You’re Already an Instructional Designer. You Just Don’t Know It Yet.

The language gap keeping teachers out of EdTech, and the vocabulary shift that closes it.

She had been in classrooms for eleven years. Eleven years of designing experiences that held the attention of thirty teenagers who would genuinely rather be anywhere else. Eleven years of reading a room in real time, adjusting on the fly, building systems that made complex ideas feel learnable, and then rebuilding them when the system stopped working. She walked into the EdTech interview knowing her work deeply. She walked out without the job.

The feedback? ‘We were looking for someone with instructional design experience.’

She had built nothing but instructional design. She just hadn’t called it that.

The problem was never the skill. It was always the sentence.

This piece is for her. And for every educator sitting on a decade of sophisticated, evidence-informed practice who is being told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are not quite right for the roles their skills were built for. Before you adopt another EdTech tool or pivot strategy, ask yourself one question first: Have you ever actually named what you do?

The Real Problem: You Are Describing the Wrong Job

There is a vocabulary that the EdTech industry uses to describe sophisticated learning work. It has evolved from learning science, instructional design theory, and the engineering frameworks that have shaped how we think about building learning systems at scale. It is precise, it is useful, and it is, almost entirely, built on what teachers have been doing in classrooms for generations.

The gap is not conceptual. It is linguistic.

When a teacher says ‘lesson planning,’ an EdTech hiring manager hears ‘classroom preparation.’ When that same teacher says ‘systems thinking,’ the manager hears ‘strategic architecture.’ The practice is identical. The positioning is worlds apart.

This is not a trivial distinction. In a field that is rapidly expanding, with the African EdTech market projected to be one of the fastest-growing globally, and platforms increasingly hiring for roles that require exactly the kind of human-centred, iterative design expertise that teaching develops, the vocabulary gap is actively costing educators opportunities they are more than qualified to hold.

The shift required is not about learning new skills. It is about learning to name the ones you already have.

Nine Reframes – Grouped for How They Actually Work

A reframe that recently circulated widely on LinkedIn laid out nine teaching practices and their EdTech equivalents. It is a useful starting point but a list is still just a list. What teachers need is not a glossary. They need to understand why each reframe works, and what it reveals about the sophistication of what they have already been doing. So let us go deeper, in clusters.

CLUSTER ONE - YOU WERE ALWAYS AN ARCHITECT

Lesson Planning → Systems Thinking

A lesson plan is not a to-do list. It is a systems document.

It maps inputs: prior knowledge, available resources, time constraints against processes (activities, sequences, pacing) to produce intended outputs (learning outcomes), with feedback loops built in (check-ins, exit tickets, formative observation). That is precisely what systems thinking describes: a method of seeing interconnected components holistically, tracing cause and effect across a whole rather than optimising isolated parts.

The teacher who re-plans mid-lesson because the class did not grasp a prerequisite concept is running a real-time systems correction. In learning engineering, this is called a feedback loop. In your lesson plans, it was called Tuesday.

Curriculum Design → Learning Architecture

Learning architecture is the structural design of a learning experience at scale. The scope of what will be taught, the sequence in which it unfolds, the continuity that connects one unit to the next, and the integration of real-world application throughout. Sound familiar? It should. You have been building learning architecture every time you mapped a curriculum.

The difference is that in EdTech, this happens across platforms, asynchronous formats, and diverse learner populations. Which makes the underlying design logic more important, not less. The teacher who designed a coherent year-long curriculum for a mixed-ability class has already done the hard thinking. The platform is just a different canvas.

Classroom Management → Environment Design

Environment design is one of the most underappreciated disciplines in EdTech UX. It asks: how does the space, physical, digital, or psychosocial, shape learner behaviour? How do we create conditions for focus, collaboration, and psychological safety?

Teachers have been answering those questions every day, in real rooms, with real human beings, under real constraints. The flexible seating arrangement that reduces off-task behaviour. The discussion protocol that makes quieter students feel safe to speak. The transition routine that prevents the energy loss between activities. These are environment design decisions. They belong on a portfolio.

CLUSTER TWO — YOU WERE ALREADY RUNNING DATA SYSTEMS

Assessments → Insight Generation

Grading is the administrative record of assessment. But assessment itself, real assessment, is insight generation. It is the act of designing tasks that reveal how a learner thinks, where their mental model breaks down, and what they can do independently versus with support.

Learning analytics engineers build systems to do this at scale, often through platforms that track click patterns and response times. You were doing it with a rubric, a piece of student writing, and a conversation. The methodology is the same. The instrument is different.

When you repositioned your assessments as data sources rather than just evaluation tools, you were already practising learning analytics. The language just hadn’t caught up.

Differentiation → Adaptive Strategy

The EdTech industry talks about adaptive learning as if it were a feature invented by algorithms. Adaptive learning is personalisation in real time. Adjusting content, pacing, scaffolding, or support based on evidence of where a learner is right now.

That is differentiation. Specifically, it is the responsive, formative kind of differentiation that the best teachers practice: not preparing three static versions of a worksheet, but reading the room and adjusting in the moment. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) provides the framework. Teaching gave you the practice. The ADAPT strategy, used in UDL contexts to prompt deeper design thinking, names what experienced teachers already do by instinct.

Feedback → Iteration Loops

Learning engineering places enormous emphasis on short feedback loops. The closer feedback is to the moment of learning, the more iterations a learner can complete, and the stronger the consolidation. Adaptive quizzes, immediate response systems, and near-real-time progress indicators. These are all attempts to compress the gap between action and response.

Teachers who gave verbal feedback during independent work, who circulated and redirected before errors became habits, and who built peer feedback into the lesson structure. Those teachers were running short feedback loops. They just called it ‘walking the room.’

CLUSTER THREE — YOU UNDERSTOOD PEOPLE FIRST

Student Engagement → Attention Design

Attention is the prerequisite for learning. Nothing else works without it. And attention is not something learners either have or do not have. It is something that can be designed for, built, lost, and recovered, depending on how a learning experience is constructed.

Cognitive science tells us that sustained attention peaks when learners see meaning, feel capable, and are working at the edge of their current understanding, not too easy, not too hard. That is Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, applied to attention design. Teachers have been managing that cognitive sweet spot for years: pacing activities to match energy cycles, breaking content into digestible segments, using novelty and relevance to re-engage wandering focus. In EdTech, this is called microlearning, gamification, and attention architecture. In classrooms, it was called a well-planned lesson.

Parent Communication → Expectation Alignment

This reframe is the one that surprises people most, and it is the one I find most revealing. Expectation alignment is a stakeholder management practice: the deliberate synchronisation of goals, language, and standards across groups who have different relationships to the same learner.

Parents and schools often hold different expectations for the same child. Teachers who managed this well, who translated educational language into accessible terms, who built shared goals, who used conferences and communications to get everyone pointing in the same direction, were practising stakeholder alignment. In EdTech product roles, this shows up as client success management, onboarding design, and multi-stakeholder communications strategy. It is not a soft skill. It is a design discipline.

Teaching → Knowledge Transfer

The holy grail of instructional design is transfer: the ability of a learner to apply knowledge in a new context, beyond the conditions in which it was originally learned. Designing for transfer is hard. It requires authentic tasks, scaffolded abstraction, deliberate variation, and a sequencing logic that moves learners from supported practice toward independent performance.

Gagné’s conditions of learning, one of the foundational frameworks of instructional design, emphasise real-world performance as the ultimate measure of effective instruction. Teachers who designed projects, practicals, simulations, and performance tasks were designing for transfer. They understood that the goal was never to get through the syllabus. The goal was always the learning that sticks when the test is over.

The Full Reframe at a Glance

Use this as a reference and as a starting point for rewriting how you describe your work.

What You Call It	What It Actually Is	Why This Matters
Lesson Planning	Systems Thinking	You were mapping inputs, outputs, and feedback loops — before the term was fashionable.
Curriculum Design	Learning Architecture	You built the structural pillars that learning stands on.
Classroom Management	Environment Design	You optimised physical and psychosocial spaces for engagement and behaviour.
Differentiation	Adaptive Strategy	You adjusted dynamically to real-time learner data — long before EdTech called it personalisation.
Assessments	Insight Generation	You were reading cognitive signals. Grading was just the paper trail.
Feedback	Iteration Loops	You ran continuous improvement cycles. You just called them marking.
Student Engagement	Attention Design	You engineered sustained focus under constraint. That is cognitive science applied.
Parent Communication	Expectation Alignment	You managed multi-stakeholder expectations at the intersection of home and institution.
Teaching	Knowledge Transfer	You designed for durable learning and real-world application. That is the whole job.

Why This Matters Specifically Right Now in African EdTech

The African EdTech sector is in a period of genuine expansion. Platforms are growing. Funding is moving. Institutions are investing in digital learning infrastructure at a pace that is creating real demand for people who understand both the technology and the learning. The talent pool that EdTech platforms are drawing from, often technologists without pedagogical training, is producing platforms that work beautifully as software and poorly as learning experiences.

This is the gap that trained educators can fill. The problem is that many of them are not getting to the interview stage, because their experience reads as ‘teaching’ rather than ‘learning design.’

This is not a hypothetical observation. It is a structural pattern that is costing the continent’s EdTech ecosystem depth it urgently needs. The educators who have been designing for diverse learners, managing complex human systems, and iterating on evidence, often in under-resourced environments that demanded creativity and resilience, are among the most sophisticated learning designers on the planet. They simply need to say so.

So What Do You Actually Do? Three Steps.

1. Audit your language. Go to your CV, your LinkedIn summary, your email signature. Read it as if you are someone who has never stood in front of a classroom. What does it actually say? Does it describe the practice: the design work, the iteration, the data reading? Or does it describe the setting?
2. Reframe deliberately, not mechanically. Replacing ‘lesson planning’ with ‘systems thinking’ in isolation is not enough. Provide evidence. Describe the system you designed, the feedback loop you built, and the insight you generated. The vocabulary is a door opener. The specifics are what get you the job.
3. Publish the pivot. Write about the reframe. Post about the connection between differentiation and adaptive learning. Share the LinkedIn update. The teachers who are most successfully transitioning into EdTech roles are not just repositioning privately; they are doing it in public, building a professional narrative that connects who they were in the classroom to who they are becoming in the field.

Start with step one this week. It takes twenty minutes. It might change the next eleven years.

The teacher who walked out of that interview without the job? She was not unqualified. She was undescribed. The practice was there. The architecture was there. The iteration, the insight generation, the attention design, all of it was there, accumulated across eleven years of work that mattered deeply and was named too small.

Good teaching is one of the most complex design disciplines that exists. It happens in real time, under constraint, with human beings who are full of contradiction and capable of remarkable things when someone designs the right conditions for them. That is not less than instructional design. In many ways, it is the hardest version of it.

The systems we build in EdTech, the platforms, the curricula, the learning experiences, should be designed by people who understand that. And right now, many of those people are sitting outside the room, describing themselves in the wrong language.

You stop explaining. You start positioning. The work was always enough. It was always the sentence.

Teaching thrives on connection, and so does a career pivot done well. Explore the full pedagogy series on Grounding EdTech, and share this piece with the educator next door who needs to see it. For the instructional design angle on how to build your first portfolio and make the transition formal, don’t miss John Gitonga’s piece on portfolio development: the natural next step from here.

Danielle Thomas

Danielle writes on pedagogy, inclusive design, and the human dimensions of learning at Grounding EdTech Magazine. Her beat is the classroom reality behind the EdTech headline.