The Missing Medium for Collaboration

The number one difficult faced by new teachers is the lack of sufficient resources and materials, according to a 2006 survey on new teachers in Baltimore. The problem of inadequate curriculum plagues teachers at all experience levels. While the internet is flush with resources, few to none of the websites designed for teachers offer educators what they're looking for: coherent and cohesive units, complete with assessments, activities, and a suggested lesson chronology.

Teacher's lessons have context: they relate to the lesson before, the lesson after, the state standards, and, typically, a published curriculum. Current websites strip the context from lesson plans and, in the process, strip away much of the lesson's usefulness to teachers. Given the time and energy to dig through internet sites to find a suitable lesson each day, teachers resort to creating their own material, knowing all along that someone has already created it...if only they had access.

Why is there this tremendous void in educational materials available freely on the internet? The problem is three fold 1) There are no simple ways to present the structured information of a unit plan. Units plans are multi-leveled, like outlines. A unit plan has an outline with subnested lessons, activities, and/or assessments. More lengthy unit plans are subdivided into sections or concepts. The organization of the unit plan needs to be displayed visually as in published curriculum, to make it more accessible.

2) There are no websites which add value to the unit plan creation process itself. Current websites expect users to upload curriculum they've created--an often intimidating, arduous task for an unknown audience. Websites need to make the unit plan creation process easier for an individual and a group. An individual needs an easy way to create a unit overview, complete with standards and subdivisions, that is connected to individual lessons. Word processors such as Microsoft Word allow users to create unit overviews and lessons but do not allow teachers to connect the two. A team of teachers collaborating on a unit or a district curriculum department, needs the same creation tools as an individual does plus additional workgroup functionality. For example, teachers need to save their files to the website so they can be edited by any team member. There's only one copy of the file for the team--not multiple copies that are e-mailed back and fourth.

3) Lesson plan website don’t permit teachers to form networks, a la facebook. Teachers often aren’t comfortable creating a lesson plan for the known world to access via the internet. They want to share and collaborate on a lesson plan with their friends and colleagues. A website for teachers needs to allow multiple permissions to be set for units and lessons. There might be a team of teachers who can edit the plans and a group of teachers who can only view and add comments to it. This idea holds tremendous promise for school districts who find the curriculum binders or word documents they use now enable only one way communication. To continually improve, districts need to know which resources work and which don’t. A website allows districts to solicit granular feedback by allowing teachers to post comments about each lesson/activity in the unit plan.

Teachers need such a website to help them raise student achievement. If teachers can concentrate on perfecting materials already available instead of creating materials from scratch, they will have more time to concentrate on meeting the needs of their students. With better resources and more time to plan, teachers would be more effective in closing the achievement gap and ensuring that all children have an excellent education.

A team of teachers needs to be assembled that have experience with teaching and computer programming. Teach for America and other alternative certification programs excel at bringing in people into teaching with diverse backgrounds (such as computer science). However, finding such people can be a challenge. Anyone who wants to be part of such a project can contact myself, Scott Messinger at scottmessinger at gmail dot com. Together, we can enable teachers to raise student achievement through collaboration in new and powerful ways.