Recent years have seen educators chasing engagement with increasingly creative approaches, from livelier lesson plans to gamified quizzes, while schools invest heavily in behaviour management and academic interventions designed to keep students focused. Heather Cowap, founder of SciEdScrumming, believes those 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 not disengaged because learning lacks excitement. Rather, they have spent years following instructions without being given consistent opportunities to practise planning, decision-making, and accountability. She argues that merely 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 lets us embed those skills right into the classroom structure,” Cowap explains.
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 across business and technology, into an educational setting. Students can organize work on visual task boards, estimate timelines, hold brief 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 every task to coaching students through the learning process.
Cowap’s path toward classroom Scrum reflects a career journey rooted in self-discovery. After working in public health, she entered education with a different understanding of motivation than what she observed in traditional classrooms. She learnt that lasting behavioral change depends on helping people take ownership of their 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 to be very lightweight for what we really want to do in education,” she says. Years spent exploring flipped learning and Universal Design for Learning frameworks pointed her toward Scrum. Later, reading a Scrum-based productivity guide introduced her to early educational adaptations of the framework, although few practical resources existed. Cowap built her own classroom model by combining Scrum’s visual boards, sprint planning, and daily standups 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 tackle first, how long each piece would take, and what would need to become homework if class time ran short. They plan how they will move through a unit or project within agreed timeframes. Conversations about deadlines become opportunities to develop executive functioning. Visual boards make progress visible to everyone, allowing teachers to identify misconceptions early while giving students a practical system for monitoring their own work.
Cowap notes that many teachers initially worry that giving students greater autonomy means surrendering classroom control. Concerns around testing, curriculum coverage, and behavior often surface during professional development sessions. Her classroom experience challenged those assumptions.
“I was using this in a classroom that had required state testing,” she recalls. “Kids did better. I had more kids scoring at higher numbers than I did before I used it.”
Educational literature consistently links self-regulated learning with stronger academic outcomes and increased motivation. Cowap believes Scrum offers teachers a structured method for developing those capabilities rather than expecting them to emerge naturally.
Parents, she notes, often arrived with reservations. Some questioned whether teenagers possessed enough maturity to organize their own learning. Others easily recognized familiar workplace practices. “I had parents who came in who were using Scrum at work who were over the moon excited that their kids were learning real-life future-ready skills,” Cowap says.
According to her, students also required time to adjust. Some immediately embraced the opportunity to choose challenging tasks or begin with hands-on activities instead of waiting through lengthy lectures. Others, she notes, preferred being told exactly what to complete before gradually recognizing that regular team discussions created more meaningful access to teacher support.
Cowap noticed another unexpected benefit as classrooms settled into the framework. High-performing students no longer felt solely responsible for carrying group projects, while classmates who struggled academically gained confidence through peer conversations and shared problem-solving. Accountability shifted from teacher reminders toward team ownership, creating opportunities to teach collaboration instead of simply expecting it.
Perhaps the greatest misconception, Cowap argues, is that student agency represents an abstract educational aspiration. Experience has convinced her that it is a practical skill that can be intentionally taught through everyday classroom systems. Teachers often tell her they lack the time or energy to adopt another initiative. Cowap believes the opposite becomes true once routines are established because students begin managing responsibilities that previously demanded constant teacher attention.
“Teachers can feel supported. The kids know how to keep track of their own work instead of having us constantly remind and track after them,” Cowap says.
Schools continue searching for new ways to improve engagement, yet Cowap hopes educators pause before asking how to make lessons more entertaining and look beyond the surface. “Kids are capable of doing a whole lot more than we’re giving them credit for,” she says. “Helping students develop those capabilities may prove far more valuable than finding another strategy designed simply to hold their attention.”
