“…the successes of [excellent teachers] tend to be born and die with them: beneficial consequences extend only to those pupils who have personal contact with the gifted teachers. No one can measure the waste and loss that have come from the fact that the contributions of such men and women in the past have been thus confined.”
John Dewey, “The Sources of a Science of Education” (1929)
The field of education has no professional memory. Doctors have thousands of years of practice, updated and organized. Lawyers have hundreds of years of precedent, searchable and indexed. But teachers reinvent the wheel every day. I first had this realization in graduate school, but evidence of this was patently apparent when I first started teaching. 10,000 teachers might teach The Great Gatsby, and essentially I had no idea what the others were doing. Great, veteran teachers were retiring, and with their retirement were evaporating decades of knowledge and experience.
This cyclical disappearance of knowledge is at the heart of numerous challenges in education. For one, new teachers suffer, often faced with the staggering task of developing or refining curriculum on top of learning a wide range of skills: classroom management, parent relationships, developing a professional persona, and more. Further, veteran teachers stagnate. Absent an Alexandria to prompt paradigmatic changes in their work, and they can fall back on tried or tired ways. And broadly, innovation in education suffers, as teachers are forced to move from zero to one over and over again, unable to build off of the professional work of their peers, unable to stand on the shoulders of giants.
The problem is familiar to anyone — everyone — who has been a teacher. I spent the first years of my time teaching sitting in the department office peppering my colleagues with questions: How do you engage students with grammar? What do you do with the poetry of Phyllis Wheatley? How do you teach chapter four of The Great Gatsby? These are the practical and meaningful questions, the critical questions that empower teachers to translate standards and expectations into daily action. Regional, state, and national organizations can set standards, but without the day-to-day tools for implementing a curriculum that helps students meet these standards, teachers are left with near impossible tasks.
This is a challenge we should have solved by now. Our digital age has promised two powerful capabilities: streamlined knowledge aggregation and simplified connectivity across distance. Outside of education, we have moved remarkably, if imperfectly, on both promises. Wikipedia shows the potential of collaborative knowledge aggregation, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter have enabled extraordinary connectivity (with both salutary and deleterious effects). Recently, education has begun harnessing the potential of connectivity, but it has moved very little on the front of knowledge aggregation. And it has moved hardly all at integrating the two.
But there are reasons we have not yet succeeded. Education is among the most complex of professions. The abstraction of astrophysics and the sequencing of supply chains can’t hold a candle to what it means to navigate a classroom full of children: to master the intricately interwoven structure of a coherent curriculum—a recursively designed, yearlong experience with thousands of moving parts—and then adapt and implement it in a room full of students, each with complex and textured cognitive and emotional lives that cannot (should not) be treated like control variables, and each advantaged and disadvantaged by personal, social, and economic contexts. The result is that there is no one way to teach well, no formula for a successful class. This great complexity and diversity means that professional knowledge is diffuse, it means that what is determined to be high quality changes by context, and it means improvement must be an ongoing process, which is challenging in time- and resource-strapped schools.
The solution lies in a combination of customized knowledge sharing and intentionally structured collaboration. It lies in both content and community. When I started teaching, I was lucky to have a department full of caring colleagues willing to share their work. This community, that I could turn to not only for suggestions and recommendations, but also for detailed plans and paths forward — this enriched my early years as a teacher. Many departments and courses are too small to have teachers with overlapping expertise, providing neither knowledge nor support.
This prospectus walks through research and understandings that identify and address the challenges teachers face in sharing knowledge and improving teaching, and it details some of the work I have led with a non-profit called Athena. Athena aims to respect and validate the expertise of teachers while more effectively harnessing the capacity of digital tools to support, catalyze, and measure a significant part of their work.
This document is the product of over a decade of reflection, years of testing, and conversations with thousands of teachers, school leaders, technologists, district and state stakeholders, nonprofits, and more. This document is an aggregation of knowledge across a range of domains: from learning science to technology design, professional development to curriculum review, and much more. Not everything has a research citation. Not everything has been researched. This is not a perfect document in the current sense of the word. There are gaps worthy of discussion and development. But etymologically speaking, the word “perfect” derives from the latin per, meaning “thoroughly,” and facio/facere, meaning “to do,” and in that sense, this document is thoroughly done. I hope you find this synthesis enriching and invigorating.
This was once a lengthy document that I shared with a few people, but to the extent that it can prompt a broader, more useful discussion, I share it here. I welcome corrections, feedback, improvements — all in the name of improving our collective likelihood of improving the quality of education wherever there is access to the internet.
— Peter
The (Unrealized) Promise of the Internet
Fulfilling the Need: Program Design
Appendix A — Mission: Improvement
Athena: A Prospectus 
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