It鈥檚 common for teachers to go looking for lessons and classroom resources online鈥攄igital marketplaces like Teachers Pay Teachers or Share My Lesson offer seemingly endless pages of user-created materials that teachers can use to supplement their schools鈥� curricula, or in some cases, piece together one when none is provided.
Teachers rely on sites like these to save time and fill resource gaps. But many educators that the materials available .
Now, confirms some of those concerns. Reviewers evaluated more than 300 resources from three online platforms鈥擱eadWriteThink, Share My Lesson, and Teachers Pay Teachers鈥攆or alignment to the Common Core State Standards and overall quality. Most of the materials, 64 percent, received an overall rating of very poor or mediocre.
In the years since the release of the Common Core State Standards, the nonprofit EdReports formed and began to evaluate curricular materials against new requirements.
For the most part, EdReports reviews comprehensive core offerings. But most teachers aren鈥檛 just using the curriculum that their school or district provides (if teachers are provided a curriculum at all). A found that 98 percent of secondary math teachers and 96 percent of secondary English-language arts teachers were using materials that they had developed or selected themselves.
In many cases, these supplemental resources are coming from crowdsourced marketplaces, where teachers don鈥檛 have access to independent reviews of the materials they鈥檙e downloading.
For this study, researchers Morgan Polikoff, an associate professor of education at the USC Rossier School of Education, and Jennifer Dean, an educational consultant, created a rubric that could do this kind of vetting.
Their criteria look at how well these resources aligned to the shifts in instruction outlined in the Common Core State Standards鈥攍ike requirements that materials build students鈥� knowledge, give them opportunities to work with complex text, and ask them to cite textual evidence. They also considered other aspects of curriculum quality, like rigor, usability, and inclusion of diverse cultural perspectives.
To build the rubric, they adapted criteria from a and existing tools that evaluate materials against the common core鈥攍ike EdReports, the EQuIP rubric, and the state of Louisiana鈥檚 curriculum rubrics. Polikoff and Dean also partnered with four reviewers who had experience evaluating resources against the common core.
Reviewers looked at more than 300 of the most-downloaded resources for high school English-language arts, across three lesson-sharing platforms:
ReadWriteThink, a hub for free, peer-reviewed ELA lessons managed by the International Literacy Association and the National Council of Teachers of English;
Share My Lesson, another free lesson site, from the American Federation of Teachers; and
Teachers Pay Teachers, a for-profit marketplace where any former or current teacher can sell resources or list them for free.
The study focused on multi-day units and some single-day lessons, rather than one-off worksheets or activities. Most of these units were book studies, with reading and writing comprehension tasks built around one or more anchor texts.
Overall, the reviewers鈥� analysis painted a bleak picture of these marketplaces.
Most materials鈥�56 percent鈥攚eren鈥檛 aligned to the majority of the standards that authors said were covered in each resource. (Eight percent weren鈥檛 aligned to any of the standards that the materials鈥� authors claimed were covered.)
There鈥檚 an incentive for creators to tag their lesson with as many standards as they can, said Polikoff, in an interview with Education Week. On many lesson-sharing websites, users can search by these tags. Listing more standards means showing up in more search results.
鈥淭he consequence of that is that a lot of these materials are overtagged,鈥� Polikoff said. This means that it鈥檚 often up to teachers to figure out whether a resource actually aligns to the standards it claims to meet.
Even if teachers find a lesson that does address the standards they鈥檙e looking for, quality varies. Overall, reviewers thought that the anchor texts in these lessons鈥攖he fiction or nonfiction books that the reading, writing, and speaking tasks are organized around鈥攚ere strong selections. When books didn鈥檛 meet this bar, it was often because they were below grade level, as determined by Lexile measures, one assessment of text difficulty.
Even so, materials didn鈥檛 fare well on measures of cultural relevance. About two-thirds of lessons didn鈥檛 include authors from diverse backgrounds.
Text quality also varied across sites: ReadWriteThink and Share My Lesson scored higher than Teachers Pay Teachers. Reviewers made these judgments on qualitative evaluations of the book鈥檚 quality of writing and importance, as well as measures of grade-level appropriateness.
On average, reviewers ranked the reading, writing, and speaking tasks in the lessons as low- or mediocre-quality. Prompts often weren鈥檛 text-dependent, instead asking students to draw on personal feelings or other knowledge. The vast majority鈥�86 percent鈥攄idn鈥檛 offer any support for differentiation. (One bright spot in the analysis: Most of the resources didn鈥檛 have major errors, and were well-organized and visually appealing.)
The reviewers also looked at how the multi-day units built knowledge鈥攈ow they covered the historical or literary context for the ELA text, or made connections to subjects like social studies, science, or the arts. More than half of the units didn鈥檛 build knowledge, or did it weakly, devoting more time to 鈥渟kill building, simple recall, or personal interpretation,鈥� according to the report.
When it came to assessing student learning, reviewers found that most lessons and units (69 percent) included assessments that covered most or all of the core content in the lesson. But about half of all materials didn鈥檛 include rubrics that would help teachers understand how the assessments were meant to be scored.
Curation Could 鈥楽hore Up鈥� Gaps
Researchers looked at some of the most popular resources on these sites. But it鈥檚 hard to know whether downloads and star ratings are good metrics of teachers鈥� true feelings about a resource.
In interviews with the research team, teachers talked about feeling pressure not to critique their colleagues鈥� work, even if they thought it was subpar. 鈥淭hey went way out on a limb to put it out there, and I don鈥檛 want to seem like I鈥檓 criticizing ... We get bashed constantly, by administrators, the press, parents, etc., so I can鈥檛 see making it any worse for anybody,鈥� one teacher is quoted in the study as saying.
Still, it鈥檚 apparent that the materials teachers are downloading aren鈥檛 always meeting their needs. Teachers told the researchers that they鈥檙e often making modifications to materials before they use them.
More curation has the potential to solve some of these problems, Polikoff said. For example, he said, Teachers Pay Teachers could vet the materials on their site, and spotlight a few dozen that are of the highest-quality.
See also: On 鈥楾eachers Pay Teachers,鈥� Some Sellers Are Profiting From Stolen Work
And especially when users are paying for materials, it鈥檚 a big problem that teachers don鈥檛 have a way to preview and vet the entire resource before they purchase, Polikoff said. (Currently, Teachers Pay Teachers鈥攖he only one of the three sites in this analysis to charge for materials鈥�, and some requests are subject to review by side admin.)
鈥淭here鈥檚 also a role on the school district side, or maybe even a state department of education, to help curate,鈥� said Polikoff. Districts could identify the potential gaps in their core curricular materials, and point to supplemental materials that they think would 鈥渟hore up those weaknesses,鈥� he said.
Charts via the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.