SEEDS Regenerative Inquiry Cycle Agent Skill

Design a SEEDS regenerative inquiry cycle connecting place-based learning to ecological awareness for young learners.

Context cost
8.3k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 33.3 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Design a SEEDS regenerative inquiry cycle connecting place-based learning to ecological awareness for young learners. Use when building early childhood or primary inquiry around ecosystems and community.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

bio-empathycyclicalinquirymanningplace-basedregenerativeseedsstewardship

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md33.3 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle disable-model-invocation: true user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "original-frameworks/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle" skill_name: "SEEDS Regenerative Inquiry Cycle" domain: "original-frameworks" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "emerging" evidence_sources: - "Manning (2025) — SEEDS cycle, published in All Thoughts Subject to Change (Substack)" - "Manning (2025) — Metabolising Regeneration (regenerative vs restorative vs sustainable spectrum)" - "Kimmerer (2013) — Braiding Sweetgrass (bio-empathy, reciprocity)" - "Vervaeke (2019) — Relevance realisation (philosophical underpinning for the Sense stage)" - "Sobel (2004) — Place-based education (external validation of underlying principles)" - "Reggio Emilia documentation pedagogy (aligned assessment approach)" input_schema: required: - field: "learning_group" type: "string" - field: "place_context" type: "string" optional: - field: "existing_problem_or_potential" type: "string" - field: "time_available" type: "string" - field: "community_connections" type: "string" - field: "documentation_approach" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "seeds_overview" type: "object" - field: "sense_stage" type: "object" - field: "envision_stage" type: "object" - field: "experiment_stage" type: "object" - field: "design_to_last_stage" type: "object" - field: "share_stage" type: "object" - field: "documentation_plan" type: "object" - field: "known_limitations" type: "object" chains_well_with: - "place-based-inquiry-anchor" - "reggio-documentation-protocol" - "ecological-inquiry-anchor-designer" - "ubuntu-collective-knowledge-task-designer" - "critical-thinking-task-designer" teacher_time: "6 minutes" tags: ["SEEDS", "regenerative", "inquiry", "place-based", "Manning", "bio-empathy", "stewardship", "cyclical", "documentation"] ---
81# SEEDS Regenerative Inquiry Cycle
82
83## What This Skill Does
84
85This skill encodes an original practitioner framework developed by Gareth Manning, educator, curriculum designer, and learning systems designer. Unlike skills in other domains, it is not drawn from peer-reviewed research traditions. It is grounded in serious engagement with learning science, original curriculum design work, and active classroom testing. It is included because the methodology is coherent, transferable, and genuinely useful — and because intellectual honesty requires distinguishing practitioner frameworks from research-validated approaches.
86
87SEEDS designs a five-stage regenerative inquiry cycle for early childhood and primary contexts — a learning process that grounds student inquiry in real places, real systems, and real care. SEEDS stands for **Sense → Envision → Experiment → Design to Last → Share**. Unlike linear project frameworks, SEEDS is cyclical — Share connects back to Sense, and each stage overlaps and recurses. Unlike most project-based learning frameworks, SEEDS begins with attunement and bio-empathy rather than a problem statement, and ends with stewardship structures rather than a presentation. The quality of attention at the beginning determines the quality of action at the end. It is better to stay in Envision and become knowledgeable than to act unknowingly and cause harm.
88
89The framework draws on Kimmerer's (2013) ethic of reciprocity ("This is our work. To discover what we can give"), Vervaeke's relevance realisation as a philosophical anchor for the Sense stage, Reggio Emilia documentation pedagogy for the assessment approach, and place-based education principles (Sobel, 2004) for the grounding in real places. It was inspired by but is distinct from Green School Bali's 4S model (Freud) — acknowledging the catalyst while being clear that SEEDS is original development with a significantly different assessment philosophy. The regenerative spectrum matters: restorative (fixing damage) is the minimum; regenerative (increasing the capacity of the system to thrive) is the aim.
90
91## Evidence Foundation
92
93Manning (2025) developed the SEEDS cycle as a regenerative alternative to conventional PBL frameworks, published in *All Thoughts Subject to Change* (Substack). The framework addresses three limitations of standard project-based learning: (1) most PBL begins with a problem statement, which frames the world as broken and the student as fixer — SEEDS begins with attunement, which frames the world as complex and the student as participant; (2) most PBL ends with a presentation, which reduces the project to a performance — SEEDS ends with stewardship, which embeds the project in ongoing care; (3) most PBL assessment focuses on the final product — SEEDS assessment is documentation-based throughout, making learning visible at every stage. Manning (2025) also articulated the regenerative spectrum in *Metabolising Regeneration*: sustainable maintains the current state, restorative returns to a previous state, and regenerative increases the capacity of the system to thrive. SEEDS aims for regenerative. Kimmerer (2013) provides the philosophical underpinning for the Sense stage. Her concept of bio-empathy — attending to the non-human world with the same care we give to human relationships — anchors the first stage of SEEDS. Bio-empathy includes non-human voices: what does the river need? What does the soil need? This is not metaphor; it is a methodological commitment to including ecological stakeholders in the inquiry. Vervaeke's work on relevance realisation informs the Sense stage: the capacity to notice what matters — to distinguish signal from noise in a complex environment — is a trainable skill, not a fixed trait. The Sense stage trains this capacity through structured attunement practices. Sobel (2004) and Castagno & Brayboy provide external validation for the place-based principles underlying SEEDS. Place-based education research consistently shows that learning grounded in local places produces deeper engagement, stronger community connection, and better retention than abstract, decontextualised learning. Reggio Emilia documentation pedagogy aligns with the SEEDS assessment approach: learning is made visible through documentation (photographs, learning stories, portfolios, observations) throughout the process, not evaluated through a final product. This alignment is independent — Manning developed the documentation approach before encountering Reggio in depth — but the convergence strengthens the rationale.
94
95## Input Schema
96
97The educator must provide:
98- **Learning group:** Which age group. *e.g. "Early childhood, ages 5-8 — mixed-age group of 18 children" / "Primary, ages 8-12 — Year 5 class of 26 students"*
99- **Place context:** The specific place that anchors the inquiry. *e.g. "The school's neglected courtyard — a 200m² concrete space with two dead trees and a cracked fountain" / "The local river that runs behind the school — a 500m stretch that the community has asked to be cleaned up" / "The school kitchen and its waste system — students noticed that food waste goes into general rubbish"*
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md4,824 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈950
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
7,375
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
4.2%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 42% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

8.3k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 33.3 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md33.3 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# SEEDS Regenerative Inquiry Cycle · 8.3k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle ] || { mv .claude/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/seeds-regenerative-inquiry-cycle

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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