Kathleen Sheehy at Teach Fest. Photo courtesy of LearnZillion

Planning a high-quality lesson can be one of the most challenging tasks a teacher faces. Now a DC-based company called LearnZillion is using technology to help teachers share their best ideas with each other as well as with parents and students.

When Eric Westendorf was a teacher at E.L. Haynes, a highly ranked DC public charter school, he realized that “teachers, no matter how talented, no matter how hard-working, were working in isolation.” In order to figure out the best way to help students learn, he says, they constantly had to reinvent the wheel.

So Westendorf and a couple of other teachers at Haynes, where Westendorf later became a principal, started a website with video demonstrations of their most effective lesson plans. All teachers had access to the site, as did students and their parents, who could now get a clearer idea of what their children needed to know.

Several years later, Westendorf’s brainchild, christened LearnZillion, has over 130,000 registered teacher users across the country. In the past year, the site has had over 43,000 visits from teachers in DC alone. They and anyone else who’s interested have free access to over 2000 video lessons, each of which lasts between 3 and 5 minutes.

The lessons, which cover math and literacy subjects from grades 3 through 8, are the products of LearnZillion’s “Dream Team,” a hand-picked cadre of 200 teachers who meet for a “Teach Fest” in the spring. They then work with coaches throughout the summer to turn their ideas into animated videos. The Dream Team teachers aren’t visible in the videos, although they do provide narration.

While LearnZillion bears some resemblance to other sites, like Khan Academy and Betterlesson.com, it’s more closely tied to the Common Core State Standards, which DC and 45 states have adopted and begun implementing. The tests administered to students in DC public and charter schools will be fully aligned to the Common Core beginning in 2014-15.

The Common Core standards place more emphasis on conceptual and analytical thinking than has been the case in the past, and it’s not always clear to teachers how to translate the standards into lessons. DCPS and individual charter schools are working on adjusting their curricula to align with the Common Core, but many teachers are looking for guidance.

Teachers get a voice in interpreting the Common Core

Dream Team member Rebecca Hipps, a literacy coordinator at Washington Latin Public Charter School, says the Common Core is more open-ended than previous standards, and some teachers find that overwhelming. Through the Dream Team, says Hipps, LearnZillion enables teachers to have a voice in how the standards are interpreted.

Teachers using the site can search for a particular Common Core standard by consulting a chart and clicking on, say, third grade geometry. The teacher can then click on something more specific within that category, such as “Solving elapsed time word problems.” That leads to a display of a series of five lessons on different aspects of the concept.

Teachers can also use LearnZillion lessons to help them gear instruction to a student’s individual needs. If a student needs additional work on a concept, or is ready to move on ahead of the rest of the class, the teacher can have the student work individually on a LearnZillion video (assuming, of course, that the classroom is equipped with a computer and internet access).

And parents can use the videos at home to help their children with their homework. This can be particularly helpful with math assignments, since math instruction has changed significantly since most parents were in school. The website even has templates of letters that teachers can send home to parents to explain how to use the site and which lesson corresponds to their child’s assignment.

Plans for expansion

Math is particularly well suited to technology-based instruction, and LearnZillion seems to have more math-related lessons available than literacy-related ones. But Westendorf says that the company is focusing on reading and writing this summer, because it’s an area where there’s a huge need for guidance. The Common Core standards presume that not only English teachers but also social studies and science teachers will be teaching students to read texts closely and to write analytically, and many teachers have never been trained in imparting those skills.

“The LearnZillion lessons are designed to have the teacher thinking out loud for the students as they write,” says Kathleen Sheehy, a Dream Team coach and an instructional coach at Hyde Addison Elementary School in the District. That, she says, helps to demystify the writing process.

LearnZillion provides its lessons online for free, but it plans to begin offering school districts additional content and features for a fee. And while its early days have been funded with grants from the Gates Foundation and others, LearnZillion is a for-profit company. Westendorf doesn’t believe that the for-profit model works for charter schools, but he says educational technology is different. And he feels the advent of the Common Core has opened up huge opportunities for entrepreneurs like him.

Next year, Westendorf says, he wants LearnZillion’s lessons to cover grades 2 through 12. And ultimately he’d like to extend the lessons to kindergarten and 1st grade and expand the subjects beyond math and literacy to cover social studies and science. There seems to be no shortage of teachers eager to join the Dream Team: LearnZillion accepts only 6% of those who apply.

You might think that, after a year in the classroom, teachers would rather spend their time lying on a beach than hunched over a computer working on animating a lesson plan. Dream Team members do get a stipend of $2000 for their work over the summer, but it seems that for most, money isn’t the primary motivation.

Rebecca Hipps, for one, says that she relishes the opportunity to collaborate with other teachers and the opportunity to share her ideas with teachers all over the world. “For me,” she says, “it’s very refreshing.”

Natalie Wexler is a DC education journalist and blogger. She chairs the board of The Writing Revolution and serves on the Urban Teachers DC Regional Leadership Council, and she has been a volunteer reading and writing tutor in high-poverty DC Public Schools.