This Teacher’s Journal: Blog Post 9 | March 14, 2025
The Season of Ripening: Weeks 7–8 and the Shift in Student Focus
Every term follows a seasonal rhythm. Early weeks are for sprouting new shoots of growth – introducing new ideas, laying conceptual foundations, and pushing students to think beyond their initial assumptions. Mid-term is for growth, where structured inquiry, discussion, and problem-solving allow students to expand their understanding. And then comes weeks 7-8 – the ripening season.
This is when students shift their focus. The pressure of impending assessments reshapes their priorities. Inquiry, experimentation, and risk-taking – so central in earlier weeks – can suddenly take a backseat to a fixation on grades and performance. The classroom atmosphere changes. Students start looking for certainty over curiosity, structure over struggle, and a clear path to success rather than the messy work of sense-making.
This shift is understandable. Years of schooling have conditioned students to see the term as a build-up to a singular moment of judgment – the assessment. Their instinct is to lean on hard scaffolding, seeking out mnemonics, formulaic writing structures, and step-by-step guides that will (supposedly) get them the marks they want.
Scaffolding is important. In the construction industry, scaffoldings helps in the creation of a building. In education, scaffolding supports the process of learning.
The problem isn’t that scaffolding exists. The problem is that when we over-scaffold, all that is learnt is, in fact, the scaffold itself. To push this metaphor, the problem is that, sometimes we confuse the scaffolding with what is being constructed.
One example from the classroom stands out. As students approached a research task, many tightly clung to scaffolds of checklists and mnemonics, following them blindly rather than thinking critically about sources. Some applied rigid models to complex tasks without questioning their relevance, mistaking formulaic completion for deep analysis. When challenged to think beyond these structures, many were initially hesitant, fearing that deviating from the “safe” approach might cost them marks. It was important for me to “lean in” and to explicit acknowledge – to name – these fears… and to offer something more to students that resonated not only with their immediate perceived needs but with their higher aspirations to learn. Within a short time, after what, at times felt, like, constant reminders that learning involves appropriate struggle, some students began to trust the process (and me). They began engaging more deeply with historical sources rather than just ‘ticking boxes’ or clinging to their rigid scaffolds. So ingrained is the way that students, families, and many educators see the primacy of assessment that I suspect I will be repeating this style of interaction repeatedly with most of my classes each unit and each year. Perhaps, if I want my classes to be truly spaces of rich and authentic learning, this process of challenging the dominant paradigm of schooling must truly be an ‘each day, every day’ priority for my classes.
To truly support students in breaking free from performative schooling, education must honour their realities while also transcending them. There is a delicate balance to maintain – helping students achieve within the system while also equipping them to think critically about it. If learning is to be authentic, it must go beyond compliance; students need to see school as more than just a place of assessment but as a space of transformation. This requires a layered, immersive experience where explicit conversations, modelling, and reflective practices all work together to reinforce deeper learning. Teachers need to reflect on how best to give students the space to process and articulate their own intellectual journey – helping them internalise the idea that real learning is not about following a set formula but about making meaning.
This is where an AI-infused flipped learning model offers a path forward – one that balances structure with flexibility, supporting students while also challenging them to engage in real intellectual work.
“Breaking the Wheel”: AI, Flipped Learning, and Early Content Delivery
One of the most effective ways to break this cyclical dependence on rigid scaffolds appears to rest upon early content delivery through a flipped approach. Instead of scaffolding every step in the classroom, students engage with key ideas and grapple to create their own structures and scaffolds before coming to class.
This shift does two things:
- It frees classroom time for inquiry and meaning-making. Instead of passively absorbing content during lessons, students arrive with baseline knowledge and can spend greater time applying, questioning, and analysing… challenging, reflecting, and risk-taking.
- It forces students to engage with content on their own terms first. This replaces a need for security in a “follow-the-steps” approach with security in a deeper grasp of the “big ideas” of the unit. Early delievery of unit content through a flipped learning approach positions students to grapple with deep and reflective understanding before they’re guided through tasks that are more easily subsumed by worthy processes that are vulnerable to the demands of performative assessment.*
AI further amplifies this approach. AI-powered tools allow students 24/7 access to adaptive content delivery, real-time feedback, and interactive learning experiences, making flipped learning even more dynamic. Instead of passively receiving information in a flipped delivery mode, students are co-constructing knowledge – a shift that mirrors the very nature of historical inquiry.
By frontloading content and integrating AI tools that respond to individual learning needs, we create the conditions for a more agentic, skill-based, and inquiry-driven learning experience. The scaffold no longer becomes the building, but rather the foundation for deeper exploration.
Hard vs. Soft Scaffolding: Rethinking Support for Inquiry
Students are often accustomed to hard scaffolding – pre-structured supports like templates, mnemonics, step-by-step guides, and rigid checklists. Hard scaffolding has its place, particularly in early learning phases, ensuring structure, coverage, and accessibility. But when overused, it conditions students to focus on following instructions rather than thinking deeply.
By contrast, soft scaffolding is dynamic, responsive, and adaptive. It involves questioning, coaching, feedback loops, reflective discussions, and modelling of expert thinking. Instead of providing a rigid framework to follow, soft scaffolding supports students in developing their own problem-solving strategies and intellectual independence.
One series of classroom interactions brought this distinction to life. As students prepared for a source analysis task, many initially wanted a checklist of “what to say” rather than engaging in an open-ended discussion about how to approach the sources critically. Some felt uneasy when encouraged to challenge their own assumptions and to find their own voice rather than relying on pre-determined “starters concepts”. But as the learning episodes unfolded, some students began to see the power of questioning and interpreting rather than just “getting it right.”
The challenge is that hard scaffolding is easy, while soft scaffolding is complex. Hard scaffolding gives students a floor – but also a ceiling. Soft scaffolding demands more from both teacher and student, but it ultimately builds deeper agency, historical thinking, and resilience.
A flipped, AI-infused seasonal approach offers a way to rebalance this equation:
- Early content delivery provides necessary structured support (hard scaffolding where appropriate).
- Class time focuses on sense-making, coaching, and reflection (soft scaffolding to deepen thinking).
By shifting the balance away from rigid structures and towards teacher-led inquiry-driven learning, we help students break free from the illusion that ticking all the boxes means mastering historical thought.
AI and Flipped Learning: A Path to Transcendence in Education
AI isn’t just an efficiency tool – it’s a pedagogical disruptor. It challenges the transactional model of learning and invites educators to reimagine the classroom as a space of inquiry rather than mere content delivery.
A flipped seasonal model, infused with AI, provides a framework for education to be more than just coverage of curriculum objectives. It enables:
- Personalised learning trajectories, where AI adapts content delivery to student needs.
- Authentic historical inquiry, where students analyse and critique primary and secondary sources rather than just consuming pre-processed narratives.
- The development of agency, as students move from passive receivers of information to active constructors of knowledge.
This is the challenge schools must rise to: not merely doing the same things with better tools, but rethinking the very nature of pedagogy in a digital age.
A System Students Are Ready to Question
What’s becoming clearer to me this week is that many students already sense the hollowness of a grades-defined system. They know that ticking all the boxes doesn’t always equate to real understanding. They are, perhaps, hungry for more – for learning experiences that feel meaningful, even if they require more effort and uncertainty.
The flipped seasonal model recognises this reality and seeks to harness it. If students are primed for weeks 7–8 as the season of ripening, then teaching should not default to spoon-feeding and rigid scaffolding. Instead, it should provide:
- Opportunities to test their knowledge in new contexts.
- Time for metacognition and reflection.
- A shift from structured inquiry to self-directed inquiry.
When students see education as more than just a means to an end, they begin to embrace the process itself.
Now, with assessment season looming, the challenge is to see whether the shift sticks – whether students can continue to embrace inquiry over performativity.
* The “big six” historical thinking concepts identified by Seixas, Moreton, Wineburg, Peck and others are examples of such worthy ideas that have been subsumed into descriptors and criteria of assessments. They are examples of important deep-thinking ideas that have become embedded and devalued by being co-opted by a high-stakes performative assessment culture.
Disrupted History 