November 2001 — Industry Perspective

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Learning From Teachers Beyond the Classroom

In the crowded educational technology marketplace, products, to succeed, must stand out as a superior solution to real educational issues. Every company talks about customer focus, but success today requires a level of engaging with educators that is rarely achieved. At Texas Instruments (TI), this invaluable relationship with teachers and students started more than 15 years ago, when the calculator business at TI was discouraged by our competitive position in a small product segment of consumer electronics. But, we were given a strong message when we received an order from Connecticut for 10,000 simple four-function calculators. We were either smart enough or lucky enough to use this purchase as a motivator to assign a couple of people to understand what prompted the purchase.

Introduction of Technology

The team started to contact leading math educators and found that exciting changes were being implemented in math education. One component of these changes was the introduction of technology with calculators and computers to add richness, exploration and real-world problems to the teaching and learning of mathematics. We organized a strategic planning course to more thoroughly study this potential opportunity. This study indicated that a deep engagement with a relatively large group of influential educators would help us understand specific classroom demands. Since we had no experience in the education market but lots of desire to learn, we felt this was the best approach. We quickly identified two resources to help us: the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), which was developing new teaching standards, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which was initiating a series of grants for new textbook development for mathematics in middle and high schools. And we rapidly built contacts within these groups and other professional associations. The educators saw a unique opportunity to affect the course of technology development, while we saw three ways that TI could benefit:

- The leaders could thoroughly educate us in all aspects, both pro and con, of curriculum changes.

- Participants in these projects could provide specific input on product features. By using 10 or more advisors on a project, we could get a broad range of inputs to best assure that we would satisfy classroom and curricular needs.

- Finally, by having broad market contribution to product development, we naturally had educator-advocates who could explain the uses of the product much better than we could.

We introduced the TI-81 in 1990, with specific features to facilitate visualization and exploration of mathematical functions for advanced algebra and precalculus courses, typically taught in the 11th grade. By following the advice of our educator-advisors, the TI-81 was well received and became widely adopted within two years. But our relationships with educators also meant that we received scores of suggestions for ways that it could, or must, be improved. This led to the TI-82 three years later.

Measuring Success

While working with identified leading educators, we soon realized that we must also engage with everyday classroom teachers. We started putting together informal focus groups of teachers who used our products so that we could understand their experiences and barriers to higher levels of success. While we had historically conducted focus groups with an outside moderator, we decided to run these ourselves. Surprisingly, the teachers were not restrained in their comments.