How an EdTech Product Wins Teacher Adoption in One District (Illustrative Case Study)

1. Case Studies

By Saroj Jha · 7 min read

A fictional district has paid for MathPath and barely uses it, with renewal about 14 weeks away. An illustrative eight-week plan to win teacher adoption and report what the district will judge.

MathPath is a fictional math practice product, and this is an illustrative sample engagement: the numbers are modelled projections, not client results. It shows how AAJ would approach one problem that EdTech founders describe often, a district that has paid for a licence and barely uses it, with the renewal decision about 14 weeks away.

In my view, a paid-for seat that sits unused is usually a setup and training problem before it is a product problem. In this example, use was high where rosters were loaded and a lesson was set up, and near zero where teachers had to type class lists. The plan removes the setup, trains teachers around three lessons, lets a colleague go first, and agrees the renewal evidence with the curriculum director before the budget is drafted.

Snapshot

The situation

MathPath won its first district in June. By October the licence was paid for and barely used. The curriculum director who championed it was asking how she would justify renewal in January, and MathPath had no answer beyond login counts.

Phase 1: Diagnose (weeks 1 and 2)

The aim is to find out why paid-for seats sit unused, school by school.

• Usage by school and by teacher. Use was not low everywhere. In four schools most teachers used MathPath weekly; in five, almost none did. The five were the schools whose rosters had never loaded, so teachers would have had to type class lists themselves.
• Fifteen-minute conversations with 12 teachers, half active and half not. Active teachers had fitted MathPath into a lesson they already taught each week, usually the warm-up. Inactive teachers remembered the August webinar as a tour of features, and could not picture where the product fitted in their week.
• What the district would judge renewal on. The curriculum director wanted two things in January: evidence that students used it as intended, and the district’s own benchmark results for those students. Neither was being reported.

Diagnosis: the product fit the classroom where it was set up and tied to a lesson. Elsewhere, setup friction and feature-led training stopped teachers before they started, and nobody was measuring what the district would decide on.

Phase 2: Design (weeks 3 and 4)

The aim is to make the first three lessons easy, and to report what the district will judge.

1. Remove setup. Load every remaining roster automatically through the district’s student information system, rather than asking teachers to type class lists. The 1EdTech OneRoster standard exists for this: it lets a school exchange roster information between systems, and 1EdTech says it reduces the manual effort for teachers and administrators^[1].
2. Train around lessons, not features. A 15-minute session in each school’s planning period, three one-page lesson cards (warm-up, small-group practice, exit ticket) and a two-minute video inside the product for each.
3. One teacher goes first in each school. An active teacher runs the first lesson while colleagues watch, and is the person others ask.
4. Define activation and report it. A teacher is activated after using MathPath with the whole class in three lessons and opening the class results once. Every teacher gets a weekly report on their own class, not a product newsletter.
5. Agree the renewal evidence now. With the curriculum director: planned-use completion (sessions completed against sessions assigned) beside the district’s own winter benchmark, in a one-page report sent before the January budget draft.

Phase 3: Execute (weeks 5 to 8)

AAJ resources used: the EdTech Marketing Playbook (Step 9 and the common question on keeping teachers active), the Pilot-to-Contract Planner for the renewal date, and the Customer Onboarding and Retention Playbook for the activation milestone.

Projected results by the January budget draft

These are projections, not historical results. The benchmark comparison is left out of the claim on purpose. The US Department of Education’s guidance on evidence sets out what counts as evidence that something improves an outcome: its levels start from a logic model informed by research and rise through correlational studies with statistical controls to quasi-experimental and experimental designs^[2]. One term of use in one district, with no comparison group, is not a basis for a learning-gain claim, so the report presents the benchmark beside usage without saying MathPath caused any difference.

What has to go right

The largest projection is teacher use: from 54 of 180 teachers to 117 to 135. This is AAJ’s arithmetic, assuming the 180 teachers are spread evenly, 15 to a school. The five schools without rosters would then hold about 75 teachers. Reaching 117 needs 63 more weekly users, which is 84 percent of those 75 if nothing changes in the other seven schools. So the target is a stretch, and it only holds if the roster fix works in all five schools and use also rises in the three schools where it was patchy. If the roster fix alone were to bring half of the 75 teachers in, the count would be about 91, or 51 percent. On a real project I would set the target with the district after the first two weeks of data.

What carries over to any classroom product

• Setup is part of adoption. A teacher who has to type a class list may never start.
• Train for the first three lessons, not the feature list. Teachers adopt what fits a lesson they already teach this week.
• Let a colleague go first. In my view, a teacher down the hall is more persuasive than a vendor webinar.
• Measure what renewal will be decided on, and send it before the budget is drafted, not after.

Method and limits

MathPath and the district are fictional, and every figure about them is illustrative. The 15-teachers-per-school spread is an assumption made for the arithmetic above. The two outside sources describe a standard (OneRoster) and the Department of Education’s evidence levels; neither measures the effect of a product like MathPath. Real results depend on the district, its systems and its teachers.