TeachersConnect

Using data and teacher-matching to make sure every teacher gets the skill, confidence, and joy to become a GREAT teacher.

Problem: 

US School districts have an annual $2.2bn problem of K-12 teacher turnover. More importantly, the effects on educational outcomes that have a disproportionate impact on adults and students in high-poverty, high-minority communities. This turnover--and the resulting impact on educational outcomes--is due in large part to new teachers feeling under-prepared, isolated, and unsupported. In the majority of situations, new teachers face incredibly challenging teaching situations—and they’re left to figure it out largely on their own. 

Solution:

TeachersConnect is an online professional learning network that gives new K-12 teachers a safe place to ask their most urgent questions—even anonymously—and get answers from a trusted network of peers, mentors, and experts who understand the real-world classroom challenges. We use data to match teachers with similar instructional challenges and interests.

TeachersConnect is free for teachers. As teachers use the network, we develop and monetize two powerful assets: 1) Tight relationships with classroom teachers, and 2) Data about what’s driving teachers and what’s driving them crazy. Our customers are teacher preparation programs, school districts, and vendors that do business in K-12 education. They get real-time data on the actual obstacles new teachers face when they begin their careers, and they use this data to respond and innovate:

Teacher preparation programs:

• Adjust their current curricula and delivery models
• Innovate--Add new courses and programs based on stated needs
• Become an ongoing instructional resource for their graduates—even after they’re done paying tuition
• Meet new accreditation requirements that—for the first time ever—require them to collect usable data from their graduates.

School districts:

• Understand and respond to the stated needs of their new teachers.
• Spend the estimated annual $12bn on teacher professional development in a far more personalized and responsive way
• Retain their new teachers, slash teacher turnover expenses, and improve educational outcomes for our most vulnerable students.

Vendors:

• Use the data as market-research information to inform their marketing and product development efforts—so they can develop products and services specifically designed for new teachers. Get authentic (no ads, no spamming—just discussions among teachers about solutions that work) exposure to new teachers through the TeachersConnect professional network. 

Change the World:

There’s a strong body of research that shows that it takes a new teacher 3-6 years to reach his or her potential. When up to 50% of new teachers bail on teaching before they have a chance to be great, it’s a bad outcome for them, their students, and our collective society. The negative effects have a disproportionate impact in high-poverty, high-minority communities.

TeachersConnect uses the power of networked learning—and data—to make sure that new K-12 teachers get the skill, confidence, and joy they need to become GREAT teachers. 

1.    We’re a teacher matcher and a “life saver”. A 4th grade teacher in rural Appalachia who’s interested in robotics for her students might not have peers in her building. But there are definitely teachers like her in other places in the country. We’re going to match her with those teachers so she can find a peer.

2.    We’re using data—patterns about what early-career teachers need for success—to address a tremendous problem in terms of dollars spent and educational outcomes (new teacher preparation, induction, and retention), that somehow flies under the radar.  

These are game-changing new applications.

Today, we match instructional information seekers with collaborators or experts in an analog way (e.g.”I need a way to explain why images cast on retinas are upside down. Who can help?”).

We plan to use NLP to understand the topic and identify an instructional expert (based on the teacher characteristics and the crowd-sourced feedback from the TeachersConnect community—like Quora or GitHub).

We’ll use similar technologies to recognize data patterns (How do challenges of a first-year teacher compare in October vs. January vs. March?) and report those patterns to teacher prep programs and school districts in an actionable way. 

1. Build a "Lifeline" for the Sunday-night-at-11:00pm-problem. An information seeker asks a question, and our algorithm analyses the topic and finds an expert to answer it immediately. The teacher feels connection and relief.
2. Design a way for teachers to use their expertise to supplement incomes. The teacher feels empowerment and accomplishment.
3. Create a data dashboard for our institutional customers to organize and disaggregate data in customized ways. The system of teacher preparation, induction, and retention experiences an evidence-based surge of better ideas.
4. Build an app, for better access to all.

There are 50 million teachers in the world; they all deal with some version of the same problems: 

• insufficient preparation
• ongoing training and professional development that is far from personalized and responsive to their specific needs
• lack of opportunity to learn from other teachers
• isolation—weak professional network

All this, despite a strong desire among the vast majority of teachers to just get a little better every day.

We’ve already had teachers feeling these pressures join us from Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria, Ghana, and China. Every country has structures of teacher preparation, induction, and retention that need TeachersConnect community and data. 

TeachersConnect is free for teachers. Any teacher in the world can access what is now a website and what will be a native app. We find prospective and practicing teachers in two ways: 

1. Our institutional customers bring them to us. When a customer signs an agreement, we initiate a joint marketing effort to recruit teachers.
2. We run a direct-to-teachers marketing effort:
   • We provide cash incentives for current TeachersConnect members to invite their teacher “tribes” into the community.
   • We pay influencers (e.g. teacher vloggers, Twitter Edchat leaders) to talk about TeachersConnect questions and topics.

Success of TeachersConnect relies on our ability to gather and report data from as many teachers as possible--in their authentic voices. This is what our customers pay us for. In January 2018, we emerged from our prototype phase with ~250 teachers, a number we kept intentionally low to keep our qualitative research manageable. 

In February-May, we added 400 teachers.

In June alone, we added an additional 500 teachers (10x the month of May), for a total of ~1200. 

We have eight paying institutional customers.

Teachers collide, collaborate, experiment, and grow. Institutions use data to improve services and delivery. 

Our 12-month growth goals are the following: 

• 3000 teachers by 9/30/18 (summer is slow)
• 10,000 by 12/31/18
• 50,000 by 6/30/19

The majority will be US-based K-12 teachers who get a safe place to ask their urgent questions—even anonymously—and get answers from a trusted network of peers, mentors, and experts who understand the real-world classroom challenges. 

In 3 years we'll be solving problems for over 1 million teachers worldwide. The institutions and governments we work with will have the data to make sweeping, evidence-based changes to the way they prepare, induct, and retain new teachers. 

Dave Meyers (CEO) and Marcel Ollmann (CTO) have a combined 15 years of K-12 classroom experience and 25 years of education business experience. They understand teachers and the institutions that prepare, induct, and try to retain them. Dave has had a successful exit (his non-profit was acquired by an edtech company). 

Eliza Kano-Bower, Direct of Customer Success, has a strong background in developing systems to support and communicate with user and institutional customers. 

Frank Schnur, Chief Marketing Officer, was a VP at American Express and has a proven record of catalyzing rapid business growth, from zero to $100mm. 

As teachers use the network, we develop and monetize two powerful assets: 1) Tight relationships with classroom teachers, 2) Data about what’s driving teachers and what’s driving them crazy. Our customers are teacher preparation programs, school districts, and K-12 education vendors.

Districts currently spend $2.2BN on teacher turnover. With 3.1 million US teachers employed in public schools, and a proposed annual subscription cost of $10/teacher, a cost we have been told is acceptable by the Superintendents on our Board of Advisors, we have a TAM of $31M/year.

Additionally, teachers of all ages and tenures described the desire to pay a premium for professional coaching, grading assistance, job searches, and personal portfolios of competencies and classroom achievements. Most teachers report that they do not use sites like LinkedIn or Indeed because the perception is that they are not for them. This is a major commercial opportunity for TC. At $10/teacher/year, this is an additional TAM of $31M/year, just in the US.

Including payments from teacher prep programs and K-12 vendors, and adding teachers and institutions throughout the world, we have the potential to be a $100MM business. Our financial prospectus shows that we can be cash-flow positive by early 2020.

In terms of profitability and long-term systemic impact on the preparation, induction, and retention of teachers, we are fundamentally a data and data science company. While our CTO, Marcel Ollmann, has deep experience in technology, he is not an expert in natural language processing, algorithms, or data visualizations. 

We believe that Solve could make an enduring impact on our work in those areas. 

Key barriers are:

1. Today, we have a single coder. If, god forbid, something were to happen to him, the company would be at great risk. 
2. See above, we do not currently have in-house expertise in data science, algorithms, and data visualizations.

Solve can help with that. 

The third big barrier is marketing. While Solve may very well be able to contribute to resolving that problem, we have strong in-house resources.