Impact

For an education authority, a key recommendation of a state-wide review of the Kindergarten to Year 12 curriculum was that the curriculum needed to be digital. Symplicit worked with this education authority to understand the implications of the change to a truly digital curriculum for the state's teachers.

Value

Evidence-based insights helped the education authority understand how teachers used the syllabus in their teaching practice. Our mental model map showed the syllabus's role for teachers during the school year as they moved between planning classes, teaching students and marking assessments. This clear understanding helped our client scope and plan the curriculum's digitalisation and the website's design.

Process

Symplicit used a rigorous qualitative research process to create a deep understanding of teachers’ needs.

First, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 27 Kindergarten through to Year 12 teachers from the State, Catholic and Independent systems. We learned from the teachers the different ways they use the syllabus over the year and the additional needs that further teachers and their various teaching styles have from the syllabus.

We documented our analysis in a “mental model map” that showed the variety of ways that teachers use the syllabus. Using the mental model map is a way to interrogate and learn from the synthesised outcomes of the interviews and help our client decide how to structure the digital syllabus and prioritise features for the website build.

Mindset

We used a rigorous qualitative research approach to understand better how teachers do their work and applied a design thinking approach to translating the research insights into a rich representation that makes that knowledge accessible to the broadest range of business and digital stakeholders. This mindset kept teachers’ needs at the centre of our client's creation of the digital syllabus.