How to get educators to review your teaching resource (what worked for a new teacher creator)
It was 7:15 p.m. on a Tuesday, I was still sitting at my kitchen table, laptop open to my new TpT store, a half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese congealing next to me. I’d spent three months building a differentiated multiplication fact fluency resource for my 4th graders who struggle with dyscalculia—adjusted font sizes, color-coded fact groups, no overwhelming clutter on the page, exactly what I’d been begging to find for years. I posted it for free first to get traction, hit share on a Saturday in a couple of Facebook teacher groups, and by Tuesday, I had 12 downloads. Zero reviews. I refreshed the page three times just to make sure I wasn’t missing them.
The next day at lunch, I mentioned it to my teammate Lisa, who’d downloaded a copy the night before. She stirred her instant coffee, winced, and said “I’m sorry, I meant to leave something, but I graded 28 essays after school and I completely forgot. I’ll do it tonight, I promise.” I believed her, but I also knew she wouldn’t. By the time she got her kids to bed, the last thing she was going to do was log back into TpT to write a review for a free resource I made.
That’s when it hit me. I was asking other educators to do me a favor that cost them their most limited resource: time. Most of us work 60-hour weeks, juggle lesson plans, parent emails, IEP meetings, and our own families at home. Why would any of us carve out 10 minutes to write a detailed review for a stranger’s resource? If I wanted people to review my work, I couldn’t just ask for it. I had to make it so easy and worth their while that it didn’t feel like another chore.
First, I tested a small ask with the three student teachers I was mentoring that semester. I gave them all free early access to the final version of the resource, told them I wanted them to use it with their small math groups for their placement. All I asked was that if they used it at all, they leave one sentence that says what grade they used it with and one thing that worked or didn’t work. Instead of just telling them to go find my store, I linked directly to the review page in the email I sent. Two left reviews within a week, the third left one two weeks later when she used it for a progress monitoring quiz. None of them wrote more than two sentences, and that was fine—those first three specific reviews were enough to make my product look legitimate to other teachers browsing.
The next week, we had our weekly 4th grade PLC and we ended 10 minutes early, which almost never happens. I pulled out printed copies of the quick-check pages I’d made, passed them around the table, and said “This is the resource I made for our tier 3 math groups, I just posted it for $3. If you grab a copy and leave an honest review anytime this month, I’ll bring your choice of donuts to next month’s PLC. Don’t worry about writing a novel, even one line is enough, and I’d rather you tell me what’s broken than pretend it’s perfect.”
I ended up with seven reviews that month. One of them said my answer key was tucked at the very end of the file, so she had to scroll forever to find it. I’d never even noticed— I made the thing, so I knew where it was. That honest little line helped me fix the file the same night, and now it’s one of my top-selling resources. Another review said “I used this with my small group and my students stayed on task 10 minutes longer than usual” which is the kind of specific feedback that makes other teachers stop scrolling and buy the resource. That worked so much better than any generic social media ask I’d tried before.
I’ve been making resources for almost a year now, and the core of what works hasn’t changed. Most new creators I see make the same mistake I did at first: they ask for a lot for nothing. They ask for detailed reviews, don’t tell you what’s in it for you, and make you click through three pages to get to the review form. Now, every resource I post has two lines in the thank you email and a 2-line blurb at the end of the PDF that says: “Leaving a review earns you TpT credit that you can use for any future purchase on the site. Click here to leave your review in 10 seconds—even one sentence is enough.” Most newer teachers don’t even know TpT gives credit for reviews, so that small reminder is enough to get a lot of people to stop and do it.
It’s still not perfect. I have almost 300 downloads of that multiplication resource now, and only 17 reviews. That’s way better than the zero I started with, but it’s not the 50 I thought I’d have by this point. I tried doing a giveaway for a $10 Starbucks gift card a couple of months ago to get more reviews, and that only got me four new ones, and it was more work than it was worth. The donut trick for colleagues I see every week, and the direct link + credit reminder for everyone else, takes almost no effort on my part and works consistently.
Last week I got a review from a teacher I’ve never met who said she used the resource with her 4th grade resource room class, and two of her students moved up a level on their fact fluency assessment. That’s the kind of review that matters more than any generic 5-star line, and it only took her 30 seconds to write. I still check my reviews once a week, and I still get excited when a new one pops up. I’m still tweaking how I ask, trying small new things as I go, but for now, meeting educators where they are—keeping it quick, giving them something in return, not asking for more than they can give—has worked better than anything else I’ve tried.
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