We see our role as designers in understanding heterogeneity in the classroom more as a resource rather than a problem and in providing teachers with a helping tool that they can focus more specifically on the needs of each pupil.

context
Following successive waves of coronavirus, students are now back in classrooms for in-person lessons. The bond between teachers and students became less clear during remote learning. In previous interviews, teachers mentioned that the physical separation led to emotional distance, causing them to lose touch with their pupils progress, needs, issues, and educational levels.

partner: di2Lesen, University Münster
di2Lesen is sub-project 14 of the research network "Leistung macht Schule". The interdisciplinary research network focuses on recognising the strengths of all pupils and promoting their potential appropriately.

time, course
bachelorthesis WiSo 2021/22
duration: 1 semester

In our work, we were accompanied in the later process by the di2Lesen research team, specifically Laura Thomas and Dr. Martin Salaschek, who gave us great support and material that we could work with.

https://www.uni-muenster.de/PsyIPBE/aesouvignier/forschung/LemaS-di2lesen/index.html

project workflow
Although we worked with the double diamond method, the research part proved to be extremely time consuming. When we went into our synthesis, we had a point of realisation and did another quick round of content entry to move forward in our process. So in our case, the double diamond does not represent our real workflow.

Within the project displayed you can jump into acollection of terms and deeper knowledge. Beside that is structured into: discover, define, develop and deliver.

discover phase

kick-off
We started our project with this questions:

How can adaptive teaching be integrated into the daily school life of elementary pupils?

*desk research

In the first step, we focussed on the school system and explicitly on primary schools, as we were able to narrow down our scope of action through our previous research. In order to build up a understanding of the school system, general information and participants follow.

stakeholder map

As we encountered many different perspectives and realised that there are many parties involved in this topic, the next step was to create a broad stakeholder map relating to the school system.

schoolsystem: primary school at focus

In Germany, schools are not organised on a central level; responsibility for the school system lies primarily with the 16 federal states. The range of subjects, curricula, qualifications and transitions between school types can be organised differently in each federal state.

Primary school is a place of learning and a living environment for pupils with different biographical and cultural backgrounds. As a place of learning, it offers the development of basic and transferable knowledge as well as the development and expansion of competences and teaches values.

Meeting the requirements of inclusion, the growing heterogeneity, interests, strengths and weaknesses of pupils requires good training and commitment from teachers. While adaptive teaching is now explicitly mentioned in the school laws of all federal states, very few of them provide a detailed explanation of how this should be achieved.

In addition, according to Prof. Dr. Hanna Dumont, there is no standardised understanding of the term and therefore ideas vary greatly how adaptive teaching should be provided.

„Neuer Schlauch für alten Wein? - Eine konzeptuelle Betrachtung von individueller Förderung im Unterricht” von Prof. Dr. Hanna Dumont

more specific infomations about: primary schools and the learning processes

the key is adaptive teaching

We came across Prof. Dr. Hannah Dumont, Professor of Educational Psychology specialising in teaching and learning processes in schools, and had the opportunity to interview her. Essentially, three main parts can be identified when working with the adaptive teaching method:

These three parts run in a circular system. Continuously, pupils are enabled to recognise and understand their own weaknesses and strengths. Adaptive teaching is necessary in order to achieve two central goals:

First is improvement of the competences of all pupils and second the creation of equal opportunities. ^[1]

Vgl. „Neuer Schlauch für alten Wein? - Eine konzeptuelle Betrachtung von individueller Förderung im Unterricht”:^[1] Dräger J., S. 252

what is the current status quo?

We continued our research phase very open and broadly, looking for opinions and perspectives from different angles on the topic of adaptive teaching and how the components are implemented at the moment. Here we conducted interviews with experts in this field:

It is difficult to diagnose the pupils because there are very few tools to determine where each individual child stands."^[1] Another teacher says: "The introduction of learning development dialogues is a good thing for the pupils, but it takes up a lot of my time."^[2]

^[1] G. Maria 2021, teacher from Leistung macht Schule
^[2] S. Elisabeth 2021, teacher at a primary school in Bavaria

Adaptive teaching goes along with huge challenges - both for the teacher and for the entire school. It is a highly demanding task for the teacher not only to offer lessons for all pupils, but also to keep an eye on the various parallel learning processes of the individual pupils and to distribute their attention fairly (Trautmann and Wischer 2011; Breidenstein 2014; Lipowsky and Lotz 2015).
‍
But in general teachers are under very high work pressure in their profession and are exposed to high levels of stress.

Therefore they have to strictly prioritize, which important tasks they fulfil and which one they have to leave behind.^[3]

It is not surprising that teachers perceive teaching in a heterogeneous class as one of the greatest challenges of their work, for which they do not feel adequately prepared. ^[4]

Vgl. „Neuer Schlauch für alten Wein? - Eine konzeptuelle Betrachtung von individueller Förderung im Unterricht”:
^[3] Mußmann et al. 2020, S. 209 ff; Mußmann 2020
^[4]Reh 2005; Gebauer et al. 2013

more specific infomations about: best practise schools, digitalisation and media education

*qualitative interviews

Moving away from desktop research, we plunged into qualitative interviews, which are differentiated by our end users the teachers and direct and indirect stakeholders such as pupils and parents. The focus remains on generating new insights.

We also tried to indirectly test ideas during the interview phase, for example with sacrificial concept ideas, and question the meaning of them.

target group: primary school teacher

Interviews with users serve to identify needs, wishes and problems as well as realistically realisable concepts. To this end, we interviewed five primary school teachers.

task and responsibilities of teachers
From our interviews, we learned that a key duty is to perceive, record, evaluate and report back on the performance of pupils Teachers nurture and instruct children, fostering their mental, emotional, and social growth. In classrooms, they impart reading, writing, and foundational knowledge across subjects. Alongside preparing teaching materials, they review student work, supervise, and communicate with parents and guardians. The challenges of Covid-19 have introduced additional complexities.

Our interview findings show that teachers are integrating these methods into their lessons, indicating a move towards adaptive teaching, though not yet fully realized.

what are the difficulties in integrating adaptive teaching in primary school class?
The key challenge for teachers is therefore to provide the right amount and type of support for each pupil and thus ensure the optimum level of cognitive activation. Other problems were stated in the interviews:

*new methods for differentiation increase the burden and workload
*adaptive teaching is hardly feasible in view of the effort involved
*teachers do not feel trained to cope with the demands
*secondary areas of work require a high level of effort
*communication difficulties with the parents

We also need information from the pupils and their parents, we spoke to them about the situation in the various schools: insights from interviews

define phase

*synthesis of our research

Findings, conclusions and potential are brought together and systematically and methodically evaluated.

We summarise: Adaptive teaching is a method consisting of three parts that works in a circular way. When applied correctly, it is encouraging and supportive for pupils in their learning process and it emphasises heterogeneity and does not exclude. However, it requires an immense amount of time and commitment from teachers and therefore finds little to no use in the classroom.

key pain-points

With the help of the conclusions and the individual stakeholder maps of the the persons involved, as well as the knowledge we built up ourselves, we identified the key pain-points.

our opportunity area

As our focus has sharpened due to the progress we have made, we can now say more precisely which concepts we have already encountered along the way match the insights and topics that are important to us. We are developing various opportunity areas in which we see an improvement in the current situation and optimisation through the area of interaction design.

*point of realisation and research digression

With the help of our storyboard we talked to teachers again, we learnt that even they were at a loss when it came to creating a pedagogical diagnosis and the repetitive tests and that we were therefore unable to start here. The solution was to revive valuable contacts from the research phase and so we contacted the research team of the LemaS research and development project group again.

https://www.uni-muenster.de/PsyIPBE/aesouvignier/forschung/LemaS-di2lesen/index.html

Concepts like di2Lesen offer significant benefits for students. We aim to implement a digital tool to replace traditional methods and facilitate widespread adoption in classrooms. Digital processes can streamline and enhance daily school activities. Digital media should empower teachers to plan and manage lessons more efficiently. Through interaction design, we can create tangible benefits. We will leverage and integrate di2Lesen content for ongoing project development. Our tool aims to enhance student learning and support teams while reducing teacher workload and enabling adaptive teaching.

more specific infomations about: quop-teachertool and the method of the reading athlete

*defining the last bits of this phase

After the research regression, we defined our user profile, the final how might we-question and discussed relevant functions for our application.

user profile 1

From conversations with teachers using the model, we want to address some pain points. Despite many teaching materials, the introduction was perceived as very bumpy.
Furthermore:
+ considerable amount of analogue material
+ preparation of lessons not intuitive
+ assignment to groups and tasks
+ arranging the lesson when pupils are absent

user profile 2

Our second user profile is teacher who wants to incorporate the di2Lesen concept into her lessons without any experience. She has so far tried to integrate adaptive teaching into her lessons on her own, but quickly reached her limits due to the increased workload and little training. She is willing to try out the model and include it into her lessons.

how might we?

We reframed our kick- off into the detailed hmw-question:

How can we support primary school teachers with a digital application in the preparation, cordination and postprocessing of lessons in German, with the help of di2Lesen concept, in order to support pupils in the third and fourth grades in the areas of reading and self-reflection?

*functions and features

Next task was to create an extended digital version of the di2Lesen concept, avoiding problems from the analogue version and adding further benefits through the possibilities of digitalisation.

As mentioned in the HMH question, we want to take a targeted approach to the preparation, cordination and postprocessing of the reading athlete.

We summarised topics that we want to include:

+ general topics:
- onboarding to the application and method
- application guide
- overview class or seperat pupils
- overview of all classes that are taught
- exchange of experience with other teachers

+ preparation:
- test evaluations and list of completed tests
- comprehensible visualisation of the data
-semi-automated group & task allocation
- preperation of the reading athlete lesson

+ cordination:
- overview of the groups and how far they are in their material
- live-modus to navigate/reorganize the groups
- notifiction if a group is struggling
- note function while observation

+ postprocessing:
- talking material for learning development dialogues
- preperation of feedback
- functions for debriefing tasks

key functions and features

The topics above were put together into these key features. The first structural chains with functions and sub-functions were also created. These were iteratively adapted further and more.

develop phase

*information architecture

Our tree structure begins with the teacher login. The application contains higher-level functions such as the selection of classes and subjects and an application help. An additional superordinate function is live modus of reading athlete, where the teacher can keep track of the groups in class, note observations on individual pupils as well as the groups and record other classifications of support materials. The application is divided into four sections, which can be found in the navigation bar:

from paper wireframes to testing

With orientation to our use cases, we started with wireframes to make our concept tangible.

We started by designing the hero screens then carried out many iterations and further optimised the screens. After the hero screens were finished, the remaining wireframes were done. During this phase, user tests with a digital version were carried out.

*defined use cases

As stated in our hmw-question we build usecases that fit to the possibilities of the concept and can include relevant functions to make adaptive teaching possible:

deliver phase

*final draft application

After including insights of our testing we finalised the digital screens into high-fidelity and added some sparks of color. In the order of our usecases we present the concept and its functions:

use case 1: preparation

use case 2: cordination

use case 3: postprocess

adaptive teaching

adaptive teaching for primary schools

We see our role as designers in understanding heterogeneity in the classroom more as a resource rather than a problem and in providing teachers with a helping tool that they can focus more specifically on the needs of each pupil.

In our work, we were accompanied in the later process by the di2Lesen research team, specifically Laura Thomas and Dr. Martin Salaschek, who gave us great support and material that we could work with.

Within the project displayed you can jump into acollection of terms and deeper knowledge. Beside that is structured into: discover, define, develop and deliver.

discover phase