Becoming a Better Teacher Through Online Teacherpreneurship? Factors Influencing Teacherpreneurs' Perceived Gains in Teaching Practice

• In Event: Educators Meet the Fifth Estate: Social Media in Education

Abstract

Objective. In recent years, an increasingly common practice is for teachers to develop, market, and sell original classroom material to fellow educators via the internet. This practice has come to be known as online teacherpreneurship (Author, 2018b). Teacher-to-teacher sharing proliferates on marketplace platforms such as Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT), Amazon Ignite, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Marketplace, or Share My Lesson, as well as on social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tik Tok, and Patreon (Hodge et al., 2019). Educator activity in these spaces has boomed amidst the Coronavirus pandemic, as teachers scoured the internet for remote learning resources (Marcin, 2020). TpT, the most popular online educational marketplace in North America (Gomes, 2015), reported a 20% increase in weekly spending per buyer in spring 2020 compared to 2019 (Marcin, 2020).

Perspective and Methods. In spite of its popularity, scholarly exploration of online teacherpreneurship is in its infancy. In the current study, we share new data regarding the impact online teacherpreneurship has on its participants’ teaching practice, building upon our own past research of the TpT seller population (Author, 2019, 2020a) which is comprised of just over 200,000 sellers (Author, 2020b). In this previous research, teacherpreneurs reported that online teacherpreneurship positively impacted their classroom teaching (Author, 2019, 2020a). However, the factors influencing this outcome – the mechanism behind their improved teaching- are not fully understood. In the present study, we used data from a survey of 226 TeachersPayTeachers.com sellers to understand the factors influencing their perceived gains in teaching practice.

Results. An ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis and Dominance analysis indicated that teacherpreneurs’ perceived improvements to classroom practice were influenced by their collaborations with other teachers, teacher leadership efforts, and entrepreneurial pursuits, regardless of one’s TpT earnings or if they held a leadership position at their school. It seems that the collective teacherpreneur experience of collaborating, leading, and enterprising improved teacherpreneurs’ perceived classroom practice. It is compelling that teacherpreneurs believed they experienced this reskilling regardless of the actual money that they may have earned. A second, unexpected finding was that gains in perceived teaching practice were greater for female teacherpreneurs and those without graduate degrees. Teacherpreneurship may provide a unique opportunity for women, who dominate teaching as a profession (Taie & Goldring, 2017), bucking traditional neoliberal approaches (Apple, 2013).

Significance. Overall, this study suggests that creating and marketing lessons benefitted teacherpreneurs’ classroom practice, but questions remain when it comes to other stakeholders. Is the buying and selling of online classroom materials, “good” or “bad” for teacher-buyers, their students, and P-12 education broadly speaking? Given the potential of teacherpreneurship and its popularity, the field of teacher education should begin to address the online educational marketplace phenom in their programs, not only to assist those in searching for and evaluating online materials, but also to support those who may be interested in pursuing teacherpreneurship as a way to hone their talents and skills as professionals.

Authors

• Catharyn Crane Shelton, Northern Arizona University

• Tray Geiger, Arizona State University

• Leanna Archambault, Arizona State University