Carefully choose the team of teachers with whom you will work.

   Experiences:

Seven consortium teams selected the teachers with whom they worked from a pre-existing network of educators connected to the agency. One team found that a listserv invitation was forwarded to many other listservs and that they were inundated with requests to participate.

Many teams found that teachers lacked content expertise, and some teachers became overwhelmed and felt inadequate in the face of what they considered to be new expectations. Many team leaders discovered that good instructors were not necessarily good curriculum designers, and found that too much time was spent on theories of instruction and mechanics of curriculum writing. Several teams discovered that teachers were not familiar with national academic standards and how to develop standards-based lessons.

   Recommendations:

• Determine the audience for your learning module and recruit teachers that correspond to that profile.
• Start with existing agency educator contacts before enlisting teachers from the general public.
• Generate an invitation that requests a four part application: 1) a writing sample (the subject of which is the content involved in the project), 2) a standards-based lesson plan, 3) a description of their comfort level and use of technology, and 4) a letter of recommendation from their school administrator.
• Choose the teachers for the team by implementing an application review whereby each application is read by more than one person and evaluated with a standard rubric.

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