Teacher Pay Teachers has been in business since 2006 and tout around 4 million users. Before that, teacher blogs offered up lesson plans that colleagues outside their district could access. Now there is a growing swell of using Open Edcuational Resources (OER) with their mantra of: digitized, free, and editable. These online off-the-shelf lesson plans are available and teachers are downloading worksheets all the way to whole unit lesson plans.
Only providing teachers with online access to the lessons increased students’ math achievement by 0.06 of a standard deviation, but providing teachers with online access to the lessons along with supports to promote their use increased students’ math achievement by 0.09 of a standard deviation.
The intervention is more scalable and cost effective than most policies aimed at improving teacher quality, suggesting a real benefit to making high-quality instructional materials available to teachers on the internet.
- Are your teachers using online lesson plans?
- Do you even need textbooks any longer?
- Do you have an assessment framework to discern the wheat from the chaff?
- Who owns the lesson plans created by your teachers?
- Do you provide funds for online lessons or do your teachers pay for it? Should they?
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