“A Chromebook is a place for them to hide,” says Jessenya, a seventh grade ELA teacher. Earlier in her career, she watched two things happen when devices were out: students who looked busy but were somewhere else, and students who reached for a shortcut, “opening up a tab and then googling the answer or putting into AI the answer to a question that I’m asking them… rather than actually turning their gears.”
Jessenya’s observations point toward a common problem: students appearing to learn without doing the thinking. Districts from Los Angeles to New York City are now setting limits on screen time, and a bigger question follows close behind: what should fill that space instead?
At Clovis Global Academy, a K–7 Spanish dual immersion school in California, Jessenya’s answer is a printed text, a pencil, and a conversation. Her school is in its first year teaching with Inquiry by Design’s Middle School ELA curriculum, and we’re following the year with its teachers and leaders: what they’re noticing in their classrooms, the challenges they’re facing, and how they’re responding with students at the center.
On the day we spoke with Jessenya, her class opened a lesson on Piri Thomas’ “Amigo Brothers” by predicting what the story might be about from the title alone. The question turned into a fifteen-minute conversation about assumptions and stereotypes, and about where a realistic prediction ends and imagination begins. “I just actually saw the students connecting this question with their perceptions of reality,” she says.
Nothing was open on a screen. “There’s no block in between myself and the instruction,” Jessenya says, reflecting on the print-first curriculum. This has been one of the biggest payoffs in her classroom. Now, with a shared, physical text anchoring the intellectual work, discussion flows naturally. Even more, Jessenya says print “makes reading more tangible… students are more comfortable picking up something and opening it and reading it.”
With a print curriculum, thinking becomes visible. That’s the idea behind IBD’s Student Readers: Each student has their own physical copy of texts for each unit that they mark up as they read, and those annotations are designed to turn their attention to meaning. As Ruth, Learning Director at Clovis, says, “Annotation isn’t just marking up a page. It is part of how students make meaning.” For a teacher, that means students’ thinking is on the page where she can see it, so she can see how a student got to an answer, not just the answer, and facilitate learning experiences that are responsive to students’ thinking.
None of this is a case against technology. On the contrary, Jessenya treats the Chromebook as something students earn after the cognitive work of writing and thinking has deepened: “You cannot type out your narrative until you’ve processed this two or three times with revisions. Then I’ll give you a Chromebook. It’s something you can work towards.”
In a world where kids are surrounded by technology, classrooms can become a space where students develop and deepen critical thinking skills that, ultimately, will help them navigate this increasingly digitized and complex society. As Jessenya put it: “Kids these days already are built in with a set amount of screen time… if we’re just putting them back in front of screens, it’s doing, I think, a disservice to kids.”
For now, Jessenya’s take is simple. Take away the place to hide, and “it just changes their entire behavior.”
We’ll continue to follow Clovis’ implementation of Inquiry by Design’s print-first ELA curriculum, sharing insights, observations, and curiosities along the way. We hope you’ll join us.
Inquiry by Design is a print-first English Language Arts (ELA) and Spanish Language Arts (SLA) curriculum provider for grades 6–12, serving 40+ districts and nearly 500,000 students nationwide.