Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Grodd.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Alex. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
After college, I taught 6th grade Social Studies in the Atlanta public schools. I then moved to Boston and taught 6th Grade English at Roxbury Preparatory Charter School. I loved teaching but struggled most nights to write and develop compelling, engaging lesson plans. After three years in the classroom, I decided to try to solve the problem and started BetterLesson with my co-founder Erin Osborn.
BetterLesson.com now has over 600,000 active teachers each month coming to our site to access and share the highest quality lesson plans, resources, and instructional units. Over the past three years, we’ve also developed BetterLesson Coaching, a highly personalized professional development platform that matches teachers with an expert, virtual instructional coach based on their instructional profile. They work together over the course of the school year together to make meaningful instructional shifts that have a large impact on student learning.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
I’d be surprised if any entrepreneur described their journey taking place along a smooth road. Like all entrepreneurs, we’re always seeking to deepen our product-market fit and create business models that can scale to as many teachers as possible.
After years of building our lesson-sharing business, we needed to expand the type of support we provided to educators. Teachers were (and still are) being asked to change their practice to prepare students for a rapidly evolving economy and lesson plans were not an adequate solution to support that shift. As a result, we decided to build a complementary K-12 PD business and launched BetterLesson Coaching. In many ways, it was a natural evolution for us, but it also required building a new product and entering a new market. Thankfully, the pivot has paid off, and our PD business is thriving and growing at an exciting clip. We’re currently in 50 districts and 19 states and expanding rapidly.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
BetterLesson has two products:
1) BetterLesson Plans is our free, lesson-sharing website for teachers with an active community of millions of educators across the globe.
2) BetterLesson Coaching is our PD Product that empowers districts to support and develop effective teachers at scale.
BetterLesson Coaching matches each teacher with an expert virtual coach based on that teacher’s unique instructional profile. Together they engage in our intuitive continuous learning process, Try, Measure, Learn (TML), to make huge gains for their students.
The thing that we’re most proud of as a company is also the thing that sets us apart: we truly help teachers shift their practice and create more learner-centered classrooms. Our model is job-embedded, continuous (either annual or semester packages), and personalized to the needs of each teacher.
Districts spend over $18B each year on teacher PD with very little return on that investment. We are extremely proud that our district partners are seeing tremendous ROI and deep changes to teacher practice.
If you had to start over, what would you have done differently?
This is a somewhat annoying answer but I don’t think I would have done too many things differently — all the mistakes and missteps that we’ve made we’re huge learning opportunities and have helped shape where we are today.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.betterlesson.com
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/BetterLesson/
- Twitter: @BetterLesson
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