Towards Lesson Planning Interfaces for Integration of Students’ Out-of-Classroom Experiences

Educators have perpetually strived to make learning content relevant to students. One way to create this relevance is contextualizing instruction with students’ out-of-classroom experiences. Out-of-classroom experiences happen in-the-world and are embodied experiences that are more likely to be of interest to students. However, integrating out-of-classroom experiences is non-trivial, placing additional burden on the teacher when designing lesson plans. We posit that technology in the form of teacher-facing lesson-planning interfaces can facilitate this effort. To be able to design such interfaces, we need understanding of how teachers contextualize their lessons leading to design insights. We carried out a series of design workshops to understand how teachers integrate students’ out-of-classroom experiences into their lesson plans. In this paper, we present results from the design workshops that lead to an understanding of teachers’ current approaches as well as the synthesis of design insights.