What I Learned Asking Educators To Review My Self-Made Learning Resource
I’m leaning against my kitchen counter at 7:12 pm last month, crumbs from my kid’s leftover goldfish crackers scattered on my laptop trackpad, just hitting send on the 17th email. Each one went to a different classroom teacher, special education educator, and homeschool caregiver I’d connected with through local parent-teacher association meetings, asking if they’d be willing to test and review the new small-group reading resource I’d spent six months putting together. I’d used a rough version of it with my own 4th grade intervention group the year before, cleaned up the formatting, and was finally ready to share it beyond my classroom. But I didn’t want glowing reviews from my teacher besties who’d go easy on me just to put on my store page. I wanted real feedback from people who worked with the same age group I made it for: 2nd and 3rd graders struggling with reading fluency.
Two weeks later, I met Maria Lopez, a 2nd grade teacher from the Title I elementary two blocks from my house, at the corner coffee shop after dismissal. She showed up with a crumpled printed copy of my resource tucked into her canvas tote, her school lanyard still around her neck with a lopsided dinosaur keychain her 6-year-old had made her for Mother’s Day. She ordered a medium iced coffee with one pump vanilla, sat down, and flipped straight to page 12 before I even had a chance to ask how her week went.
“These fluency sentences are great for practice, but half my kids have never been sailing or ridden a snowmobile,” she said, tapping the page with her thumb. “When they stumble over the idea as much as the words, it defeats the whole point of practicing fluency.” She went on: the weekly exit tickets were full-page, which meant she had to use a whole sheet of paper per student instead of reusing the back for scratch work, and the soft blue background I’d added to make text easier on the eyes used up too much ink when she printed it on her classroom printer. She’d run out of her monthly color allocation by the second week of using it.
A week after that, I got an email from Mr. Torres, a 3rd grade special education teacher who’d agreed to test it with his small intervention group. He pointed out that I’d ordered my skill progression wrong: I put vowel teams before closed syllables, because that’s how my district structures reading instruction, but most intervention programs for struggling readers flip that order. I’d just gone off what worked for my kids, and never thought to check how other districts scope their lessons.
I went into this process thinking I just needed a handful of good reviews to drive sales on my Teachers Pay Teachers page. What I got was a dozen small, critical changes that turned a resource that worked for my class into one that works for a lot of different kids. The biggest thing I learned early on is that asking for reviews doesn’t have to be a big, stressful ask for anyone. I didn’t demand a 500-word polished write-up in two weeks. I gave people a full month to test it with their groups, sent the full resource for free to anyone who agreed, and offered $10 Venmo for coffee as a thank you for their time—nothing big, just enough to acknowledge that their time isn’t free. I also didn’t just ask “what do you think?” I sent three specific questions with the resource: what’s the first thing that slowed you down when you used this? What’s one thing your kids struggled with that I didn’t expect? What’s one small change would make this work better for you? That got me way more useful feedback than open-ended questions ever could.
I also invited a handful of homeschool parents to review it, since a lot of them reach out for intervention resources for their kids. One mom of a 2nd grader with dyslexia told me she loved the black and white version I added after Maria’s feedback, but she wanted all answer keys in one separate document, instead of at the end of every unit. That way she could just print the answer key once and keep it by her side while she checks work, instead of flipping through the whole 80-page resource every time.
Before I started asking for outside reviews, I thought a good resource was something I could make perfectly on my own, just based on my own classroom experience. I didn’t realize how much my own context shapes what I make. My kids all come from middle-class families, most have been sailing on the nearby lake, a few of them have been up north to ride snowmobiles on winter break. I work at a school that gives me a 50-page color printing allocation every month. None of that is universal, and I would have never noticed those gaps if I didn’t ask people in different situations to review what I made.
Right now, I’m sitting at my kitchen table again, reformatting all the exit tickets to half-sheets and swapping out the fluency sentences. “We went sailing on the lake” became “We ride our bikes to the park,” and “The snowmobile goes fast down the hill” became “We build a snowman in the yard.” I still have two reviews outstanding from a teacher in a rural small town who said she hasn’t had time to test it yet—her school had four snow days last month and they’re still playing catch up on reading assessments. I’m not rushing her.
I still check my inbox every night for new responses, and I don’t care if more than half the feedback is things I need to change, not things I got right. What I love about having educators review my work isn’t the five-star ratings I can put on my store. It’s the fact that they’re willing to carve out 15 minutes from a chaotic week to tell me the honest truth, so I can make something that actually helps the kids and adults who use it. Next week, I’m meeting another teacher for lunch to go over her notes, and I’m already curious what I’ll be changing next.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What I Learned Asking Educators To Review My Self-Made Learning Resource