The Power of Educator Investment

This week my reading covered several research studies conducted on colleges using Open Ed Resources. The studies tested a variety of things—the effect of OER on graduation rates, grades, retention rates, savings to colleges, and more. In nearly every study, students and institutions using OER fared the same or better than those not using OER. In particular, student success (be it measured in grade, retention, savings, or graduation) improved when using OER. As a seasoned teacher, I was a bit puzzled as to how simply choosing a self-built, free curriculum could actually improve my students’ success. Though I realize saving money is important from the students’ perspective, the savings of money alone would not motivate better effort towards improving grades or study habits. But as I was reading through study after study, I began to wonder about an aspect of using OER that I had overlooked before: Educator Investment.

Now, when I say “investment”, I am not referring to the educator buying anything. After all, OER is based on free use. No, what I mean by “Educator Investment” is how invested those educators naturally become in their course of instruction simply by nature of self-building a course. For example, if I am handed a complete curriculum when I am hired as a 4th grade teacher, and I have all summer to get ready to teach that curriculum in the fall, it is virtually impossible to get to know all the ins and outs of the curriculum’s subject matter within that summer. It isn’t even expected. Indeed, the premade curriculum negates the need for this as a complete curriculum comes with enough hand-holding to allow just about anyone to navigate teaching the subject matter. However, that kind of hand-holding does not a successful student make.

In one of the studies I read where student success while using OER was being evaluated, the research conclusions noted, “The change in textbooks coincided with a change in pedagogy, which may have been the decisive factor in the growth of student learning.” Here we see that changing the pedagogy—by the educator’s investment of reworking and/or rewriting the curriculum—was likely the main reason for student success.

In another study of the highly successful “Z-degree” (zero-cost degree) at Tidewater Community College, it was noted that the very classes that saw success were taught by educators “largely who were involved in the creating of the courses.” These two studies show a correlation of teacher investment in creating the course to student success.

When I think back on the times in which I have made my own curricula—either reusing, remixing, or from-scratch creating it—without fail my students have had better success (and a lot more fun). Is that because I am an amazing pedagogical creator? Not at all—in fact many times my “great ideas” have to be scaled back or altered as my students give me feedback (which actually makes my creation better). But the very act of building a unit (or a even just a lesson) yourself, requires you to know the subject matter backwards and forwards. I have to think about the wording of every discussion question and evaluate every measuring tool: “Wait…was he the first person to do this or just the first American to do this?”, “How much would that be in today’s money?”, “This is going to be boring…how can I make this more relevant?”, “How can I measure this without a worksheet?”, etc. In the process of making these pieces of the lessons, I find myself excited (and educated), curious (and caring)…invested!

I remember a unit about electricity with the curriculum’s dry worksheets and wordy texts that I just dreaded my way through for a few years, until one summer I determined to make that unit over myself. It took a while, and I wasn’t sure I would enjoy it (electricity was not of interest to me), but I ended up having so much fun creating useful, hands-on, learning experiences that when it came time to teach that lesson the following year, I was giddy with excitement to introduce this topic to my students. They knew it, too. They could see it in my eyes and body language. They caught the excitement and (best learning environment ever) they got curious. That was a solid beginning, but excitement and curiosity alone do not lead to success, nor does fun. It was because I was confident in my knowledge of the unit, I knew exactly what outcomes I wanted to reach and had mapped out the path to those outcomes with my sweet students in mind. To be clear, it was not my excitement (though I was excited), or the fresh curriculum (though it was refreshing), or the curious kids (that always helps), or the fun ( a nice addition) that improved my students’ success—it was my investment in the subject itself.

Questions: Is there a way to measure teacher investment for research in order to evaluate its influence on student success? What barriers keep educators from creating their own lessons or units?