If you have spent the last decade thinking in SAMR, you do not need to start over. SAMR is in your bones, your scheme of work, and the language your department already shares. PICRAT keeps everything SAMR taught you and adds one more axis. The four-letter ladder you already know is one column of the PICRAT grid. The other axis is the question SAMR was always missing: what are the students doing while you climb it?
The migration takes one INSET to brief and roughly half a term to settle. The translation is straightforward. What you already know about Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition tells you which column of the PICRAT grid a lesson lives in. PICRAT then asks you to add the row. Once that row is in your habit, you stop being surprised when two SAMR-Modification lessons turn out to be doing very different work.
What SAMR got right
The single best thing SAMR has done for classrooms is the placement instinct. A teacher who has used SAMR for any length of time stops asking 'is this lesson using technology?' and starts asking 'what is the technology actually doing for the lesson?' That move alone has shifted a generation of UK teachers out of tool-led planning. Before SAMR, a typical conversation about edtech began with the app. After it, the conversation began with the lesson.
The four levels are also good descriptions of the pedagogical move. Substitution: the technology does what paper would have done, with no functional change. Augmentation: same task, slight functional improvement (a spellcheck, a hyperlink). Modification: the task itself changes (collaborative editing, peer comments). Redefinition: the task could not have been set on paper at all (a published artefact for an audience outside the room).
None of that goes away. PICRAT names the same column with three letters instead of four, but the underlying question is the same. Replace, Amplify, Transform map cleanly onto Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. The placement instinct that SAMR gave you is the one PICRAT depends on.
What SAMR was missing
What SAMR cannot tell you is what the students are doing.
Two SAMR-Modification lessons can be radically different lessons. A lesson where students sit and watch the teacher annotate a primary source on a shared document is Modification. A lesson where students each annotate their own primary source, exchange comments, and disagree in the margins is also Modification. The technology has done the same modifying work in both. The lesson has not.
PICRAT names that gap. The first lesson sits at Modification on SAMR and at Passive Replace on PICRAT, because the student is watching. The second sits at Modification on SAMR and at Interactive Amplify on PICRAT, because the student is doing something with the content. Same column. Different rows.
The difference matters because it is where the learning either lands or fails to. Two lessons that look identical on a SAMR placement can produce very different work by the end of the period. A teacher reviewing a year of SAMR-Modification lessons can find that some of them barely moved the class while others did the heavy lifting. SAMR cannot explain why. PICRAT can.
The activity axis is the answer. Passive students consume. Interactive students respond. Creative students make. The PICRAT grid is what you get when you take the SAMR ladder and add the question 'what is the student actually doing while the technology does its work?'
The translation
The two frameworks line up on one axis. PICRAT keeps SAMR's pedagogical-move judgement intact and reads it as a column. Then it adds a row that SAMR does not ask about.
The mapping from SAMR levels to PICRAT columns is direct.
| SAMR level | PICRAT column | What changes |
|---|---|---|
| Substitution | Replace | Same task, screen instead of paper |
| Augmentation | Replace, sometimes Amplify | Slight functional improvement |
| Modification | Amplify | The task itself changes |
| Redefinition | Transform | Lesson could not exist on paper |
Two of those mappings need a comment. Augmentation is a slight improvement on paper, which sits comfortably in Replace for most lessons; only when the improvement is genuinely meaningful (a real-time language translation, an embedded data visualisation) does it earn an Amplify. Modification can sit in Amplify or Transform depending on whether the lesson would have been possible without the technology. The honesty test is the same in both frameworks: take the technology away. If the lesson still runs, the placement is below Transform.
Your existing SAMR judgements give you the R/A/T column. PICRAT then asks you to place the lesson on the P/I/C row as well.
A worked example
Year 8 geography. The lesson is on flooding in the Mekong Delta. The teacher has 50 minutes and an iPad per pair.
In SAMR terms, the teacher pulls up an interactive map showing flood-risk data overlaid on satellite imagery. Students compare three regions, identify which is at highest risk, and write a paragraph justifying their answer in a shared document. The map is something paper could not provide. The collaboration on the shared document changes the task itself. SAMR places this at Modification, leaning towards Redefinition.
PICRAT places it differently. Students are doing something with the content (Interactive). The technology is doing more than paper could (Amplify or Transform depending on whether the data layer is the lesson). The lesson sits at Interactive Amplify, with a leaning towards Interactive Transform.
Now move the lesson. The teacher rebuilds it as a recorded brief. Each pair records a 60-second piece-to-camera making a flood-risk recommendation to a regional planning team, with the data they used cited on screen. They watch each other's clips and vote on the most defensible argument.
On SAMR, that lesson is still Modification or Redefinition. The placement looks similar.
On PICRAT, the lesson has moved from Interactive Amplify to Creative Transform. The technology is now doing something paper cannot do at all (recording, citing, voting), and the student has moved from interacting with the data to producing an argument from it. Same lesson on the SAMR ladder looks unchanged. On the PICRAT grid, the move is visible.
What changes for you next term
Three practical shifts will land the migration.
First, when you place a lesson, ask both questions. SAMR's question is what is the technology doing. PICRAT adds: what are the students doing while it does it. The answer to one is rarely the answer to the other.
Second, when you observe a colleague, classify the activity first. The technology placement is usually obvious within thirty seconds. The activity placement takes the rest of the lesson to read. Most observation conversations get stuck on the technology because that is the easier of the two to discuss. PICRAT lets the harder question come first.
Third, treat the framework as a grid, not a destination. SAMR's structure is vertical, and the visual implication is that Redefinition is the goal. PICRAT is laid out as a grid, and the visual implication is that the right cell is the cell the lesson asks for. A Tuesday-afternoon vocabulary recap that lives in Passive Replace is doing its job. A Year 12 essay that lives in Creative Transform might be the right move once a unit and overkill the rest of the time. The placement is a description. The judgement about whether to move it is a separate decision.
Most departments find the migration takes a single INSET, two weeks of grumbling, and then a noticeable shift in how lesson observations land. The grumbling is real. A grid is harder to draw on a whiteboard than a ladder. By half-term, most teachers prefer the grid.
If you want to test the translation on your own work, drop a recent lesson plan into Review. It will classify the lesson on PICRAT and surface the single move that would change its placement. You can then think back to where SAMR would have placed the same lesson and see whether the two judgements agree. If you would rather start from scratch, Generate will build a full 3x3 matrix of nine lesson ideas in your subject and year group, one per cell, so you can see the rows you would never have used in SAMR thinking.
The student is the axis SAMR is missing.
Andy Perryer is the head of digital learning at a group of international schools and the creator of PICRAT Suite. The PICRAT framework was developed by Royce Kimmons, Charles Graham and Richard West in their 2020 paper in the CITE Journal. SAMR was developed by Ruben Puentedura.