A Sharing Economy Where Teachers Win

[summer]

NY Times

What kind of tunes do you think Iago, the villain in William Shakespeare’s “Othello,” would listen to if he had an iPhone?



That is the kind of question that Laura Randazzo, an exuberant English teacher, often dreams up to challenge her students at Amador Valley High School in Pleasanton, Calif.



So, when Ms. Randazzo heard about TeachersPayTeachers.com, a virtual marketplace where educators can buy and sell lesson plans, she was curious to find out whether the materials she had created for her own students would appeal to other educators.



A couple of years ago, she started posting items, priced at around $1, on the site. Her “Whose Cell Phone Is This?” fictional character work sheet has now sold more than 4,000 copies.



“For a buck, a teacher has a really good tool that she can use with any work of literature,” Ms. Randazzo said in a phone interview last week. “Kids love it because it’s fun. But it’s also rigorous because they have to support their characterizations with evidence.”



She clearly has a knack for understanding the kinds of classroom aids that other teachers are looking for. One of her best-selling items is a full-year collection of high school grammar, vocabulary and literature exercises. It has generated sales on TeachersPayTeachers of about $100,000.



Speaking from her tiny home office, formerly a bedroom closet, Ms. Randazzo still sounded amazed at her success.



“What started out as a hobby has turned into a business,” she said.



Teachers often spend hours preparing classroom lesson plans to reinforce the material students are required to learn, and many share their best materials with colleagues. Founded in 2006, TeachersPayTeachers speeds up this lesson-plan prep work by monetizing exchanges between teachers and enabling them to make faster connections with farther-flung colleagues.



As some on the site develop sizable and devoted audiences, TeachersPayTeachers.com is fostering the growth of a hybrid profession: teacher-entrepreneur. The phenomenon has even spawned its own neologism: teacherpreneur.



To date, Teacher Synergy, the company behind the site, has paid about $175 million to its teacher-authors, says Adam Freed, the company’s chief executive. The site takes a 15 percent commission on most sales.



A former chief operating officer of Etsy and former director of international product management at Google, Mr. Freed is a veteran of data-driven growth companies. By selling tens of thousands of items, he says, 12 teachers on the site have become millionaires and nearly 300 teachers have earned more than $100,000. On any given day, the site has about 1.7 million lesson plans, quizzes, work sheets, classroom activities and other items available, typically for less than $5. Last month alone, Mr. Freed added, more than one million teachers in the United States downloaded material, including free and fee-based products, from the site.



“If you have a kid in school in America, they are interacting somewhere with TeachersPayTeachers’ content,” Mr. Freed said in an interview last week at the company’s headquarters in Manhattan.




Mr. Freed took the helm of Teacher Synergy in 2014. One of his first tasks was to bring the technology behind the homespun company up to date without introducing radical changes that might upset its following. That goal has become more urgent now that TES Global, a British company with its own teacher-to-teacher marketplace, has entered the American market.



Last week, for instance, TeachersPayTeachers introduced an iPhone app from which educators can buy materials. The app replaced an older version that allowed users to look up products but, oddly enough, not to purchase them.



“We were not a technology company until very recently. We were a teaching marketplace with a technology underlay,” Mr. Freed said. “Now we are trying to be both.”



The site’s popularity with teachers reflects the convergence of a number of trends in education and technology.



For one thing, school districts around the country have been introducing new learning objectives, called Common Core state standards, for different grade levels. That has sent tens of thousands of educators to TeachersPayTeachers looking for lessons to reinforce particular math and reading standards — like the requirement that sixth graders and older students be able to delineate and evaluate the argument in a given text.



“It’s a matter of understanding what the standards are and figuring out how to get the students to perform to those standards,” says Erin Cobb, a middle-school reading teacher in Lake Charles, La., whose Common Core-aligned teaching materials have had sales of more than $1 million on TeachersPayTeachers.



At a time when many politicians, technology executives and philanthropists are pushing novel digital tools for education, many teachers are also seeking old-school offline techniques that other teachers have perfected over the years in their classrooms. That has positioned TeachersPayTeachers as a kind of Etsy for education.



“A lot of the stuff you see in the digital world that is interactive, teachers are making them in analog form,” Mr. Freed said, noting that many teacher-to-teacher products are PDF or zip files meant to be downloaded and printed out.



As an example, he cited an “Interactive Reading Literature Notebook,” developed by Ms. Cobb. In her lesson plans, “interactive” does not refer to digital video or audio. It means students are asked to actively learn by, in part, cutting out and gluing assignments into their notebooks, taking deep notes in class and sometimes even drawing illustrations to demonstrate that they understood the reading.



“There’s a lot of creativity and innovation,” Mr. Freed said, “but it is tried and true in a lot of its methodology.”



For teachers, building a successful business on TeachersPayTeachers may also entail a lot of work.



To draw attention to the tools she developed for TeachersPayTeachers, for instance, Ms. Randazzo, the English teacher, started a teaching blog where she recounts her experiences or highlights resources she finds interesting. She also recently started a YouTube channel in response to requests from other teachers who asked her to demonstrate how to teach complicated concepts like irony.



She added that many teachers considered TeachersPayTeachers credible because they can find ideas from more experienced teachers who face the same classroom challenges they do.



“That is what ground-level teachers are able to do that textbook publishers can’t,” Ms. Randazzo said.

[rugbywife]

My SILs and friends all use it a ton. Apparently some of our teachers have made good money off it too.

[nsl]

I keep meaning to upload some of my stuff to this website. I absolutely love that teachers are getting paid for the innovative lessons they've spent hours creating, and that kids across the country are benefiting from those lessons.

[shell403b]

I use this website. I love it. I hope to start posting some of my own materials.

[dropitlikeitshott]

I started selling last year. I only have a few products (with a bunch I need to put up) I've made around $1,000. I figure I'm making this stuff anyways why not share and make some money.

[dropitlikeitshott]

I started selling last year. I only have a few products (with a bunch I need to put up) I've made around $1,000. I figure I'm making this stuff anyways why not share and make some money.

[darthnbjenni]

Sept 6, 2015 17:52:17 GMT -5 incogneato said:

I feel like this was just taking off when I left teaching 3 years ago, but I've heard it mentioned a lot by teacher friends and I know they consider it a valuable website. I think it's great. I am all about teachers sharing great ideas and getting tangible benefits for having the creativity to come up with new and novel lessons. I would hope that school districts would provide some funding to teachers for purchses on this website, however, because ideally teachers would be able to purchase the lessons and resources with school funding, not their own wallets. I have a strong hunch that what happens IRL is that teachers DO pay with their own money, and then make copies for other teachers at their school, which is unfortunate but understandable, too.

I'm given $250 at the beginning of the year in state/district funds. I have to turn in receipts, but I am totally able to use digital receiptsto turn in. I just bought a $27 home school packet for lapbooks that we're going to make (8th grade) to give to our local elementary schools. I'd put stuff on TpT, but I have a very specific content area, and likely wouldn't make any $. 

[hymen]

I use that website. I am using a year-long grammar program through it that came recommended by someone at a conference. We are 3 weeks into it and I really like it.

[RoxMonster]

I both buy and sell on this website. I keep wanting to upload more material but never seem to find the time. My store only has about 5 things in it right now, 3 of which are free, but even just selling two products, I have made probably $200 in the last year and a half. Not monumental, by any means, but a little extra cash and if I put more time into adding items, I could make a lot more.

I also buy things on there a few times a year. It's a great resource to have.

[RoxMonster]

Oh and we absolutely have to buy anything off TpT that we want with our money. There is no way our district would give us money to do that.

[noradog]

hymen what grammar lessons are you using/for what grade?

I've bought stuff off there, but I haven't sold yet.

[erbear]

I use the website and I sell my own stuff on it. Anything that brings innovative, interesting, engaging lessons into the classroom, especially without paying the publishing companies, is great by me.

[hymen]

Sept 6, 2015 20:31:14 GMT -5 noradog said:

hymen what grammar lessons are you using/for what grade?

I've bought stuff off there, but I haven't sold yet.

7th grade. It's called Ten Minute Grammar. It covers a specific skill for five days to be used as class warmups. Units provide additional practice as well as quizzes. It also uses popular YA to teach them (excerpts from Stargirl and Hunger Games so far). I believe it was $20, and it hits all my required standards for PA Common Core. There are a few that so hit the 8th grade standards as well (verb mood, active and passive voice).

[Jalapeñomel]

I come across it a lot, but I have yet to pay for one.

[rugbywife]

I have 12 years worth of teaching resources on my computers. If I were smart I would upload them and see what I get.

[mccallister84]

I guess I'll be an outlier and say something about it bothers me (I am an also a teacher). One of the greatest joys about teaching for me has been collaborating with others and sharing ideas and materials with other teachers all over the country (I read a lot of blogs). I appreciate that everyone is putting their materials out there for free, so the idea of paying for TPT just seems wrong to me. I recognize that this is something I can't really explain well and may be somewhat irrational - of course I believe teachers should be compensated fairly for what they do.

I guess I'm also concerned about some of the quality on TPT. I also get concerned about copyright infringement. I know I never have an original idea - all of my best lessons have been modifications of things I've found elsewhere. I guess my gut just says something feels wrong about it - even though I can't objectively back it up.

[rugbywife]

Sept 7, 2015 11:08:28 GMT -5 mccallister84 said:

I guess I'll be an outlier and say something about it bothers me (I am an also a teacher). One of the greatest joys about teaching for me has been collaborating with others and sharing ideas and materials with other teachers all over the country (I read a lot of blogs). I appreciate that everyone is putting their materials out there for free, so the idea of paying for TPT just seems wrong to me. I recognize that this is something I can't really explain well and may be somewhat irrational - of course I believe teachers should be compensated fairly for what they do.

I guess I'm also concerned about some of the quality on TPT. I also get concerned about copyright infringement. I know I never have an original idea - all of my best lessons have been modifications of things I've found elsewhere. I guess my gut just says something feels wrong about it - even though I can't objectively back it up.

I totally wonder about your second point. I also don't know if I really want my lessons floating all over the place.

[cherryvalance]

Sept 7, 2015 11:08:28 GMT -5 mccallister84 said:

I guess I'll be an outlier and say something about it bothers me (I am an also a teacher). One of the greatest joys about teaching for me has been collaborating with others and sharing ideas and materials with other teachers all over the country (I read a lot of blogs). I appreciate that everyone is putting their materials out there for free, so the idea of paying for TPT just seems wrong to me. I recognize that this is something I can't really explain well and may be somewhat irrational - of course I believe teachers should be compensated fairly for what they do.

I guess I'm also concerned about some of the quality on TPT. I also get concerned about copyright infringement. I know I never have an original idea - all of my best lessons have been modifications of things I've found elsewhere. I guess my gut just says something feels wrong about it - even though I can't objectively back it up.

I hear this and this is one of the reasons I've never uploaded to TPT.  Tailoring tried and true methods to the needs of my current students is something I do well, but I can't claim those are my personal ideas or creations. Even the organizers or mini-lesson materials I personally create were influenced by things I've seen elsewhere.

However, I do use TPT and have found great (and modifiable) resources.  I especially love finding things that are pre-differentiated, so I can just tweak for my own classes rather than start from scratch for two or three different ability groups. 

[chw57]

Sept 7, 2015 11:08:28 GMT -5 mccallister84 said:

I guess I'll be an outlier and say something about it bothers me (I am an also a teacher). One of the greatest joys about teaching for me has been collaborating with others and sharing ideas and materials with other teachers all over the country (I read a lot of blogs). I appreciate that everyone is putting their materials out there for free, so the idea of paying for TPT just seems wrong to me. I recognize that this is something I can't really explain well and may be somewhat irrational - of course I believe teachers should be compensated fairly for what they do.

I guess I'm also concerned about some of the quality on TPT. I also get concerned about copyright infringement. I know I never have an original idea - all of my best lessons have been modifications of things I've found elsewhere. I guess my gut just says something feels wrong about it - even though I can't objectively back it up.

I feel the same way. I've used a few free things, but overall I find I get a lot more quality ideas from the NSTA listserve (I teach 7th grade science)

[joenali]

I agree. A lot of the stuff I have come across on TpT is not great and it can take a lot of time to sift through the crap to find something worth paying for. I've mostly used TpT for sub materials.

[bronxgirl]

Sept 6, 2015 21:39:12 GMT -5 rugbywife said:

I have 12 years worth of teaching resources on my computers. If I were smart I would upload them and see what I get.

do it!!! I'm sure you would do well.

[RoxMonster]

I don't mind paying for things on TpT that I would use because it doesn't seem all that different than paying for a workbook with similar items in it. For instance, an entire Great Gatsby unit on TpT could be $8 or something similar vs. buying a whole unit workbook for the same book could be $25+ and a lot of those workbooks are also made by teachers who have just started working for textbook/publishing companies instead. There is definitely value in sharing resources with other teachers for free, but I don't inherently have a problem with teachers wanting to put their own original resources up online for a fee. I mean, I think of it as basically an Etsy but for teaching resources.

As far as copyright, I do think (it's been awhile since I actually uploaded something) that you have to click something/verify it is your original product when uploading. And it's pretty widely accepted that when you use or buy someone else's resources, you keep their name/copyright info on the bottom when using in class. I mean, a LOT of teaching ideas are not 100% unique or new. For instance, it's pretty common to do some sort of Facebook profile for literary or historical characters. I made my own template for that years before I heard of TpT, yet there are tons of those templates on TpT. If your template is original and made by you, I don't see an issue with multiple people giving away or selling similar products. It doesn't mean they stole the idea from someone else--maybe one person's template works better for your classes than a different one. Again, I guess I don't see it entirely different than having multiple Etsy sellers making the same kinds of products and "competing" for business. I would have an issue with someone who knowingly used someone else's lesson plan and sold it on TpT. I don't know that you can entirely avoid that, but at least with the teachers I interact with on there (and via their blogs), they care a lot about copyright/fair use/giving credit where credit is due and being ethical.