Agile For Learning- Part 2: Challenge Days
How challenge days can help students build agile, adaptable skills and the interpersonal abilities they need as new technology enters classrooms.
Agile in the classroom checked against 2025 employer research, with a five-step plan for running a Challenge Day.
Jessica Cavallaro wrote this in 2023 to show how Challenge Days help students build an agile mindset when ChatGPT can pull facts and draft sentences. A new section below checks that case against 2025 employer research and sets out how a teacher can plan and run a Challenge Day.
As new technology enters our classroom, educators must focus on building AI Proof skills that will allow students to learn how to safely navigate these tools. They also need to develop the interpersonal skills necessary to thrive. A central part of that is developing an agile mindset. An agile mindset teaches people to actively think outside the box and experiment in small increments to solve complex problems.
In the last few weeks, we have learned about the capability of ChatGPT and how education misunderstands this new tool. As educators, we must assess our current pedagogy and reflect on our mission. If education aims to prepare our students for the future, how will we shift to work with these new technologies?
Using Agile to Create AI-Proof Skills
Our current technology can pull facts, put together sentences, and sort data. Therefore, we must purposefully teach students how to reframe situations and approach issues from different perspectives. An agile mindset values collaboration, innovation, and problem-solving. Instead of acknowledging that situations can change, agile opens the mind to possibilities, divergent ways of thinking, and multiple paths to goals.
It helps students become more resilient, adaptable, and flexible in their cognitive paths. An agile mindset promotes learning through taking risks in assumptions, experimentation, and reflection on the positive and negative results. Our students must learn and become fluent in these skills as they will need them to navigate AI.
Tangible Agile Mindset
Students cannot cultivate an agile mindset in a vacuum. They must practice during lessons and when there are opportunities for collaboration. It is not enough to tell students that it is essential for them to problem-solve differently; it is not an advisory class or an assembly with a new PowerPoint.
An agile mindset is a collection of skills that must be scaffolded, modeled, and practiced. It requires students to manipulate knowledge independently, make predictions, explore possibilities, and reflect on what was learned. An agile mindset helps students see that the wrong answer isn’t the final stop but an opportunity along the learning journey.
For future-focused teachers ready to stretch beyond a growth mindset and challenge students to think beyond the first result from google or focus on THE answer, these exercises can help students learn content, have opportunities for hands-on learning, and develop an agile mindset that will benefit them throughout their lives.
Using Challenge Days to Develop Test Agile Skills
During large units, there is always a risk that the classroom can get monotonous. When you have to teach a large amount of content, it is easy to slip into a rut where an agile mindset is challenging to develop. It is time for a Challenge Day when the class feels too repetitive!
Instead of a normal day in class, student teams are thrown into learning challenges that reinforce content, provide hands-on learning, and opportunities to grow their agile mindset. The Challenges are always completed in teams and usually encompass skills taught in other classes. This helps build an agile mindset because students use English skills in their math class or science skills in their history class, and it breaks down the “rules” of how learning should look in different classes.
Purpose of a Challenge Day
A Challenge Day may be several tasks the team must complete by the end of the class period. This keeps students on their feet, excited, and applying the content knowledge in new and novel ways.
Examples of Challenges may be:
- Participate in a game of charades using vocabulary words.
- Write a haiku to express how to multiply fractions.
- Write a Greek Myth that explores the powers of Congress. Must include correct literary elements from English class.
- Nominate a fictional character to the role of the Presidential cabinet. Why should the Senate approve them?
- Create a rap battle between characters in a book expressing their conflict and presenting their sides.
Making Learning Fun Using Agile
Challenge Days break up the class flow, give students time to be silly, and help them safely build connections outside their normal classroom tasks. They can see how different content areas work together and how to build strong relationships between seemingly unrelated topics. The ability to link unlike ideas and find connections between different areas of expertise are the sparks of innovation. Challenge Days practice and celebrate difficult skills students must learn when basic recall can be automated. The celebration of making this a special day gives positive reinforcement to access creativity and try new ideas.
This is a small way to implement agile into the classroom and build an agile classroom.
Read Part 1 of this three-part Agile for Learning series here.
Agile in the classroom in 2026: what employers report and how to run a Challenge Day
Agile in the classroom borrows a way of working from software teams, in which a group breaks a large goal into small pieces, tries one, looks at what happened and adjusts. Jessica Cavallaro’s 2023 article above describes one classroom form of that idea, the Challenge Day, and argues that students need the habits behind it now that software can sort data and put sentences together. This section tests that argument against current employer research and then turns Cavallaro’s example challenges into a plan a teacher can follow.
What employers say they will need
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, published in January 2025, draws on a survey of more than 1,000 employers who together represent more than 14 million workers across 22 industry clusters and 55 economies. The report finds that analytical thinking is still the most sought-after core skill, which seven out of ten companies call essential. Resilience, flexibility and agility come next. Employers also expect creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility, and curiosity and lifelong learning to keep rising in importance between 2025 and 2030, alongside technical skills such as AI and big data. They expect 39 percent of workers’ existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated over 2025 to 2030, a smaller share than the 44 percent reported in 2023, and the report notes that more workers (50 percent) had completed training, reskilling or upskilling than in 2023 (41 percent).
Two limits apply. The report is a survey of what employers expect, so it describes demand for skills and says nothing about which classroom method produces them. It also covers the whole labor market rather than schools. Cavallaro’s article points at the same cluster of skills, namely collaboration, problem solving and the ability to adjust when a first plan fails, which gives teachers a reasonable basis for practicing them. No study that tested Challenge Days themselves turned up in the research for this section, so the planning advice below comes from Cavallaro’s description and ordinary good practice rather than from measured results.
Turning the examples into a plan
Cavallaro describes a Challenge Day as a class period in which student teams complete several tasks that use content from more than one subject. Cavallaro’s examples include a haiku about multiplying fractions, a Greek myth that explores the powers of Congress, and a nomination of a fictional character to the Presidential cabinet with an argument for why the Senate should approve. A few decisions separate a lively day from a confusing one.
- Start from the content. Choose the standards the unit has already taught and write each challenge so that a team cannot finish without using them. A rap battle between book characters works only if students can state each character’s conflict accurately.
- Limit the tasks and the time. Cavallaro describes several tasks to finish by the end of the period. Three or four short tasks give teams room to change course without rushing.
- Mix the teams on purpose. A team that combines strong writers, strong mathematicians and strong speakers has a real reason to divide the work and to explain ideas to one another.
- Grade the content, not the performance. A short rubric that names the accuracy of the content, the use of vocabulary and the quality of teamwork keeps the day from becoming a talent show.
- Finish with a reflection. Cavallaro explains that an agile mindset treats a wrong answer as part of the learning journey. Ask each team what it tried first, what changed along the way and what it would adjust next time. That builds the habit of reviewing work and adjusting that agile teams rely on.
Where AI tools fit
An AI tool can write a haiku or a short myth in seconds, so a teacher running a Challenge Day in 2026 needs to decide where such tools are allowed. One workable approach is to let teams use a tool for a first draft and then require them to check it against the unit content, correct what is wrong and defend their choices, since judging and revising is the skill Cavallaro wants students to practice. Leaders setting expectations for a whole school can start with edCircuit’s AI in Education guide.
Keep going with the series
Cavallaro’s other agile articles on edCircuit cover wide-open questions in Part 1 of this series, three agile principles for educators and three agile principles for students. A teacher new to the approach might begin with one Challenge Day at the end of a unit, collect the reflections, and decide from those notes whether to schedule another.
Related reading
More on EdTech
