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Educational systems endemic of demotivationmight signify a stagnating rather than nurturing ecology oflearning, due in part to an obstruction in the loops of sharedinformation between the organisms within these systems,i.e., teachers, educational researchers, teacher educators,school administrators, and educational policymakers.Working within the ecology of English as a foreign lan-guage education in Japan, we have been endeavoring overseveral years to open loops of communication with stu-dents through a learning-teaching-researching process wecall critical participatory looping (CPL). We reportedsuccesses in various publications about how CPL hasimproved our students’ motivations, and this paper elabo-rates upon two recent examples to provide a grounding ofCPL in practices that support activating ecological adapt-ability. First, we theorize that individuals and groups(classes) can be seen as socially intelligent dynamic sys-tems, and examine this perspective in relation to intraper-sonal and interpersonal dynamics of students needingnurturing loops of open communication in order to fostergreater self-awareness and mutual care. Then we suggestthat through soft assembling expansive learning, studentsand teacher-researchers might open communicationsexplicitly about themselves and their contexts, deepenmutual appreciation and understandings, and act purpose-fully as agents toward promoting healthy qualities inthemselves. Finally, we show with two examples that thesocial life of valuable information can be extended bylooping it not only back to those that created it but also bylooping it forward (similar to paying it forward) acrossexpanding networks that might benefit from it with eco-logical adaptability