The Gates Foundation and Amplify, a digital education platform, wanted to test the feasibility of turning a paper teaching methodology into a digital tool to facilitate more equitable math discussion. School facilitated a cyclical process of designing, prototyping, and testing to produce a digital 5Ps tool for teachers to use in their classrooms.
The 5 Practices (5Ps) was created by Dr. Margaret (Peg) Smith. They’re designed to give teachers a process they could enact when teaching mathematics in order to elicit better classroom discussion involving a broader segment of the class. The main interface for the process up until our involvement had been a paper table that teachers customize to fit their specific use case.
To kickoff our process, we worked with teachers to define areas that were successful within their utilization of the pen and paper version of the 5Ps and talked with them about how we could potentially translate those successes into the digital tool.
The final iteration of the app gave our teacher advisory group the ability to login, upload their class rosters and store data collected during classroom usage. Ultimately, that data would be used to help make suggestions and ideally lighten cognitive load in the classroom.
The main interface was focused on capturing students’ progress and the teacher’s engagement with each student within each group.
Using data collected over many classes, teachers are reminded to make sure they are including specific students in their discussions with groups.
Ultimately, the results of our twelve-week research and testing process were turned into a 97 page white-paper written by our collaborators in the project, Sean Nank, Ph.D., Kathleen Sheehy, M.A.T., Claire Chang, Ph.D