How a Teacher Made $1 Million Selling Lesson Plans

[ErikJ]

By Caroline Winter on September 24, 2012, Bloomberg Business

Deanna Jump is not a trust fund baby. She never married into money and she has never won the lottery. But in the past year-and-a-half, the 43-year-old kindergarten teacher in Warner Robins, Ga., has earned more than $1 million. Her unlikely strategy: selling catchy kindergarten lesson plans to other teachers.

Jump is just one of some 15,000 teachers currently marketing their original classroom materials through the online marketplace, TeachersPayTeachers (TPT). Since signing on to the site, she has created 93 separate teaching units and sold 161,000 copies for about $8 a pop. “My units usually cover about two weeks’ worth of material,” she says. “So if you want to teach about dinosaurs, you’d buy my dinosaur unit, and it has everything you need from language arts, math, science experiments, and a list of books you can use as resources. So once you print out the unit, you just have to add a few books to read aloud to your class, and everything else is there, ready to go for you.”

To be fair, no one else on TPT has been as wildly successful as Jump, but at least two other teachers have earned $300,000, and 23 others have earned over $100,000, according to site founder Paul Edelman. “Of the 15,000 teachers who are contributing, about 10,000 make money in any given quarter,” he adds.

Edelman, a former New York middle school English teacher, launched TPT in 2006 after sinking grueling hours into planning his own classes. “Every night, I would spend two or three hours, at least—and then Sundays I would spend all day and all night preparing and correcting papers,” he says. To get ahead, Edelman and his colleagues swapped ideas and lesson plans. They also perused online sites for helpful resources, but found only sub-par, outdated materials.
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http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-24/how-a-teacher-made-1-million-selling-lesson-plans

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. I have a good friend who has made some money at that website

Not a million dollars though. LOL

[mjwelchphd]

2. Good Lesson Plans Are Hard Work, But It Takes More Than A Good Lesson Plan

As a teacher myself, I know that writing good lesson plans isn't easy. It takes research, planning, writing, editing, printing, testing in a classroom, revisions, more testing... well, you get the idea.

If other teachers are finding Deanna Jump's work good and useful, then I'm happy to see her have some success selling her lesson plans. If her lessons were suited my classroom, I'd be glad to spend $8 and save hours of work. But a good lesson alone does not a good teacher make.

There is no doubt that the California school system has many excellent, dedicated teachers, but it is a mistake to assume that every teacher is of that high caliber. There are no reliable statistics available to measure teacher competency, but a casual observation of teachers in the secondary system reveals problems which point to teacher incompetence as a significant factor in the high failure and drop out rates in schools today. Students complain of boring, ineffective teachers who waste a lot of time in the classroom on busy-work; teachers who waste time talking about themselves; teachers who spend little time with the students, giving worksheets and busy-work instead; and teachers who give tests for materials not covered in class.

My personal observation is that most secondary level teachers teach only to Bloom’s second level. Lessons are often inadequately prepared and the students are bored in class. Harry K. Wong, Ph.D., says that if you want to increase student learning and achievement, increase the time the student is working. Furthermore, he says that if the student cannot demonstrate learning or achievement, the student has not failed—teachers have failed the student.

Too many teachers do not put the student to work. A boring lecture followed by an in-class reading assignment or worksheet is often all the teacher has to offer. In a high school near me, the “block” schedule, in which classes were 1½ hours long, was abandoned for the traditional class length of 53 minutes, plus a 7 minute passing period. Was this because teachers were unable to engage students for that length of time?

A well-organized plan, which includes teacher instruction and guided student work assignments, is essential. The teacher cannot put the students to a task, then go sit at his desk. The teacher must be involved at every moment with the ongoing work. Group work is an important part of student participation because it allows the students to help each other in small social groups in which some peer pressure works to motivate group members. Teachers must outline to the students what is planned for the day, present instruction, do work, recap the lesson, and test only on the material actually studied. Homework should be designed to reinforce the lesson for that day. Why is that such a hard concept for teachers to understand?

Teachers complain that students are using technology to cheat on tests. Really? Where was the teacher while the students were taking the test? Gone, that's where. While the teacher is gone, the students can pull out their cell phones and exchange answers or look things up. How do you stop this? Take away cell phones before a test? No. You stop this when the teacher is in the classroom walking the aisles between the students, watching what they are doing, and answering questions that come up. That's where the teacher is supposed to be during a test.

[knitter4democracy]

3. You should do more observations.

I don't know where you've been observing, but you haven't been in any schools I've been in. Few teachers still lecture by the hour or use worksheets to death these days. I've taught in 6 schools now in my career and subbed in another 10, and I haven't seen that style of teaching in a long time.

Group work? Really? I learned about that in my education classes back in the 1990s. We all use it and continue to tweak it and make it better. We don't have lesson plans? Really? Have you seen the latest mandated lesson plan forms districts require? That second to last paragraph seriously made me laugh out loud. That is exactly what we do, and everyone in my school has had many, many hours of training on it, is observed regularly to make sure we're doing it, etc.

For crying out loud, come visit my class any time you want. Oh, and the reason most schools gave up the block wasn't because of teacher issues but because of credits and dealing with the need for year-round classes for the core subjects and a few others while trying to figure out how to fit in things like foreign language, music, art, and the extras that parents and students expect and demand. Trust me: scheduling nightmare.

[demtenjeep]

4. your "observations" have all kinds of fail and assumptions that are just wrong

Most teachers do not lecture or leave the room, or just phone it in.