Diversity is a basic determining factor of learning processes.  Educators in all fields have always been confronted with different types of learners and their various needs, interests and learning backgrounds. Especially in urban areas where not only many people but many cultures, educational backgrounds, religions and beliefs and different types of social standing agglomerate this becomes apparent. Although many educational systems (e.g. Germany) are still geared to homogeneity - primarily in matters of age and cognitive ability - the importance of considering and supporting individual ways of learning has been increasingly picked up in several educational recommendations, laws and regulations during the last years. But how can individualization be put into effect in schools in which teachers are faced with huge classes, inappropriately scheduled presettings, working in a structure which mainly focuses on selection and allocation? And how can these concepts be described systematically?

Even though the general conditions to implement the individualization of learning processes are unfavorable and difficult there are a many concepts which develop an idea how to realize individual learning nonetheless. In many of them the involvement of “didactic laymen” can be seen as a constitutive factor. This paper focuses on exactly this group of concepts and picks up the following research questions:

* What are didactic laymen?

* Why does the involvement of didactic laymen open up possibilities for individualized
    learning?

* In which teaching and learning methods are didactic laymen involved?

* How can these methods be systematically described and structured?

Didactic laymen shall be persons fulfilling didactic tasks without ever having passed a professional training in this or having an official degree in a didactic or educational field of study. Didactic laymen predominantly make didactic decisions intuitionally and not based on reflexive expertise. They take part in and form learning processes without explicitly knowing professional principles to do so. Concrete examples for methodical concepts involving didactic laymen are cooperative learning arrangements like the jigsaw method or student teams-achievement divisions or approaches like learning by teaching or peer-education. Furthermore tutors, experts or even mentors can be seen as didactic laymen.

With regard to individualized learning involving and activating didactic laymen can be interesting not only because teachers can be supported by them and share the workload. Even more, the communication with peers or experts from the professional world often is more coequal and not influenced by hierarchic structures and dependence. Furthermore: There are many concepts involving didactic laymen which are designed flexible and allow learners to learn in their own way as far as possible.

Even though the basic idea of involving and activating didactic laymen is known for hundreds of years already and the above mentioned methods have been practiced in innumerable contexts there is still no systematic survey and categorization to be found. Methodical concepts dealing with the involvement of didactic laymen are well known but have not been recognized as an associated group altogether yet – even though exactly these concepts emerge consistently in the current theoretical and practical discourse about how to implement individualized learning within a given framework.

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