to create the conditions where it shows up. Brilliance is not taught. It is made possible. The move from consuming other people’s ideas to generating your own isn’t a curriculum. It’s a set of conditions.

Beauty

The Form That Holds Everything

Not decoration — design that tells the truth about what matters. A beautiful experience says: this is worth your full presence. The care in the details isn’t aesthetic — it’s epistemic. It tells people they are worth this. Beauty is trust made visible.

What we know to be true

The honest premises

—Most professional development treats educators like passive recipients rather than the creative professionals they are.

—Real transformation doesn’t happen in a workshop. It happens in the slow, invisible work — in weeks three and four, not week one.

—The organizations that change are the ones that learn to trust what they can’t fully see or measure.

—You can’t rush someone from consuming other people’s ideas to generating their own. But you can build conditions where it becomes inevitable.

—Beautiful conditions produce different outcomes than institutional ones. The form of the work is inseparable from its function.

—The conditions we create for adults are the conditions adults create for young people. Human flourishing at any level requires the same things.

How we work

Four principles
everything lives inside

◈

Iterative Spaciousness

Breakthrough happens in week three or four, not week one. We create sustained conditions — time, trust, and the freedom to not know yet — where educators and organizations move from consuming other people’s ideas to generating their own. We design for the slow, invisible work that actually changes things.

"It wasn’t until residents stopped waiting to be told what to do that they started doing the work that actually mattered."

◎

Participatory at Core

The people closest to the work know the most about it. We don’t arrive with a framework to install. We arrive with deep listening, honest reflection, and a design process that centers practitioner wisdom. The work we build together is yours to carry — because it came from you.

"Radical trust must be demonstrated through sustained conditions, not just stated values."

◇

Form Follows Transformation

The conditions are the curriculum. Every detail — the space, the pace, the materials, the food — communicates whether people are worth full presence. Beautiful conditions are not an aesthetic choice. They are an epistemic one. We treat design as a moral act and a statement about human worth.

"Beauty is trust made visible."

◉

Small Is Intentional

Cirque Studio is small by design. That means you work with us — not a junior associate, not a playbook, not a product. The relationship is real, the work is tailored, and we stay accountable to your actual outcomes. We take on work we believe in with people we believe in.

"The coalition of the doing, not the willing."

What we offer

Services

We work with school founders, heads of school, education nonprofits, and networks navigating meaningful change. Engagements range from single strategic sessions to sustained partnerships. We stay small on purpose — so the work stays real.

○

Leadership Coaching

One-on-one coaching for school leaders, founders, and executives navigating the complexity of building and sustaining genuinely innovative organizations. We work on clarity of vision, decision-making under pressure, and the internal grounding to hold your mission when everything pulls back toward the familiar.

Ongoing · 1:1

△

Strategic Advising

Deep partnership for organizations at inflection points — launching a new model, building a network, entering a new phase of growth, or navigating a field-building challenge. We bring systems thinking, stakeholder strategy, and hard-won experience from founding to scaling. We don’t show up, deliver, and disappear.

Project-based

◇

Learning Experience Design

Design of professional development experiences, residencies, and cohort programs where the conditions are the curriculum. We specialize in creating the container that produces genuine transformation — and in designing for the breakthrough that happens in week three, not week one.

Design · Facilitation

→

Narrative & Communication Strategy

Helping leaders find the language that makes their vision legible to boards, funders, families, and policymakers — without diluting what makes their work transformative. Translation, not compromise. We help educators explain the unexplainable without selling out the vision.

Workshops · Writing

⬡

AI Tool Development for Education

Designing and prototyping AI-powered tools that extend the capacity of educators and school leaders — for founders building new models who need to navigate stakeholder conversations, communicate their vision, and stay grounded in their mission under pressure.

Emerging · Collaborative

▽

Network & Field Building

Supporting education networks and ecosystem initiatives in building the infrastructure, relationships, and learning culture that enable distributed transformation. Drawing from national network work, coalition leadership, and field-building across the learner-centered education movement.

Network · Systems

Selected work

Projects, roles,
and ventures

2019 – 2024

Embark Education

Miguel: Founder & Executive Director · Meg: Director

Together, we built and scaled a micro-school model that embedded learning inside real small businesses — bike shops, bakeries, and beyond. Embark reimagined school as a living relationship between young people and the community around them. We raised and managed multi-million dollar budgets, built partnerships across business, education, and philanthropy, and coached a team through the complexity of holding vision and execution simultaneously.

School Design Real-World Learning Community Partnership Shared Leadership

2019 – 2024

Iterative Space Residency

Founder & Facilitator

A 5–6 week summer residency for educators seeking to design and build learner-centered innovations. Residents received stipends, coaching, and 24/7 access to a dedicated space — under radical trust rather than prescribed curricula. The most critical insight: it took until weeks 3–4 for participants to truly believe the trust was real, and that their work was for themselves and their communities, not for us.

PD Design Radical Trust Adult Learning

Fellowships

Pahara · Joyful Impact · Moonshot

Fellow

Selected as a fellow across three distinct national networks: the Pahara Network, which brings together leaders committed to transforming education for underserved communities; the Joyful Impact Accelerator, focused on organizations that center joy and wellbeing; and the Moonshot Fellowship, a cohort working on bold, systems-level change in education.

Pahara Network Joyful Impact Moonshot

2023 – Present

Lyra Colorado & The Canopy Project

Board of Directors · National Advisory Council

Serving on the Board of Directors of Lyra Colorado and the National Advisory Council of The Canopy Project — a national effort to document, connect, and amplify innovative school models. This dual advisory work sharpens thinking on how mission-driven organizations build accountability to the communities they serve without compromising their vision.

Board Governance Advisory Field Building National

2015 – 2020

PBLWorks

Meg: Systemic Partnership Coach & Program/Curriculum Manager

Meg led strategic planning and national implementation for a grant bringing project-based learning to teacher education programs and partner districts. She designed and facilitated year-long professional development series, created curriculum and tools that scaled nationally, and coached district and school leaders to build systems and structures for lasting instructional change.

PBL National Scale PD Design Systems Coaching

2016 – 2019

DCS Montessori

Miguel: Middle School Director · Castle Pines, CO

Led the middle school division of a Montessori school, deepening roots in self-directed, learner-centered pedagogy. This role cemented design principles that would later define Embark and Iterative: that environments of trust and purpose produce extraordinary results, and that the conditions are always the curriculum.

Montessori Learner-Centered School Design

Let’s talk

For the people who believe
the form of the work matters.

Whether you’re founding a school, leading a network, designing a learning experience, or trying to stay true to a vision of human flourishing when conventional pressures push back — we’d love to hear what you’re working on.

Start a Conversation

Reach out at magonzo14@gmail.com
Missoula, Montana & Denver, Colorado · Working nationally

We are not

✕ A firm with a framework to sell you

✕ Consultants who show up, deliver, and disappear

✕ Believers in professional development as an event

✕ Interested in outputs that look good on paper

Designing conditions
for human flourishing.

Two practitioners.
One shared mission.

Awe. Brilliance. Beauty.

The honest premises

Four principles
everything lives inside

Services

Projects, roles,
and ventures

In the conversation

For the people who believe
the form of the work matters.

Designing conditionsfor human flourishing.

Two practitioners.One shared mission.

Awe. Brilliance. Beauty.

The honest premises

Four principleseverything lives inside

Services

Projects, roles,and ventures

In the conversation

For the people who believethe form of the work matters.

Designing conditions
for human flourishing.

Two practitioners.
One shared mission.

Four principles
everything lives inside

Projects, roles,
and ventures

For the people who believe
the form of the work matters.