This project set out to explore how completely new schools, occupying completely new classroom spaces, create themselves as schools. At its inception, a new school has only its buildings; everything else must be developed. In particular, the school must develop its vision for learners, and how this is reflected through school culture, routines, values, practices, and interpretations of curriculum and assessment. The authors wanted to know what the experience was like for both teachers and students as they found their way and developed their identities as members of the school. To that end, the project examined how teachers and students at Hamilton's Rototuna High School (RHS), an innovative learning environment (ILE), developed agentic identities while defining their sense of self as a foundation community. The authors wanted to know how culture, practices, and pedagogical routines develop support and enhance learning for a wide group of learners. The authors also wanted to know what teachers, students, and school leaders learned as they found their way. The research questions include the following: (1) How do teachers and students describe, apply, and demonstrate understandings of their own agency in an innovative learning environment (ILE) and do these understandings illustrate principles of an architecture of ownership? (2) In what ways do teachers and students make sense of the various architectures of an ILE (relational, pedagogical, physical, curriculum, or social), and to what extent do the meanings they ascribe to these architectures influence the development of student and teacher agentic identities? (3) In what ways do participants make links between their identities as students or teachers and their engagement in classroom life, and what do these links look like? and (4) How do understandings and actions regarding agentic identity formation inform or impact on the ways in which the participant students and teachers practise, experience, and express The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) key competencies?