Yes!! I love this idea and it directly answers some of my major concerns about training teachers and developing healthy cultures for self-improvement.
I have used TPT (a bit, years ago) but the quality was rather variable but the biggest issues were discovery and legibility: was hard to determine how good the material would be before buying it.
Going back and looking again these issue are much better now with their rating system, previews and user reviews. I think that freedom is an important norm, too because the best materials may not fit with the default school curriculum and thus even though you may be able to identify great materials you want to teach, if you don't have professional freedom you won't be able to use them.
Expectations for all teachers to enroll in one or several central markets could also help to build network effects. In my experience it is somewhat uncommon for teachers to regularly look outside their own schools for materials. If on enrollment in teacher training or on employment people were immediately signed up for a central market of lesson materials this could improve everything.
One last thing is that I appreciate the fact that you mentioned videos of actual lessons. In person and recorded peer observation is really underrated. Normalizing peer observation could go a long way to spreading best practices. If peer observation is seen as too boring or time-consuming, perhaps that should be seen an indictment of the curricula that students need to sit through every day.
If I’m hearing you correctly about TeachersPayTeachers.com’s old challenges with (1) discovery and (2) legibility, I’m guessing that we could help solve those by:
- making sure to “brand” ours (using key terms like “Egan”)
- having a standardized format to show off what our community’s lessons would include (so potential buyers could see more, but sellers don’t need to reinvent the format)
- linking to all the materials on some centralized Egan education site
Mind you, these are mostly solutions to “how can we help non-Egan-yet folks find the stuff”, which is a totally different problem (by definition) to what we’re looking at.
Yes, to your first points. I think discovery and legibility on TPT has improved as user ratings and reviews have helped to identify strong producers of lessons. I think that sellers should provide free previews of their materials (and many do!) as that really helps teachers to assess quality and relevance.
I agree with you that branding and formatting are important, and it sounds like from what Kirsten wrote below that Orton-Gillingham lessons are successfully managing quality using branding at least. A centralized Egan site seems like a good idea. CIRCE is pretty good at providing ideas but not well organized to be a source of content.
My experience with Teachers Pay Teachers is that quality is variable, just like in a lot of other corners of the internet. I've found exceptionally high quality Orton-Gillingham based materials, and a few really great things based on the The Writing Revolution, for example. But there are also a lot of products that look like they could have been thrown together in 5 minutes. The gems are definitely there, at least in the types of materials I am searching for.
(If anyone reading this writes materials at the middle school level using the methods espoused in The Writing Revolution and would sell these materials on TPT for a reasonable price...please do so. I really want more of those!).
I've also had variable success on TpT. The Harry Potter Animal Taxonomy lessons "Mythical Creatures and How to Classify Them" were excellent, but there have been many others that I thought sounded good and ended up being way too simple or short. It's really hard for me to calibrate my expectations with the reviews/ratings.
I'm curious how much teachers-pay-teachers teachers make and if any other slightly weird group has used it as a rallying point. It feels more plausible to do kickstarters/other ways to crowdfund a collection where the crowdfunding can build momentum than to try to promote individual lessons.
I was curious so did a bit of quick online research. Here's what I found:
For a Basic Seller (free) account, TpT takes a $0.30 transaction fee for all resources. With a Premium Account ($59.95 a year) that transaction fee is waved for orders over $3, but is $0.15 for transactions under $3. TpT takes a 45% commission for all items sold for a basic seller (so seller keeps 55%), and they take a 20% commission for all items sold by a premium seller (seller keeps 80%).
It seems like there's wide variance in how much teachers make selling on TpT. There are a small number of who make a lot of money and can quit their teaching job to focus full time on materials development but for most it seem like it is a nice side business. I'd be curious to hear from some who decided to go with Patreon or another platform vs TpT. I would guess that those who went out on their own probably have. wide range and number of products to offer, or have some other way to drive traffic to their site (blog or podcast following, association affiliation, etc) since it'd probably be hard to stumble across them through a google search... though I think that my be how I found the Minimalist Math worksheets 4 years ago? I can't remember.
I have no idea how profitable it is for creators, but I do find other "niche" items I am looking for. Orton-Gillingham based remediation for dyslexia is becoming more mainstream all the team, but it isn't exactly the type of material that every teacher is looking for. But there are tons of OG materials available on TPT. I do see some creators moving to having their own download "shops" on their own websites - I'm assuming that's because they are avoiding whatever cut TPT takes.
Yes!! I love this idea and it directly answers some of my major concerns about training teachers and developing healthy cultures for self-improvement.
I have used TPT (a bit, years ago) but the quality was rather variable but the biggest issues were discovery and legibility: was hard to determine how good the material would be before buying it.
Going back and looking again these issue are much better now with their rating system, previews and user reviews. I think that freedom is an important norm, too because the best materials may not fit with the default school curriculum and thus even though you may be able to identify great materials you want to teach, if you don't have professional freedom you won't be able to use them.
Expectations for all teachers to enroll in one or several central markets could also help to build network effects. In my experience it is somewhat uncommon for teachers to regularly look outside their own schools for materials. If on enrollment in teacher training or on employment people were immediately signed up for a central market of lesson materials this could improve everything.
One last thing is that I appreciate the fact that you mentioned videos of actual lessons. In person and recorded peer observation is really underrated. Normalizing peer observation could go a long way to spreading best practices. If peer observation is seen as too boring or time-consuming, perhaps that should be seen an indictment of the curricula that students need to sit through every day.
If I’m hearing you correctly about TeachersPayTeachers.com’s old challenges with (1) discovery and (2) legibility, I’m guessing that we could help solve those by:
- making sure to “brand” ours (using key terms like “Egan”)
- having a standardized format to show off what our community’s lessons would include (so potential buyers could see more, but sellers don’t need to reinvent the format)
- linking to all the materials on some centralized Egan education site
Mind you, these are mostly solutions to “how can we help non-Egan-yet folks find the stuff”, which is a totally different problem (by definition) to what we’re looking at.
Yes, to your first points. I think discovery and legibility on TPT has improved as user ratings and reviews have helped to identify strong producers of lessons. I think that sellers should provide free previews of their materials (and many do!) as that really helps teachers to assess quality and relevance.
I agree with you that branding and formatting are important, and it sounds like from what Kirsten wrote below that Orton-Gillingham lessons are successfully managing quality using branding at least. A centralized Egan site seems like a good idea. CIRCE is pretty good at providing ideas but not well organized to be a source of content.
My experience with Teachers Pay Teachers is that quality is variable, just like in a lot of other corners of the internet. I've found exceptionally high quality Orton-Gillingham based materials, and a few really great things based on the The Writing Revolution, for example. But there are also a lot of products that look like they could have been thrown together in 5 minutes. The gems are definitely there, at least in the types of materials I am searching for.
(If anyone reading this writes materials at the middle school level using the methods espoused in The Writing Revolution and would sell these materials on TPT for a reasonable price...please do so. I really want more of those!).
I've also had variable success on TpT. The Harry Potter Animal Taxonomy lessons "Mythical Creatures and How to Classify Them" were excellent, but there have been many others that I thought sounded good and ended up being way too simple or short. It's really hard for me to calibrate my expectations with the reviews/ratings.
I'm curious how much teachers-pay-teachers teachers make and if any other slightly weird group has used it as a rallying point. It feels more plausible to do kickstarters/other ways to crowdfund a collection where the crowdfunding can build momentum than to try to promote individual lessons.
I was curious so did a bit of quick online research. Here's what I found:
For a Basic Seller (free) account, TpT takes a $0.30 transaction fee for all resources. With a Premium Account ($59.95 a year) that transaction fee is waved for orders over $3, but is $0.15 for transactions under $3. TpT takes a 45% commission for all items sold for a basic seller (so seller keeps 55%), and they take a 20% commission for all items sold by a premium seller (seller keeps 80%).
It seems like there's wide variance in how much teachers make selling on TpT. There are a small number of who make a lot of money and can quit their teaching job to focus full time on materials development but for most it seem like it is a nice side business. I'd be curious to hear from some who decided to go with Patreon or another platform vs TpT. I would guess that those who went out on their own probably have. wide range and number of products to offer, or have some other way to drive traffic to their site (blog or podcast following, association affiliation, etc) since it'd probably be hard to stumble across them through a google search... though I think that my be how I found the Minimalist Math worksheets 4 years ago? I can't remember.
I have no idea how profitable it is for creators, but I do find other "niche" items I am looking for. Orton-Gillingham based remediation for dyslexia is becoming more mainstream all the team, but it isn't exactly the type of material that every teacher is looking for. But there are tons of OG materials available on TPT. I do see some creators moving to having their own download "shops" on their own websites - I'm assuming that's because they are avoiding whatever cut TPT takes.