The Agile Classroom
What distinguishes an Agile classroom, including student agency, the teacher as guide and self-paced, scaffolded work toward mastery.
An agile classroom gives students agency within limits and makes the teacher a guide. How it works and where it needs support.
In this 2023 article, Jessica Cavallaro describes the agile classroom: student agency, the teacher as a guide, and skills. A new section below, added in 2026, explains where the idea comes from and what research on instruction says teachers still need to provide.
Throughout the year, I answered this question from educators worldwide. While I do not have a definitive answer, some qualities distinguish an Agile classroom from a traditional classroom: student agency, the teacher as a guide, and skills.
Student Agency & Agile Strategies
In an agile classroom, students drive their education. This does not mean that the classroom is a free-for-all with no standards or organized curriculum. It is quite the opposite.
For a moment, think about where agile originates. It developed to lean out (to make more efficient) systems of software development. The technology industry has clear deadlines, objectives, and functions, and no one hires software developers to create anything the developers like. Agile was conceived for businesses to be more efficient and flexible.
The same need is true for a classroom. A scope and sequence must be adhered to, standards to uphold, and a curriculum to be met. When students are given agency, they still have constraints, just like in the workplace. In an agile classroom, the students can choose freely within those constraints.
In an agile classroom, the teacher poses a wide-open question. The question helps set the learning goals of the unit. Students understand what questions must be answered by the given deadline. There is also content that must be taught. For me, that means students must analyze primary documents, evaluate historical events, and understand the causes and effects of these events. Students must understand these skills and content: it is a non-negotiable of the class.
Let Students Make Their Own Choices in the Agile Classroom
The choice comes from students applying skills and content knowledge. For my students, I teach mini-lessons that model important skills and scaffold activities for learning history. Instead of treating my classroom as a stage where I dispense information, I make these lessons as autonomous as possible. I create videos to teach new skills, so students can watch them repeatedly and stop when necessary for maximum understanding. Activities are self-paced and scaffolded to develop mastery of knowledge. Therefore, student teams decide what gets done, when, and where. There are MUST lessons and activities that are turned in for a grade, but students can choose when they do them and how they apply their knowledge to answer the essential question.
Teacher As a Guide
As students gain choice and agency in their learning, the role of the teacher shifts as well. When I often introduce agile to new teachers, they are weary about adding a new “thing” to their already exhaustive list of tasks to complete.
Agile is different. Instead of leading the learning and dosing it out as necessary to a classroom of students, the teacher transforms into a guide. Teachers step back from the front of the room, delegate the work to the students, and help students troubleshoot.
Students are now expected to plan their units, pace their learning, and problem-solve the solutions. A teacher cannot do all that for a classroom of students. Now teachers get to do what they really love: working with students.
Let Students Take Their Time On Agile Classroom Tasks
There is no more large group instruction since each team works independently. There is no classroom management because every team employs a different strategy. The teacher is finally free to work in small groups or with individuals. Learning is personalized, and differentiation is easy.
The advanced students can take off immediately because they know what needs to be done. As the teacher moves through the room, they can prompt these students with personalized questions to further push and continuously challenge them. Students who struggle can ask clarifying questions and receive the teacher’s undivided attention. Teachers get the time to build strong relationships with all their students and the space to assess mastery and understanding that otherwise would never be possible.
Agile Classroom Focused Skills
Our students are growing up in a knowledge-rich environment. They can google any question, easily access ancient philosophers, or tweet political figures. They are connected and can access depths of knowledge never considered possible by our ancestors. The real value in today’s education is no longer “recall.”
Education is now how to apply the knowledge that you can access. It is the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated topics, be creative, problem-solve, make decisions, and prioritize information. This is only achieved through active learning.
Students need time to learn these skills, develop them, and become comfortable practicing them in their lives. There is a difference between being told something is important and learning it for yourself, which is also true for skill transference. Students must be granted the space to be creative, practice collaboration, and solve real-world problems using critical thinking skills. An agile classroom is designed to give students these opportunities.
Making Your Classroom Agile
An agile classroom sets up students with the necessary knowledge and a goal. Skills can be modeled and scaffolded, but most importantly, students can practice, reflect, learn, and try again. This is character-building, the foundational development of social-emotional learning and executive functioning skills.
An agile classroom addresses the student’s needs. It begins with a standard traditional curriculum and advances it to address the needs of today’s evolving world. Students can still learn classic literature, world history, and physics; the difference is they have a choice. The teachers are free to truly teach, and the classroom transforms from a passive learning environment to a room buzzing with activity.
Agile classroom in 2026: what it looks like in practice and what the research on instruction adds
An agile classroom, as Jessica Cavallaro describes it above, gives students agency within firm limits, turns the teacher into a guide, and puts weight on skills. Teachers and school leaders considering the idea may ask what an agile classroom looks like on an ordinary Tuesday, and how to tell whether it is working. This section takes up those questions by going back to the source of the term and by setting the approach beside well-established findings on how students learn.
Where the idea comes from
The word agile comes from software development. The twelve principles behind the Agile Manifesto were written for software teams, and several of them translate readily to a school setting. One asks teams to build projects around motivated individuals, to give them the environment and support they need, and to trust them to get the job done. Another says the best work emerges from self-organizing teams. A third says that at regular intervals the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. Cavallaro makes the same point when noting that agile was conceived to make businesses more efficient and flexible, and that a classroom, like a company, works within constraints.
Those three principles map onto three routines a teacher can see and check: students make choices inside a clear goal, student teams organize their own work, and the class stops on a regular schedule to look back at what worked. The manifesto was not written about learning, so it offers no evidence that these routines raise achievement in schools. Leaders should treat it as a source of working habits, and look elsewhere for evidence about what students need in order to learn.
What teachers still have to provide
Cavallaro states that an agile classroom is not a free-for-all, that students must master content and skills the teacher treats as non-negotiable, and that Cavallaro teaches mini-lessons and builds scaffolded activities. That description fits what research on teaching suggests students need. In Principles of Instruction, published in American Educator in Spring 2012, Barak Rosenshine drew on cognitive science, studies of master teachers and research on cognitive supports to set out ten principles. According to the full text, they include presenting new material in small steps, checking for student understanding, obtaining a high success rate, providing scaffolds for difficult tasks, and requiring and monitoring independent practice.
Read next to the agile approach, these principles suggest where the weak points are. Self-paced work with videos that students can pause and replay supports small steps. The risk lies in checking understanding: when every team follows a different path, a teacher has to find ways to see what each student knows, and cannot rely on the whole class answering the same question. A high success rate matters as well, since a student who is stuck for days without help is not practicing independently, only waiting. Cavallaro addresses part of this by noting that struggling students can ask clarifying questions and receive the teacher’s attention, and that is a design to build in deliberately.
A fair view of the claims
The original article makes strong statements: that there is no classroom management because every team uses a different strategy, and that differentiation is easy. Teachers who have run team-based work may find these hold in a well-prepared class and fail in a class where norms were not taught. Classroom routines for teams do not appear automatically, and the first weeks of an agile classroom may need more teacher direction, not less. This section cites no study that tests agile classrooms as a whole, so its practical guidance rests on the broader evidence on instruction, and the claim about easy differentiation is best treated as a hope to be checked in each room.
Starting an agile classroom
- Choose one unit and write the essential question and the non-negotiable skills and content before any choice is offered. Cavallaro’s example, analyzing primary documents and evaluating historical events, shows the level of detail that works.
- Offer choice in how and when students demonstrate the skills, and keep a short list of required tasks that every student completes.
- Teach team routines directly: how to divide the work, how to ask for help, and how to record progress so the teacher can see it at a glance.
- Build in a short, regular reflection, borrowing the manifesto’s habit of looking back and adjusting. A five-minute review at the end of each week is enough to begin.
- Keep checking individual understanding with a short task or conversation, so that a team’s progress is not mistaken for each student’s progress.
- Gather feedback from students and colleagues after the first unit, and change the design before extending it to a second.
Cavallaro also links the approach to social-emotional learning and executive functioning, since students practice, reflect and try again. Leaders who want to connect agile routines with that work can see the edCircuit social-emotional learning guide and the classroom management guide. The earlier edCircuit pieces on agile principles for educators and on wide-open questions cover the starting points in more depth.
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