By Craig Williams

There are probably not many high school classrooms in America where a student can look at his teacher and say, with complete sincerity, "Can you just get the f-#k out of our way?" and have the teacher regard it as something close to a breakthrough.

Andrea Vescelius remembers exactly where that student was sitting.

She had been explaining a new project to her students at Olentangy Orange High School, including what she needed from them and why. But increasingly, the ‘how’ belonged to them.

One student finally told her what they needed from her. “Get out of our way.”

"What does that look like?" Vescelius asked.

He wasn't entirely sure. Neither was she. And they were off.

For Vescelius, an English teacher who has spent much of her career reconsidering what an English classroom might be, the exchange represented something she had been working toward for years. She had watched students become anxious over grades. She had watched engagement diminish, and eventually acknowledged something else. She was bored, too.

"If we don't change what we're doing," she remembers telling a colleague, "I've gotta get out."

So she started pulling ideas from places educators don't always look. Her husband's work in IT leadership exposed her to Lean thinking and Agile methodology. Eventually she encountered Design Ingenuity, a framework built by the nonprofit Catalyst Learning Labs that begins not with what a teacher wants a student to produce, but with curiosity. Students might start with space, dreams, biochemical engineering, or owning a lobster, and then synthesize that curiosity with a term from the curriculum, connect it to themselves, and build something that tells the story. They do it fast: a six day sprint. The discomfort is intentional. So is the freedom.

Something more fundamental had happened years earlier. In 2019, Vescelius and a group of AP Language students stood in a hallway looking at their responses to Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," posted across the lockers.

"How do we grade this?" she asked.

The students pushed back. Maybe they shouldn't. "This is our thinking," they told her. Then one student asked why they were continually being asked to solve problems teachers already knew the answers to. "We're smarter than that," he said. "We can do more."

Eventually they asked to go gradeless. Vescelius said yes, without knowing how they'd pull it off. What followed surprised her. Nobody stopped working. "I saw real growth," she says, "not like fake jump-through-hoops growth." Power over students slowly became power with them.

Last year she quietly offered a bigger challenge. "Do you want to change education?" A dozen or so students stepped forward; seven formed a core group that carried the experiment further than any of them expected. There was no itinerary. "She didn't know either," Ella Kirk remembers.

That may have been the point. These were seniors immersed in the intensely individual work of college applications. Ella saw the invitation as a chance to set some of that aside and work on "something that had a little bit more joy in it."

They began presenting inside the district. A planned thirty minute conversation with the Ohio Department of Education stretched toward two hours. Then, this spring, a student stuck overseas during the outbreak of conflict in Iran couldn't get home. His hotel wasn't far from the bombing. Vescelius asked three of his classmates whether they wanted this to be their project instead. They wrote a letter to Senator Houston's office, revising it late into the night over a shared document. It went out the next morning. The senator's office committed to helping get him home.

Then the rooms got even bigger. The students raised roughly $10,000 in 10 days, building their own flyers and social posts, to make a trip to Los Angeles possible. At a national conference on student agency, they weren't spectators. They presented, on the question of what student agency actually requires in a classroom. Adults took notes.

For Gracelyn Quay, now studying political science and economics at Notre Dame, that mattered. She is someone who likes a syllabus and a rubric. Agency made her uncomfortable at first. Then something changed. "I felt really bold after," she says.

Gavin Long, now at Denison University, remembers educators gathering around him as he explained ideas born from his own curiosity. "I feel like my whole life, I've kind of spent trying to take information from others," he says. Suddenly the direction had reversed.

In Los Angeles, the students visited Homeboy Industries, where former gang members rebuild their lives. On their last day, tearful and saying goodbye, one man hugged Ella and told her they call Father Greg Boyle "Pops." Then he pointed toward Vescelius. "She's kind of like your mama, Pops," he said.

Back home, the experiment kept reshaping the relationship. Ella disagreed with her teacher "probably on a daily basis," she says. "It felt so weird, because I felt like I was almost bettering my teacher in some regards, and I felt like my teacher was bettering me."

That might be the most interesting thing happening in this classroom. Agency isn't permissiveness. It isn't abandoning standards or a teacher's expertise. It's accepting that learning gets more powerful when students help build it rather than receive it.

The students are in college now: Case Western Reserve, Ohio State, Denison, Bowling Green, Notre Dame. They're noticing things differently. Ella remembers that a year ago she sat nearest the door in every class, positioned to leave early or not show up at all. Now she sits in the front row.

Gavin came away with something else. "Every person has their own brilliance," he says. "It's just a matter of what environment we're in that can help us show it."

Maybe the most agentic thing a teacher can do isn't to give students something. Maybe it's to recognize what was already there.

And then, when the moment is right, get out of the way.