Reinventing the Wheel

In 2008, Alex Grodd was the only sixth-grade English teacher at Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. He had spent the two years before that teaching sixth-grade Social Studies in the Atlanta Public Schools as a Teach for America corps member, building lesson plans every night, often from scratch, sometimes well past midnight. Somewhere in the country there were master teachers—people who had been teaching sixth-grade English for years—who had already figured out how to teach the things Alex was struggling to teach for the first time. There was no way to find them. He phonebanked local middle schools looking for peers. An email list he started with five other Boston teachers didn't last. The work he was creating every night, like the work all those master teachers were creating, sat isolated on his own desktop. BetterLesson was the company he started to stop teachers from having to reinvent the wheel.

The Earliest Work

I started with Alex and the founding team in BetterLesson's earliest startup period. The first task was the familiar one: turn the idea into a usable website. But it quickly became clear that there were harder questions to address, such as: How would teachers find their way through what would eventually become tens of thousands of lessons and units? How would they decide which to trust? How would the design respect teachers as the experts they were rather than treating them as consumers to be marketed at? And why would they invest their own work back into the platform?

The research started with the teachers themselves: their day-to-day reality, the way they organized their own materials, the way they decided what was worth borrowing from another teacher and what wasn’t. From these insights, I created personas reflecting various thinking styles, mapped how a teacher's relationship with the platform might evolve over time, established the visual identity and design system, and developed an information architecture that could evolve to support the master-teacher concept at scale. Then I prototyped, tested with teachers, and iterated.

Beyond the Website

Over several years the work expanded. BetterLesson needed funding, and it needed partners who could give it institutional credibility. I designed the print materials, presentation templates, and infographics that Alex took into a pitch with the Gates Foundation, and the marketing materials that supported the eventual partnership with the National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union. The design system stayed focused on the teachers as the source of expertise, the platform as a means to make their expertise findable, and the brand serious enough that a teacher would put their professional reputation behind contributing to it.

The Results

BetterLesson secured a $3.5M Gates Foundation grant and a joint $7M platform investment with the NEA, which added 130+ master teachers contributing more than 3,000 Common Core lessons at launch. By 2016, BetterLesson was serving more than 400,000 educators nationwide. The company has since grown from its four-person founding team in 2008 into a national K-12 professional development partner for districts across the country, and in 2024 earned ESSA Level 3 certification on the basis of evidence that students whose teachers were coached by BetterLesson showed higher end-of-year math and reading scores than peers.

Role

Strategist
Creative Director
Designer
Information Architect

Key Deliverables

User Research
Information Architecture
Website Design
Print Collateral Design
Presentation Templates
Information Graphics
Email Marketing Templates