Introduction

It is nothing short of tragic, in this era of instant global communication, that I am sweating over the same lesson plan that a teacher in Cincinnati developed a year ago. A group of public school teachers in Atlanta and Boston invested money, time, and talent into resolving that tragedy while I have only whined about it. So I respect their solution a great deal even if, on a fundamental level, it is not the solution I am looking for, the solution I think will catch fire and change teaching.

How It Works

At some point, in some spitballing session between these developers, someone said the words “a Facebook for teachers.” The label is earned. Even in its private beta, BetterLesson has capably adapted social networking features for a teaching audience – news feeds, friends, and groups have been repackaged as activity feeds, colleagues, and networks, for instance – while also layering a functional content management system over the top of it.

After registering, you create a class – “6th Grade Science.” Then you create a unit within that class – “Human Body.” Then you create a lesson within that unit – “Skeletal System – Joints.” From there you fill in an objective, select a state standard, estimate total time on task, and lay out a lesson plan in a text entry field. You can upload files and assign them to the lesson or you can leave those files in an “unassigned” pile. You can also add other users’ files to your own curriculum in a nifty two-step process. This appears to be BetterLesson’s only nod at a wiki-style collaborative lesson planning environment, if that is important to you.

You can search files by keyword, age-level, file format, and instructional type.

When you click on a result, BetterLesson shows you every lesson plan using that file, which is really nice. At the time of writing there isn’t a sorting mechanism for searches – not alphabetically or by date or by any kind of reputation ranking. The first ten results for a search of “proportions” broke into:

60% – a PDF of a lesson plan.
20% – a standards rubric containing the word “proportion.”
10% – a page from a textbook’s student workbook.
10% – indeterminate.

Obviously it’s worth restating BetterLesson’s beta status here. I imagine these results will improve and diversify with more users.

The Challenges

Here are the challenges facing any lesson sharing site, at least as I see them:

1. Ugly, dysfunctional user interface. Teachers are no different from other web users in their demand for an Internet experience that works well and looks great. BetterLesson, in spite of my other reservations, is without parallel here. It is the prettiest, most functional lesson sharing site on the Internet. It hurdles the bar and then some.
2. Teacher reticence. Teachers are notoriously strapped for time, notoriously autonomous, and fail, notoriously, to collaborate with each other unless the opportunity is either a) coerced or b) extremely enticing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a precedent for this kind of lesson sharing site. None. Not in the same way that MySpace preceded Facebook or that Blogger preceded WordPress or that Twitter preceded Plurk. BetterLesson can’t point to a proven predecessor and say “we do this, only better.” This is an enormous challenge but there are advantages to inventing the market. (See: iPod.)
3. Quality control. Teachers will warm to the idea of downloading lesson material online only if the sharing site returns consistently useful search results. Twitter’s attrition rate (the proportion of people who sign up and then abandon it within the first month) is reportedly 60%. A content management system for teachers that can’t consistently deliver quality content will suffer the same fate. This is complicated even further by widespread disagreement over what constitutes a “quality” lesson plan. (see: math wars, implications of.)
4. Particularly reluctant demographics. There are lots of educators who create engaging, challenging lesson content daily who also, on top of issues of time, autonomy, and aversion to collaboration, lack confidence with technology. Enticing those educators to register, download, and upload is no small task.

Prognostication

After reviewing BetterLesson’s response to those challenges, I predict it will see incredible user registration in its first six months. At least one person in your school will have used it to search for lesson materials and at least one person in every department at your school will have heard of it. The site looks that good. The site sounds that promising. Usage will be heaviest among new teachers who, I suspect, are less ideological, less attached to any particular definition of effective instruction, who will take whatever worksheet will let them get to sleep before midnight. But the attrition rate will be high. It’s possible that BetterLesson has already anticipated a scenario where a small group of uploaders share content with a much larger group of downloaders, not unlike the blogger/commenter ratio we find in the blogosphere. I suspect, though, that BetterLesson would like to see a larger fraction of teachers sharing content online.

Two Errors

So here are two reasons why I think that won’t happen.

First, BetterLesson isn’t fun. Lesson planning isn’t always fun (though I’ll argue for a strong correlation between “lessons that are fun for teachers to plan” and “lessons that are fun for students to learn”) but a well-trafficked site for lesson sharing, because such a site is without precedent, must be fun. It must connect, in as few clicks as possible, to whatever teachers find fun and satisfying about planning lessons for students.

You know what I’m talking about, right? I’m talking about explosive fun where you discover a fascinating route through challenging material, a route you somehow missed even though this is your sixteenth time through the book, and now you’re researching ice-carving techniques online (or whatever) and developing extensions and you’re learning at the same time that you’re lesson-planning and you have to share that route and you know you’re onto something when, like, five teachers comment on your blog post before midnight and you know for a fact that one of them lives in the opposing hemisphere and it’s five a.m. there.

Do you know what I’m talking about?

BetterLesson has a certain grim efficiency about itself. It knows that it is necessary and useful but it knows nothing of fun. It knows not the fun of discovery or the fun of creation.

Create class. Create unit. Create lesson. Add file. Add standard. Add objective. Add pacing guide. All of these are important but none of them has much to do with what will coax the larger corps of good teachers to sacrifice free time to come online and learn a new platform. Those teachers will come online for profoundly interesting hooks to material they already know how to teach, for multimedia resources other teachers have created, for the opportunity to contribute their own insight to those materials, for a profoundly fun experience. They won’t come online to find out which three example problems I used to teach linear inequalities or how many minutes I allotted for worksheet practice.

The second reason BetterLesson will find little traction with teachers not already disposed to sharing their material online is that BetterLesson ties form tightly to content. I care more about what you did than how you did it. I care that you had students study fractions by making an orchestra out of glasses filled with water. I care significantly less about a) how you paced that lesson, b) its exact content standard alignment, or c) how long your period was. I even hold your lesson objective in a loose grip. The same idea can work across different units, across different content areas.

I’ll wager that 90% of teachers with three or more years of experience can adapt a good idea to their particular context, expanding or contracting it for time, pacing it to their bell schedules, adapting warmup exercises that are appropriate for their students’ prior knowledge or personal experience. At a certain level of experience, that information was no longer valuable to me. The water orchestra is valuable to me.

But BetterLesson has tied all of that lesson form tightly to the lesson content. Not only is that information not fun (see above) but that information forces teachers to a) reverse engineer someone else’s lesson plan, stripping away the pacing guide, standard, and objective, b) locate the interesting idea (the water glass orchestra) and then c) re-engineer it for their own contexts. I can’t predict exactly how many teachers will invest that time for uncertain returns but I’m guessing: not many.

Conclusion

Simon Job recently combined amateur photography and Google satellite imagery to motivate the perimeter of curved shapes, which was really fun. It’s obvious he enjoyed the process.

Kate Nowak enthused in the comments:

Great use of photo + google maps! It can be hard to find circle applications. Thanks for sharing. I think throwing it on the screen as an unfamiliar problem is a good instinct.

Contrast Kate’s enthusiasm with Sheng Ho’s review of BetterLesson:

It is unclear how and why the lessons work or whether they are any good. Takes quite a bit of effort to go through the files to reverse engineer the lesson or make one up for yourself.

Or Derek Follett, referring to lesson sharing services in general:

I feel like I have to do way too much digging into a lesson plan before I get the essence of it then (if it is any good) adapt it to my own lesson. What I would rather see instead is “idea sharing.”

In our follow-up phone conversation, Alex Grodd outlined one of BetterLesson’s foundational design rules, “No red apples, no school buses, no chalk, no rulers, no demeaning clip art.” He said his team compensated for the corny status quo with a utilitarian aesthetic which I am concerned has pushed to the sidelines what makes time spent planning lessons so fulfilling. This is a mistake. I want BetterLesson to succeed. Someone has to succeed in this space. But BetterLesson has traded a fun experience and interesting content for an efficient service and controlled form. I hope the BetterLesson team can find the intersection of those two services. If they can’t, I will still follow their progress with a great ideal of interest, though I don’t think it will surprise me.

At whatever point BetterLesson goes public, it will be the only game in town for teachers sharing lesson content with other teachers. BetterLesson answers an essential question, “how do we get teachers to connect and share their work?” with more force, clearer vision, and better funding than any other solution preceding it. I take a declarative tone here only because I’ve spent much of the last two years investigating and discarding those other solutions.

Over the last two weeks, I have beta-tested BetterLesson, debated its merits with Kate Nowak on Twitter, interviewed its CEO/founder Alex Grodd, and composed my own review, which *spoiler* is very, very mixed. Like I said: the BetterLesson team has pursued a clear vision with great force. I take two exceptions to that vision – one philosophical and one pragmatic.

This week is dedicated only secondarily to BetterLesson. I’ll post the transcript of my interview with Alex followed by my review of BetterLesson itself. Primarily, though, we’re talking about how teachers share and I am grateful for anything you can contribute to that conversation.

I told Alex that my commenters typically deliver savage, measured feedback, punching my ideas in the jaw more often than praising them. The BetterLesson team is nothing if not eager for feedback so Alex has offered BetterLesson beta accounts to the first fifty readers to register for an account listing “dy/dan” where it asks you to describe how you heard about BetterLesson. Get on it. Let’s talk about it.

Rhett Allain

Rhett Allain is on a tear lately. His summer thing is to apply skeptical physics to YouTube clips of highly improbable projectile motion – a rare jumping elephant, the longest waterslide ever, etc. He runs them through Tracker, his Swiss Army knife for video analysis, and subjects them to lengthy scrutiny with models and diagrams. I can only skim his posts but I have a stupid grin on my face the entire time because here’s the thing:

He has to know.

It’s impossible not to see his insatiable curiosity between the lines. Physics isn’t his day job. It’s how he understands life and resolves its questions. You can ask Rhett to stop wondering about the elephant’s parabolic fit as easily as you can ask him to stop eating.

Students pick up on that vibe. They buzz to it like bugs to a glowing lamppost. The teacher and the student listen to different music and wear different clothes and worry about different problems but curiosity unites them. That shared curiosity transcends their differences and goes a long way to define a classroom culture. It also has a funny way of assassinating the question, “how much credit is this worth?”

To whatever extent our personality traits should motivate student learning, Rhett has something to which we should all aspire.

Mike Konczal

Let me get it straight that, vocationally speaking, Mike Konczal isn’t a teacher. He is a financial engineer in San Francisco and at one point during the recession I subscribed to his blog. Some of his writing gets into quantitative models that are too far above my dusty mathematics bachelor’s degree but I never miss a post. He is an expert after David Foster Wallace’s own definition, which is the only kind of expertise that matters to me as a classroom teacher:

DFW: Think of the thrill of finding a smart, competent IT technician who can also explain what she’s doing in such a way that you feel like you understand what went wrong with your computer and how you might even fix the problem yourself if it comes up again. Or an oncologist who can communicate clearly and humanly with you and your wife about what the available treatments for her stage-two neoplasm are, and about how the different treatments actually work, and exactly what the plusses and minuses of each one are. If you’re like me, you practically drop and hug the ankles of technical specialists like this, when you find them. As of now, of course, they’re rare. What they have is a particular kind of genius that’s not really part of their specific area of expertise as such areas are usually defined and taught. There’s not really even a good univocal word for this kind of genius–which might be significant. Maybe there should be a word; maybe being able to communicate with people outside one’s area of expertise should be taught, and talked about, and considered as a requirement for genuine expertise.

Konczal wrote a post at The Atlantic called How Health Insurance Is Like Zombie Insurance that contextualized both a) rescission and b) credit default swaps – two complicated, nuanced, easily misunderstood concepts – within a hypothetical zombie apocalypse. It’s awesome, clear, expert-level writing.

Allain and Konczal approach the same masterful teaching technique from opposite angles. Allain uses the simple and the fun to motivate the complicated – waterslides and elephants inspiring pages of physical analysis. Konczal uses the simple and the fun – his zombie apocalypse – to explain the complicated. You get the sense from his writing that if zombies didn’t work for you he could dip into his sack of metaphors and pull out something from pop culture, athletics, cooking, or whatever you needed.

Both teachers are dazzling in their own ways. I would buy a ticket to their live shows, easy.