According to an ecological affordances perspective, any static curriculum has a set of affordances, and differences in teachers, students, and the teaching environment change how those affordances are viewed and used. Therefore, teaching is a relationship between the curriculum, the teacher, and the students. As such, it is not only possible but expected that a teacher will diverge from the details of a lesson plan to better accommodate the needs of themselves as a teacher and their students as learners.

In this study, we report on a mixed-methods investigation that explores the different ways upper-elementary and middle-school (7-13 y.o. students) teachers implement the Scratch-based TIPP&SEE learning strategy and the reasoning for their approaches. As expected, we find that teachers across grade levels often deviate from lesson plan details to cater to their own classrooms. For example, teachers serving younger grades were far more likely to keep scaffolds that lesson plans suggest removing. The varied degree of deviation found suggests that the repeated use of a learning strategy, alongside lesson plans that present a variety of scaffolded implementations, is beneficial in enabling teachers to adapt lesson content to serve the needs of their specific classroom.