Every student gets a badge!
Every student gets a progress bar!
Every student gets a certificate of completion!
And yet—somehow—students still walk out of courses believing they're bad at school?! Make it make sense.
Brooke Rosenthal, our very own Lead Product Designer at Subject, holds a master's in product design and a background in medical anthropology. She has also spent two years sitting in real classrooms watching what happens when the curriculum asks nothing of students except that they finish. Her conclusion: completion data and confidence are not the same thing, and a student who has produced nothing during a course has gotten nothing worth keeping.
Her four-step read on building real learner identity is below… and no, "watch another video" is not one of the steps.
Here’s what’s on the dashboard this week:
Today’s Deep Dive: 4 steps to make students feel like learners
Reading Rainbow: Worksheets or nah?
From Our Desk: ICYMI + our Subject Innovation City Tour
Watch of the Week: Good lessons from big mistakes
Four steps to make students feel like learners
Brooke Rosenthal has a master's in product design and a background in medical anthropology—which is a fancy way of saying she's trained to look at systems, not just software. After two years designing curriculum for grades 6 through 12 for our partner districts, she kept finding one thing that most platforms never bothered to fix: students who completed everything and still left convinced they couldn't do school.
Her four-step read on building real learner identity:
Make the video active.
By the time the video ends, the student has produced something visible that belongs to them.Let them get unstuck without waiting until morning.
Explain concepts rather than hand over answers. In beta testing, one student said Brooke’s solution made him "more proactive in his own learning,” and then immediately asked when it was coming to the other courses. Which is, genuinely, the most hopeful thing a student has ever said about a homework tool.Show them what they can't see on their own.
We track which behaviors predict course completion and then surface those patterns directly to students: how many lessons they've finished, how close they are to done, and what pace actually tends to work.Tie the material to something they already care about.
A student who sees even a thin line between what they're learning and something they actually care about shows up differently.
A student who finishes a course believing they're a capable learner is a different kind of student going into the next one. Brooke shares how to build that in our full playbook.
Worksheet Glow-Up or Elaborate Waste of a Laminator?: Edutopia's latest argues that worksheets aren't inherently bad since they're just formal wear that needs tailoring. Technically true… though we'd still like to see someone try explaining that to a seventh grader at 8:47 on a Monday.
Veni, Vidi, Vici... or Did We?: School districts from Massachusetts to Ohio are quietly cutting their Latin programs, and one high schooler is making the case that Latin is actually an equity tool. Nothing says "leveling the playing field" quite like giving South Bronx kids the same linguistic leg-up prep schools have been hoarding since the Renaissance.
Time and a Half for Teachers: An Unhinged Proposal That Makes Total Sense: EdWeek asked its readers whether teachers should qualify for overtime pay (since they currently don't, despite other school staff doing so). The responses ranged from "the system would go broke" to "any answer other than yes is simply ridiculous," which is honestly the most accurate summary of teacher compensation discourse in 2026.
The South Bronx Has Entered the Career Chat: One English teacher at a South Bronx middle school built a "Classroom-to-Career Pipeline" program that had seventh graders presenting legislation at the Albany state house within six months of launch. Let this serve as a reminder that sometimes the most practical thing you can teach a 12-year-old is that the world is available to them right now, not just after graduation.
ICYMI: Copy our notes on station-based learning, covering how to prioritize student-driven learning in the classroom. Get the free guide here.
Subject has been recognized with the Angeles 100 Award as one of the Top 100 venture-backed startup companies! We’re just getting started.
Our Subject Innovation House City Tour, where we highlight the power of technology-driven education for student engagement, is ongoing! This week’s stop is in Cincinnati, Ohio on May 21 - 22nd. Email [email protected] for more information.
Our pick of the week: Big Mistakes
Why We’re Obsessed: From Dan Levy (the genius behind Schitt's Creek) comes this gloriously unhinged comedy about two deeply incapable siblings who get blackmailed into working for some very dangerous people, which is honestly less of a crime drama and more of a love letter to everyone who has ever made a plan that sounded great at 11pm and catastrophic by morning. Teachers will feel personally attacked by how relatable it is. Students will think it's just funny. Everyone wins.
Recommended lesson integration:
The Choices We Make (and Their Consequences): Using Big Mistakes as a conversation-starter, young learners draw a simple two-panel comic strip: one panel showing a "good choice," the other showing a "whoops, that happened" choice—because learning that actions have consequences is easier when it comes from a cartoon, and harder when it comes from experience.
What Makes a Good Decision?: Students map out a decision one of the characters faces and then brainstorm at least three alternative choices they could have made instead. This is a low-stakes introduction to cause-and-effect thinking, without the emotional damage of actually making bad choices at age eight.
Crime, Comedy, and Moral Ambiguity in Storytelling: Students compare Big Mistakes with another text featuring morally complicated characters (Breaking Bad, The Odyssey, your choice) and write a comparative analysis on how tone shapes how audiences judge a character's choices. English teachers, this one's yours.
Satire and Social Critique: Big Mistakes plays as a wild inversion of Schitt's Creek—where that show grew warmer over time, this one starts as a frolic and grows more chaotic, making it a great jumping-off point for a unit on satire. Students examine what the show says about ambition, family, and the lengths people go to protect their image, then write a satirical short piece of their own.
Pressure, Choices, and Who You Are When Things Get Hard: Students discuss what it means to do something wrong for "the right reasons" (a central theme of the show), and write a short journal entry about a time they felt pressure to make a choice they weren't sure about. Good luck, teachers! You're brave for opening this one.
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Thank you for joining us for another edition of On The Subject. We’ll see you again in a week, with more stories from the hallways.
The Subject Team
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