Mr. Ortiz walks into his classroom on a Monday morning. Before students arrive, he turns on his desktop computer and reviews the student data dashboards from two separate platforms. His students spent a total of three hours across the two platforms last week, but the data is too generalized to tell him much. He can’t see what any particular student actually understood or struggled with. He can see completion rates.
He moves from his desk to the computer cart to make sure every student laptop is plugged in and fully charged.
The bell rings and students pour into the classroom. They are loud and alive — excited to see each other after the weekend. Mr. Ortiz knows this energy. He knows what to do with it. He could ask about their weekends, pose a question that connects last week’s short story to something that happened in the news, spark something. He’s done it before, and he knows how it goes when it works.
But he can’t. Time is limited, and the platforms are waiting.
“Ok everyone,” he announces, “grab your laptops and log into the vocabulary program. You’re going to spend 20 minutes on your next exercise.”
One by one, students retrieve their laptops, put on their headphones, and click away. Mr. Ortiz circulates the room — not teaching, not facilitating, but monitoring. Watching screens.
This isn’t teaching, and it’s long past time we reckon with that.
The Logic Was Sound. The Outcome Wasn’t.
The shift toward platform-based instruction happened because the problem it was trying to solve was real.
Classrooms are complex. Students arrive with different reading levels, language backgrounds, and academic challenges. Differentiating instruction for twenty or thirty students at once — while teaching, while assessing, while managing the hundred small decisions each class requires — is hard. Really hard.
The promise of adaptive technology was that it could help. How? By assessing each student’s level automatically, generating personalized lessons, and freeing teachers from the logistics of differentiation so they could do the parts of the job that required a human.
Initially, this promise was exciting for many teachers.
But how it all played out has been… complicated. As platforms multiplied and districts signed contract after contract, the rift these programs caused grew. Gradually, the instructional decisions that once belonged to the teacher moved to the system: what a student works on next, how long they spend on a skill, when they move on.
These are critical instructional decisions — ones that, for the decades preceding edtech, belonged to the professional discretion of the teacher.
They are instructional decisions that we believe need to be returned to the teacher.
What Gets Lost When Teaching Is Outsourced
The impact of edtech’s proliferation on teachers is real and documented.
- Educators are managing an average of eight different digital tools, with half reporting they are overwhelmed by too many platforms [1].
- Almost two-thirds of teachers, principals, and district leaders say they are exhausted by the volume of tools they are expected to use [2].
- 85% of teachers think students spend too much time on screens in school [3].
- Nearly 75% of teachers using digital devices note they actively distract from learning, fueling daily classroom management friction [4].
The concern is not hypothetical. It is evident in the data, in teachers’ accounts of their classrooms, and in the growing number of districts now limiting or banning screens during the school day.
But there’s another impact that deserves attention: what happens to students when the human relationship at the center of teaching gets displaced.
Research on discussion-based learning is consistent and compelling. Study after study shows, for example, that classroom discussion — including Socratic seminars and structured debate — has an effect size of 0.82 on student learning outcomes [5]. For context, an effect size above 0.40 is considered meaningful. An effect size of 0.82, then, is exceptional. This reflects the consistent finding that students who learn through structured discussion — who are asked to defend ideas, respond to peers, revise their thinking in real time — develop deeper understanding and stronger critical thinking than students who complete the same content individually.
As one of the most robust findings in the educational research literature, this points to something specific about how learning works: understanding is not primarily a solitary act. Learning flourishes in conversation, in the productive tension between one student’s ideas and another’s, in the moment when a teacher asks the question that makes a concept come to life.
What an over-reliance on platform-based instruction removes is not content. What gets removed is the experience of building understanding alongside other people, the social and intellectual nature of learning that the research says matters most.
Technology Isn’t Solely to Blame
It is important to be precise here, because the conversation about screens and platforms in schools often falls into unproductive binaries.
The problem is not technology. It is the role we have assigned it. There is a meaningful difference between technology that supports a teacher’s decision-making and technology that replaces it, between a screen that helps students access a text and a curriculum that requires a screen to function.
That distinction has direct implications for how districts think about curriculum adoption. When a curriculum is designed for a platform, the teacher’s role becomes one of supervision: monitor the system, intervene when it flags something, manage the logistics of students moving through their individual tracks. When a curriculum is designed for a classroom, the teacher’s role is fundamentally different: lead the reading, facilitate the discussion, make the instructional calls that only a human in the room can make.
Taking back teaching, in this sense, is not merely a sentiment. It is a design choice. It means selecting a curriculum built for classrooms rather than platforms, a curriculum that assumes a teacher is the one holding the room, and that everything else is designed to help that professional lead it.
How We Take Back Teaching
At Inquiry by Design, every design decision in our grades 6–12 English Language Arts curriculum starts from the same assumption: the teacher — with their expertise, their passion, their knowledge of their students — is the one leading the room.
That assumption has curriculum design implications. It means the curriculum is print-first and built for sustained, shared engagement with real texts that students hold in their hands and annotate on paper, not for individual screen-based navigation. It means discussion is not supplemental; it is embedded in lessons as a primary means through which ideas develop and understanding builds.
It also means that when teachers walk into the room with an IBD lesson, they are not managing a system. They are walking into a classroom that is already set up for the kind of teaching they went into the profession to do: a shared text, a set of real and thoughtful questions, a room full of students who are about to read something together and then explore together what it means.
This is what Connected by Design means in practice. Reading, writing, language, discussion, and knowledge-building are designed to work together, not across separate platforms or supplemental resources, but inside the lesson, from the moment it opens to the moment it closes. The connections are already there. The teacher gets to lead through them.
Back in Mr. Ortiz’s Classroom
Let’s reimagine what Mr. Ortiz’s Monday morning could look like.
He still arrives early. He still thinks about his students before the bell rings. But this morning, he is not reviewing dashboards or frantically plugging in laptops. He is reading over the discussion questions for the unit’s next text — a long-form piece of investigative journalism that his students have been annotating in their readers all week. He has a few ideas about where the conversation might go. He also knows it might go somewhere else entirely, and he is ready for that.
The bell rings. Students come in loud, the way they always do.
This time, he asks about their weekends. One student mentions something she saw in the news that connects to the argument at the center of the text. “Yes!” Mr. Ortiz shouts excitedly. “I want you to bring that up when we get to the third paragraph.”
She grins.
Books come out. Students find their annotations. The discussion begins. Connections are made.
Students aren’t learning in isolation from each other. They are learning out loud, together.
That is what taking back teaching looks like: not a rejection of tools, but a return to the belief that the most important thing is the teacher in the room: knowing their students, reading the moment, and responding to the students in front of them.
This is the Monday morning that Mr. Ortiz deserves. It’s the one that all teachers and students deserve.
This is the third post in The Connected Learning Project, a blog series from Inquiry by Design. Connected learning isn’t just a framework we write about — it’s the design principle behind everything we build. Inquiry by Design is a print-first English Language Arts (ELA) and Spanish Language Arts (SLA) curriculum for grades 6–12, built so reading, writing, language, and discussion work together in every lesson. We serve 40+ districts and nearly 500,000 students nationwide.
1: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-edtech-trends-report-by-jotform-reveals-educators-turning-to-ai-302662782.html
2: https://www.edweek.org/technology/tech-fatigue-is-real-for-teachers-and-students-heres-how-to-ease-the-burden/2022/03
3: https://www.wsfa.com/2026/06/09/auburns-college-education-surveys-hundreds-us-teachers-about-screen-time/
4: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/learning/is-there-too-much-screen-time-in-school.html
5: https://www.education.ky.gov/curriculum/standards/kyacadstand/Documents/EBIP_4_Discussion.pdf