Cognita's Teaching for Impactful Learning and Progress framework (TILP) is the agreed pedagogical lens across the Cognita Group. It sets out what quality looks like in teaching, in learning, and in progress, and asks leaders to evaluate typicality over time rather than one-off events. It draws on the Great Teaching Toolkit from Evidence Based Education and on AERO's work on depth of learning.
If you've read the TILP document, you'll have noticed something deliberate. On page 7 it says:
Technology does not explicitly feature in this document. This is intentional, as our approach to Teaching for Impactful Learning and Progress should be pedagogically led not technologically driven.TILP, November 2025, p.7
That's the right instinct. It's also why a companion tool is useful. This page is for Cognita leaders, teachers and governors who want a pedagogy-first way to evaluate technology in the classroom without breaking the stance TILP has taken.
TILP in one paragraph
TILP is built around an infinity loop. Teaching feeds learning, learning feeds teaching, and the result over time is progress. It names four dimensions of effective teaching: understanding content and students, building a supportive environment, maximising opportunity to learn, and activating hard thinking. It names three indicators of learning across three levels of depth: regulation and attention (Level 1), retrieval and fluency (Level 2), and connection, application and transfer (Level 3). Progress is evaluated as a best-fit view across academic attainment and learner competencies. Leaders are asked to triangulate evidence from lesson observation, student work, student discussion, planning and the learning environment.
Why TILP leaves technology out
Framing technology as its own category puts the cart before the horse. A lesson isn't good because it uses an iPad, and it isn't weak because it uses paper. The quality question is pedagogical first. By keeping technology out of the core framework, TILP protects against the easy mistake of judging a lesson by its tools rather than by its impact on learning.
The trade-off is that technology is central to how Cognita students learn now. Leaders still need a way to talk about it, evaluate it, and develop teachers in it. TILP points readers to the Cognita Digital Learning Framework for that work. PICRAT sits in exactly that space.
What PICRAT is
PICRAT is an evidence-informed model for evaluating classroom technology use, published by Kimmons, Graham and West in 2020. It asks two pedagogical questions.
- What are students doing with the technology? Passive, Interactive, or Creative.
- How is the technology impacting the teacher's practice? Replace, Amplify, or Transform.
The two axes produce a three-by-three grid of nine classifications, from PR (Passive Replace) at the bottom left to CT (Creative Transform) at the top right. Both axes are pedagogical. PICRAT can't praise a tool for being shiny or novel: it can only evaluate technology through its effect on teaching and learning. In that respect it is TILP-compatible by design.
How PICRAT's axes map onto TILP
This is where the two frameworks line up.
The PIC axis maps onto TILP's depth of learning
TILP evaluates learning across three levels. PICRAT's PIC axis tracks what students are actually doing with the technology. The two sit almost on top of each other.
| PICRAT (student axis) | TILP depth of learning |
|---|---|
| Passive. Students receive, watch or consume. | Typically sits at Level 1 (regulation and attention). |
| Interactive. Students respond, manipulate, retrieve, test. | Typically sits at Level 2 (retrieval and fluency). |
| Creative. Students design, construct, synthesise. | Typically sits at Level 3 (connection, application, transfer). |
A Creative PICRAT lesson typically lands at Level 3. A Passive one sits at Level 1. The mapping isn't mechanical: a Passive video followed by a well-judged discussion task can still push thinking into Level 3. As a best-fit signal, the match holds.
The RAT axis maps onto Dimension 4
TILP's Dimension 4, "Activating hard thinking", is the dimension most explicitly about cognitive demand. Its sub-indicators cover structuring, explaining, questioning, interacting, embedding and activating. PICRAT's RAT axis tracks what the technology is doing to the teacher's practice.
| PICRAT (teacher axis) | TILP Dimension 4 |
|---|---|
| Replace. The technology does what could have been done without it. | Doesn't move Dimension 4. The tech is doing the same work as a worksheet, in a different medium. |
| Amplify. The technology makes existing practice more efficient or more visible. | Supports 4.3 questioning, 4.4 interacting and 4.5 embedding. |
| Transform. The technology enables something that couldn't otherwise happen. | Supports 4.6 activating: moving learners toward independent thinking. |
A Transform lesson is, by definition, changing what the teacher is able to do. That is what Dimension 4 asks for.
A worked example
Consider a Year 8 history lesson on the causes of the First World War. Same topic, same teacher, same pupils, three versions.
The teacher hands out a printed timeline. Students read it silently. On TILP, this evidences Dimension 1 (the teacher knows the content), sits at Level 1 or 2 depth, and doesn't strongly activate hard thinking.
The teacher shares a digital timeline that students sort, annotate and discuss in pairs. On TILP, this evidences Dimensions 1, 2 and 4 (questioning, interacting) and sits at Level 2 depth with Connection emerging.
Students use a collaborative canvas to build their own causal map, arguing which cause mattered most and responding to each other's reasoning in real time. On TILP, this evidences all four dimensions and pitches firmly into Level 3 Connection and Application. If the causal-map method is then used on a different conflict, Transfer is in reach too.
The difference between the three versions is visible through both frameworks. The two frameworks agree on which lesson is pitched higher, and they give slightly different language to say why.
Why this matters for school leaders
TILP's Section 6 asks leaders to evaluate in-school variation and to triangulate evidence. Technology use is one of the places where variation is hardest to surface. Two teachers using the same tool can be operating at wildly different PICRAT cells: one has the class in Passive Replace, watching a teacher demo; the other has them in Creative Transform, building something together.
Layering PICRAT over a TILP evaluation gives leaders a second, specific view on that variation. The question stops being "are we using technology?" and becomes "are our teachers pitching technology use at Creative and Transform, or is most of what we see sitting in the Passive and Replace corner?".
PICRAT Suite already aggregates this data at school level. Heatmaps show where a school is clustered on the grid. Journey narratives show how individual teachers move across terms. CPD evidence PDFs slot straight into appraisal and quality assurance. In the Cognita schools I've worked with closely, the first PICRAT heatmap is usually a quiet moment. You can see, in one picture, how ambitious the tech use actually is.
Why this matters for teachers
TILP asks teachers to reflect on their practice against a pedagogical framework. PICRAT gives teachers a specific tool for reflecting on the technology part of that practice without the reflection turning into a tool-comparison exercise. A teacher running PICRAT Analyse or Review on one of their lessons ends up with a result that speaks directly to TILP Dimensions 1 and 4, and to the depth of learning the task is pitched at.
That's the practical version of what this page is arguing. Reflection on teaching happens in TILP's language. Reflection on the technology within that teaching happens in PICRAT's language. The two conversations feed each other without getting tangled up.
A note on inclusion
TILP places inclusion at the centre of the framework, noting that good teaching for students with SEND is good teaching for all. PICRAT doesn't replace that thinking, but it does support it. The right-hand side of the PICRAT grid is, in practice, the side where high-impact inclusive strategies are easiest to layer in: scaffolding, chunking, metacognitive prompts, flexible grouping. Creative and Transform lessons tend to offer more alternative response modes and more ways in. PICRAT's Analyse and Review tools flag this in the challenges and next-steps sections of every result.
How to use both frameworks together
A practical rhythm for a Cognita school:
- Use TILP as the pedagogical reference framework, as intended.
- When a lesson involves technology, use PICRAT Analyse (for teacher self-reflection) or PICRAT Review (for AI-assisted classification of a written plan) to add a tech-specific lens.
- Bring both views into appraisal conversations, CPD planning and quality assurance. The overlap is usually more informative than either view alone.
TILP is how we talk about teaching. PICRAT is how we talk about the technology inside it.
Written by Andy Perryer, Global Head of Digital Learning at Cognita and creator of PICRAT Suite. PICRAT Suite is an independent, evidence-informed resource grounded in Kimmons, Graham and West's 2020 paper and developed across Cognita schools. This page describes how PICRAT complements TILP; it isn't official Cognita Group guidance on TILP itself. For authoritative TILP documentation, refer to the Teaching for Impactful Learning and Progress document (November 2025) and your regional learning team.