SINE: strategic integration of navigated engagement - a design thinking framework for technology integration in secondary education
by Anne-Louise Agnew, Jonathon Mascorella
Forum for Education Studies, Vol.4, No.3, 2026;
The integration of digital technologies in secondary education requires teachers to make principled decisions about when and how technological affordances serve learning. This paper introduces the SINE framework (Strategic Integration of Navigated Engagement), a design thinking scaffold that positions technology use as a pedagogical decision grounded in professional judgement, disciplinary epistemology, and learner need. The study examined approximately 80 learning design artefacts produced by preservice teachers across Mathematics, Science, English, HSIE, and Creative Arts (Drama) within an initial teacher education program. Qualitative content analysis examined how preservice teachers articulated pedagogical reasoning, positioned technology IN and OUT, interpreted technological affordances in relation to disciplinary purposes, and demonstrated developing teacher design thinking. Findings identified four themes: Pedagogical Reasoning During Design, Deliberate Positioning of Technology, Disciplinary Alignment of Technological Affordances, and Development of Teacher Design Thinking. The artefacts demonstrated varying levels of reasoning sophistication, with more developed responses explicitly connecting technology decisions to intended learning, disciplinary purposes, and anticipated effects on student understanding. Technology OUT decisions further demonstrated that purposeful integration can involve the deliberate exclusion of technology where other approaches better serve learning. Placement-situated artefacts from a subset of participants also provided evidence of the framework being applied within classroom-based planning contexts. The findings position SINE as a practical scaffold for making technology-related pedagogical reasoning visible and supporting context-responsive, discipline-aligned decision-making during learning design.
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