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Recent years have seen teachers pursue engagement with increasingly creative approaches, from more lively lesson plans to role-playing quizzes, as schools invest heavily in behavior management and academic interventions designed to keep students focused. Heather Cowap, founder of SciEdScrummingbelieves that these efforts often overlook a more important question: have students actually learned how to take responsibility for their own learning?
Cowap believes that many students are disengaged because learning lacks excitement. Rather, they have spent years following instructions without being given consistent opportunities to practice planning, decision-making, and accountability. She argues that simply offering more choice does little if students have never developed the skills needed to use it well.
“We talk a lot about giving students agency, but they don’t always have the skills to be able to do that. Scrum allows us to embed those skills right into the classroom structure,” explains Cowap.
Rather than treating agency as an ideal to hope for, she treats it as a system to teach.
Her approach adapts Scrum, an agile framework widely used in business and technology, to an educational setting. Students can organize work on visual task boards, estimate timelines, hold short team discussions, reflect on progress, and adjust plans as they move through a unit or project. Teachers remain deeply involved, although their role shifts from directing each task to coaching students through the learning process.
Cowap’s path to the Scrum classroom reflects a career journey rooted in self-discovery. After working in public health, she entered education with a different understanding of motivation than she observed in traditional classrooms. She learned that lasting behavior change depends on helping people take ownership of their own decisions. Cowap carried that philosophy into biology classrooms, where she questioned whether engagement alone should be considered the ultimate goal.
“I always find the term engagement too easy for what we really want to do in education,” she says. Years spent exploring flipped learning and Universal Design for Learning frameworks led him to Scrum. Later, reading a Scrum-based productivity guide introduced him to early educational adaptations of the framework, though there were few practical resources. Cowap built its classroom model by combining Scrum visual boards, sprint planning, and daily postures with UDL principles that encourage student choice and self-regulation.
Students, she explains, would map out a two-week unit or project themselves: what to cover first, how long each part would take, and what homework would have to be done if class time was short. They plan how they will move through a unit or project within agreed timelines. Conversations about deadlines become opportunities to develop executive functioning. Visual charts make progress visible to all, allowing teachers to identify misunderstandings early, while giving students a practical system for monitoring their work.
Cowap notes that many teachers initially worry that giving students greater autonomy means surrendering control in the classroom. Concerns about testing, curriculum coverage, and behavior often come up during professional development sessions. Her classroom experience challenged those assumptions.
“I was using this in a class that required state testing,” she recalls. “The kids did better. I had more kids score higher than I did before I used it.”
Educational literature consistently links self-regulated learning to stronger academic outcomes and increased motivation. Cowap believes that Scrum offers teachers a structured method for developing these skills rather than waiting for them to emerge naturally.
Parents, she notes, often came with reservations. Some questioned whether the teenagers were mature enough to organize their own learning. Others easily recognized popular workplace practices. “I had parents come in who were using Scrum at work who were excited that their kids were learning future-ready skills in real life,” says Cowap.
According to her, the students also needed time to adapt. Some immediately embraced the opportunity to choose challenging assignments or start with hands-on activities instead of waiting through long lectures. Others, she notes, preferred to be told exactly what to fill in before gradually realizing that regular team discussions created more meaningful access to teacher support.
Cowap noticed another unexpected benefit as the classes were put into the framework. High-performing students no longer felt responsible for completing group projects, while classmates who struggled academically gained confidence through peer conversations and collaborative problem solving. Accountability shifted from teacher reminders to team ownership, creating opportunities to learn cooperation rather than simply expecting it.
Perhaps the biggest misconception, Cowap argues, is that student agency represents an abstract educational aspiration. Experience has convinced him that it is a practical skill that can be learned intentionally through everyday classroom systems. Teachers often tell her they don’t have the time or energy to adopt another initiative. Cowap believes that the opposite becomes true once routines are established, because students begin to manage responsibilities that previously required constant teacher attention.
“Teachers can feel supported. Children know how to keep track of their work instead of constantly reminding us and following up,” says Cowap.
Schools continue to look for new ways to improve engagement, but Cowap hopes educators will stop before asking how to make lessons more fun and look beyond the surface. “Kids are capable of so much more than we give them credit for,” she says. “Helping students develop those skills can be much more valuable than finding another strategy designed simply to keep their attention.”
