I’ve taken a blog hiatus the past month or two to wrap up the school year as well as work on the specifics of starting a non-profit!
And so, I’m looking for your help to improve our schools and empower teachers.
The new non-profit will be focused on these three key steps to make education more effective for everyone – and in particular, for novice teachers just starting out on their careers.
o Create and distribute high-quality curricula, for FREE – teachers frequently experience a lack of access to high-quality curricula. Often, they have to find it on their own and pay for it using their own money or actively seek out colleagues or mentors – this is hard for them because the first year or two of teaching is overwhelming and exhausting.
o Create explicit guidance for implementation – clear tools and instructions on how to effectively design and teach lessons and units, determine authentic student learning outcomes, align assessments meaningfully to learning goals, and move through/survive the day-to-day realities of teaching to integrate new curricula into new teachers’ classrooms.
o Develop teacher skills – professional development for teachers on creating and implementing a quality curriculum. Many teachers do not have the opportunity to learn these skills in their teacher-preparation programs.
1) $300 to pay for the cost of starting the non-profit
2) $200 for legal advisement for the paperwork and various filing requirements
3) $800 for 2 video equipment to film both high school ELA and science classes in action (our goal is to film EVERY DAY of the school year if we can)
4) $200 to get our website up and running – we are going to create it ourselves using WordPress, most likely, but we’ll need to buy a domain name and pay for web hosting initially.
I would also be interested in people willing to donate expertise for web design, branding, logos, or general infrastructure.
This will help my colleague KC and I with the setup for the non-profit organization and the seed of our curricula and tools. Our plan is to use those to lay the groundwork for a more extensive outreach that can enable the organization to grow to a scale that can impact the quality of teaching in California and beyond.
The Teacher Lab Blog 