PME 811: Blog Entry 2
Finding the will to innovate through technology and... Etsy?
As an educator I have struggled with innovation... how do you find time, energy, and motivation to create new resources and approaches when you are already overloaded by curricular and extra curricular demands? As I shouldered more and more administration-level tasks (when I became the department head in addition to my teaching load) I became especially uncomfortable with my lack of motivation to revise my already-created materials. No longer did I have the will to rework and perfect a worksheet packet or assignment rubric to better meet the needs of my students and streamline my program. Something had to change.
Around the same time, my mother (an elementary teacher) was moved to a new grade level assignment for the fourth year in a row. She was frustrated and apprehensive at having to amass and create materials for an entirely new grade - and the school year was already two weeks old when the assignment changed! It was a nightmare and one that was already well-known to other teachers at her school. Her colleagues suggested a website called Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) and it ultimately saved her sanity that year. It's a simple concept: educators, school counselors, and para-educational professionals upload learning resources and offer them for sale or for free. It's like Etsy for worksheets, units, report card comments, slideshows, assessment, and more. I helped my mum download and print a few units and became interested. When I dug deeper, I discovered that there was a definite lack of materials for high school programs and that by contributing I could help a teacher in the same situation my mum had encountered.
Ridiculous as it may seem, I can honestly say that that decision was the single most important pedagogical thing I have ever done.
I compare it to playing hockey at the Olympics. You can play hockey at the local arena every weekend all winter long, enjoying every moment and getting better as you work on it. BUT. If you were to make up your mind to work toward the Olympic ski team you better believe you're going to bring your A-game! It's kind of embarrassing, actually, but when I was putting my materials out there and asking people to pay real money for them I felt like I had to put those final polishes on everything. A plain text, Times New Roman essay assignment just wasn't going to cut it. I started out making things more attractive and visually interesting but it quickly became an incredibly rewarding adventure in innovation. My shop is small - tiny even, by the standards of sellers who make a full-time living from the site - but what I have for sale is a very small portion of the 'products' I have started because of the inspiration and motivation of the shop. I use everything I create in my classroom and have rediscovered my love of tweaking.
That's only part of the TpT appeal, though. Through the forums, conferences, and communities maintained by the company to connect member sellers, I've participated in extensive professional development, collaborative learning, resource sharing and even university-level research projects into learning styles, curriculum design, and assessment with colleagues from all over the world. For the first time in my career I have professional development goals for myself, I have revision schedules for my new lesson plans and assessments, and I have genuine pride in my print materials.
I still feel silly that it took something like Etsy to motivate me to create, to search for innovative solutions to classroom problems, and to make my work as visually attractive as it is content-rich, but I figure - go with it! This little adventure has expanded my professional community and horizons and that is never a bad thing. So what is it about holding up your work for others to see, or offering it in exchange for something that everyone considers valuable, that is more motivating? Is it that the exercise inherently requires a type of collaboration and peer review? Is it that the innovation is not so much curricular as it is subject/ content oriented?
Sources:
Ha Le, Jeroen Janssen, Theo Wubbels. (2018) Collaborative learning practices: teacher and student perceived obstacles to effective student collaboration. Cambridge Journal of Education 48:1, pages 103-122.
Martin, J.R. (1996). There’s too much to teach: Cultural wealth in an age of scarcity. Educational Researcher, 25(2), 4–16. doi: 10.3102/0013189X025002004
