When the Environment Drives Engagement
Denise Mitchell’s Thinkering x LCPS capstone shows how humanizing learning begins with space, regulation, and trust
Denise Mitchell didn’t begin her capstone project with a curriculum question.
She began with a student.
“I have one student whose mom asked about learning via land,” Denise explained, recalling a conversation early in the school year. “She asked if I could send her daughter outside with no shoes on to just kind of earth… get in the dirt and everything.”
In a public school setting, the answer had to be no.
But Denise didn’t stop there.
“What we can’t really do is send kids out barefoot,” she said. “However, I have this interior courtyard area that I have been, quote-unquote, made responsible for.”
That courtyard became the starting point for her Thinkering Fellowship capstone with Loudoun County Public Schools. Not as a special activity or reward, but as a necessary learning environment for her students in special education.
Regulation Comes Before Instruction
Denise works with students who need movement, quiet, and sensory regulation in order to access learning. Traditional classrooms often make that harder.
“I’ve been sending my students out there for recess this quarter,” she shared, referring to the courtyard. “We just recently got an inclusive playground, but we share it with the entire school, and we just can’t be out when everybody’s out there.”
The issue wasn’t supervision. It was overwhelm.
Large, crowded spaces created sensory overload. The courtyard offered something different. Containment. Calm. Control.
This wasn’t about time off from learning. It was about creating the conditions that make learning possible.
Inclusion Requires More Than Access
Denise’s capstone highlights a truth many educators know but struggle to operationalize. Inclusion is not just about placing students in shared spaces. It’s about whether those spaces actually work for them.
Her courtyard became a flexible environment where students could move, breathe, and regulate without competing demands.
This shift reframed how learning time could look.
Students weren’t being removed from instruction. They were being supported into it.
Small Changes, Real Impact
What makes Denise’s work powerful is how grounded it is. There was no large budget. No construction project. No overhaul.
There was simply an educator noticing what wasn’t working and using what she already had differently.
“So I’ve been sending my students out there,” she said matter-of-factly, describing a practice that has already changed daily routines for her learners.
The impact came from intention, not scale. Other Thinkerers are churning the same questions around.
This Is the Work That Rarely Gets Seen
Special education classrooms often innovate quietly. Solutions are customized, adaptive, and deeply responsive to student needs. But they’re also isolated.
Denise’s capstone matters because it brings this work into the light.
It shows how environment, regulation, and learning are inseparable. It shows how outdoor and nature-based spaces can be essential supports, not extras. And it shows what becomes possible when educators are trusted to design learning around real human needs.
Why This Work Shouldn’t Stay Isolated
Denise didn’t set out to build a model. She set out to help her students learn.
But this is how models are born.
When educators are supported, when experimentation is allowed, and when insights are shared, individual solutions become collective knowledge.
That’s how humanizing education spreads. Humanizing education is a collective effort.
The work gets stronger when we share it, build it together, and support one another beyond the walls of our own classrooms.