'Teacherpreneur:' Educators buy, sell lesson plans online

'Teacherpreneur:' Educators buy, sell lesson plans online

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FARMINGTON — Sisters Heidi Van Natter and Emily Stephenson, both teachers, collaborated for more than 500 hours to create daily morning work activities for their second-grade classes. Believing other teachers could benefit from the time they spent, they sold their plans on Esty in 2008.

Business picked up in June 2012 when the sisters started an account on teacherspayteachers.com, an online market for educators that allows teachers to share, sell and buy original educational resources.

The result is a marketplace where teachers can make additional money, share ideas and purchase the good ideas of others.

Van Natter and Stephenson said they never thought they would become entrepreneurs. But managing their online education store became a full-time pursuit as more and more instructors wanted access to their materials. They withdrew from teaching in the classroom to focus on their store.

Teachers Pay Teachers and other similar websites refer to teachers who have become business owners as "teacherpreneurs." According to the site, contributors' proceeds exceed $175 million and has emerged as a 'big educational movement,' Van Natter said.

"I love teaching, but instead of just 20 kids at a time, this gives me an opportunity to help thousands," Van Natter said. "And I don't have to do bus duty or write sub plans."

Since the opening of the sisters' online Teachers Pay Teacher's store Second Story Window, they've sold more than 62,000 products, Stephenson said. And 13,000 of those purchases were the 2nd Grade Common Core Morning Work Stephenson and Van Natter originally intended to use only in their own two classrooms. That product ranks fourth in generated revenue out of all Teachers Pay Teachers products and second in generated revenue for products in its grade division.

Stephenson said teachers purchase their morning work because it is thorough, spiral review – meaning that the workbook content cycles back to subjects found earlier on in the year's curriculum – and contains graphics and clip art. Stephenson defined morning work as the first exercise students do when they come to class, which sets a pattern and reviews curriculum. She said morning work is a method teachers have used for years.

"When [teachers] are in the classroom trenches of teaching they have so many demands, and don't have time to be passionate about every part of every curriculum that they teach," Stephenson said. "Because we are not in the classroom, we've gotten to know the curriculum better than when we were even in the classroom. All of our products are based on the curriculum and are rigorous not just cutesy."

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The top results on a search on Amazon for "common core morning work" are morning work activities broken into content areas and sold around $10 each.

With nearly 13,000 copies of 2nd Grade Common Core Morning Work sold at $26 a copy and Teachers Pay Teachers taking a 15 percent commission, Stephenson and Van Natter's product has resulted in more than $280,000 in sales from their plan alone.

After seeing the success of their second-grade materials, Stephenson and Van Natter expanded their store to include kindergarten- to third-grade content. Their 147 products include morning work, general homework, reading fluency homework and other teaching worksheets and plans for each of these grades.

Van Natter said she and Stephenson are surprised by the positive response to their products. They own best-selling Teachers Pay Teachers online store in Utah, ranking 17 on the Teachers Pay Teachers all-time bestseller list. They have more than 10,500 followers on the site.

Stephenson said the most incredible part of the store's success was the fulfillment of a childhood goal.

"We've wanted to open a preschool together since we were little kids, but teachers pay teachers made this a reality," Stephenson said. "I don't know what I would be doing, but I know my sister would be needing the income from teaching full time."

Stephenson said the online store and preschool give her an opportunity to work and influence many kids while working around home and spending time with her own children.

Van Natter said she is happy with the unexpected turn her career took.

"The most terrifying part is not having a set income, but I use that to help me fuel my creativity in creating new content for the store," she said.


I don't even know if being a teacher would be an option for me if I didn't find Teachers Pay Teachers. I probably would have left the teaching profession for a more lucrative business to pay off my student loans.

–Marlie Rosenberg, teacher


Van Natter said she works primarily on product development, while Stephenson works on marketing and managing. She said she encourages teachers to share their original resources on Teachers Pay Teachers, but not to think that success always comes quickly because the most successful products come from hundreds of hours of work.

Marlie Rosenberg, who teaches at Madeleine Choir School in Salt Lake and owns a store on Teachers Pay Teachers, said it is a real financial boost. She used money from the online store to fund her wedding this year and attributed 'the wedding of her dreams' to the site.

"I don't even know if being a teacher would be an option for me if I didn't find Teachers Pay Teachers," Rosenberg said. "I probably would have left the teaching profession for a more lucrative business to pay off my student loans."

Rosenberg has sold nearly 20,000 products and has more than 1,800 followers on her store. She said she will likely stop teaching when she has children and instead work at home full time on her online store.

According to teacherspayteachers.com, 1 out of every 3 teachers in the United States will download a resource from teacherspayteachers.com in 2015. Katelyn Anderson, teacher at Park Land Elementary, said most districts require teachers to use 80 percent of their teaching resources from pre-approved sources, but that she uses Teachers Pay Teachers for almost all of her supplemental material.

"Teachers Pay Teachers worksheets make a concept memorable for students," Anderson said. "As dumb as it sounds, if I give them a worksheet with cool pictures on it, they are going to remember that concept so much better because it is visual."

Anderson recently started her own store on Teachers Pay Teachers. She said she wants to give her unique ideas to the website in appreciation for the content other teachers provided that helped her students.

"Teachers Pay Teachers is all about how teachers are in this together," she said. "It's this joint effort of, I'll give you some of my ideas and you'll give me some of yours in order to create a better educational system. We don't need to reinvent the wheel."


Tori Jorgensen is a Deseret News intern and current communications major at Southern Utah University. Find her on Twitter @TORIAjorgensen Email: vjorgensen@deseretnews.com

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