A Market for Lessons
The 9th in the Egan Pattern Language
1. A problem
Classrooms are often home to brilliant innovations by brilliant teachers. But often, when they leave, their innovations disappear.
2. Basic plan
Make it normal to spread curriculum innovations by appealing to a few powerful motivations:
money (we start putting curriculum on sites like teacherspayteachers.com, and, one far-off day in the glorious future, start our own bespoke site)
freedom (we give teachers time to create new lessons and improve old ones, and to share them with colleagues)
expectations (we make “improve the curriculum you’re given!” part of every teacher’s job)
status (we cultivate online community, where teachers who create great stuff can be recognized for it)
3. What you might see
A teacher looking forward to the first week of summer vacation so she can shoot videos of the poetry lessons she’s been perfecting to sell online and make a sweet, sweet passive side income.
Teachers from non-Egan schools purchasing some Eganized lessons, and spreading the word of what we’re doing.
4. Why?
This is a way to make Egan education constantly improve. Whatever wonderful ideas we have at the beginning of this1 will pale in quality compared to the boots-ready curriculum that a community of practitioners could evolve in a decade.
(It’s also a way to make it easier and easier to be an Egan teacher — which is one of the main problems people suggested that Egan education might have.)
5. Egan’s insight
Where do we see this in the human experience?
Knitting together minds to become a superorganism is the literal secret of humanity’s success.2
That is: “Tiger vs. Ape-man!” is an unfair fight for the ape-man. “Tiger vs. Ape-man!” when the ape-man is equipped with the best tools his society has crafted is an unfair fight for the tiger.
Similarly: “Teacher vs. Dead-eyed teenagers” is an unfair fight for the teacher. ‘Teacher vs. Dead-eyed teenagers” when the teacher is equipped with the best tools that Egan teachers have crafted…
6. This might be especially useful for…
First, it’s good for creative, passionate teachers… because they have the opportunity to make way more than any single school could ever pay them.
But it’s also good for uncreative, beaten-down teachers… because this can help them rediscover why they went into teaching in the first place. “We learn to love by imitating the love of others”, and all that.
7. How could this go wrong?
Teachers put up good stuff, but no one buys it, so uploading dwindles
So prime the pump: schools commit to giving teachers money each semester/quarter/whatever to purchase curriculum pieces.
No one can find the Egan-fueled curriculum online
So make a central directory of it, and include links to the sites you can find it on.
Intellectual property squabbles become World Wars III, IV, and V: teachers fight about who really made each piece of curriculum
A lot of great work is made by a network of people; some fighting is presumably inevitable. But this is the sort of problem we should be aware of.
Can you think of another way this could go wrong… or, um, a way to help avoid that? Become a paid subscriber and join in the comments conversation!
8. Classroom setup
—
9. Similar stuff (others are doing)
Obviously, sites like teacherspayteachers.com have existed for a while, but I was inspired to do this when I remembered hearing that Acton Academies have an internal market for teacher-made curriculum.
And then I realized that we can conceive of a “market” for things like status. The Teaching Gap — one of my favorite books about math education — mentions how teachers in Japan continually refine their nationwide math lessons over years and decades, and publish their innovations in curriculum books that are so popular, they’re actually sold in bookstores.3 And my sense of the Montessori movement is that it supports subject-specific gurus who give speeches at conferences, as well as publish books.
10. Open questions
Q: Are the lessons on teacherspayingteachers.com any good?
Asking for a friend.
Q: Is there a danger that we’ll pay teachers too little, if they have the option of making more here?
I doubt it, and anyways this will be a school-by-school thing, but I suppose I should raise it here.
11. How could this be done small, now?
I already do a little of this — my “Eating Poems” curriculum — but it lacks some elements I think would be important, like a space for people to make recommendations for improvement. (Maybe our model should be something like Apple’s or Google’s app stores, where people leave ratings and feedback, and makers upload updates.)
12. Related patterns
This bears some resemblance to Every Class a Brain°, except it’s done at a higher level. And it could benefit from Egan schools diversifying and specializing: Every School a Tribe°.
Whoa, went a bit meta, there…
And can I point out that Joseph Henrich’s book of the same name is currently available on Audible for free?
I might be misremembering this, and in any case the book is a bit old — if anyone has any corrections on this, let me know and I’ll update the post.
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.
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!).