WeTeachNYC

• Context and Challenge

  In 2015, the NYC Department of Education (DOE) faced a fragmented professional learning landscape. Instructional resources were scattered across multiple systems, inconsistent in quality, and often misaligned with teachers’ classroom realities. With 76,000 educators across the city, this created major challenges:

  • Coherence: Teachers struggled to connect district priorities with available resources.

  • Accessibility and Relevance: Limited time made it hard to find materials tailored to specific needs.

  • Teacher Agency and Trust: The platform had to consider varying levels of trust for top-down professional learning.

  • Equity Gaps: Under-resourced schools faced the steepest barriers to access.

  • Sustainability: The platform needed to outlast leadership changes and shifting priorities.
    
    

• Key Decisions and Actions

  We built educator voice into the platform from the start, through surveys, interviews, and advisory groups, and created personalization features where teachers controlled their own data sharing. Knowing that educators had multifaceted needs, we built multiple ways to find things, quick search for time-pressed teachers and reflective browsing for people with more time to explore.

  We branded the platform as reform-agnostic so it could survive political shifts, and equipped DOE teams with analytics dashboards and community management tools so they could own it long-term without depending on outside vendors. We also trained central teams to run online communities and gave them coaching, planning tools, and peer learning opportunities to make the practice stick.

• Outcomes

  The platform reached 70,000+ educators, 4,000+ resources, and 60+ active communities of practice. At its peak, 22,000 teachers accessed the library weekly, and more than 400,000 public users relied on the site. Bringing resource management in-house cut costs. And the platform is still in active use a decade later, well past its original grant funding.

• Lessons Learned

  Teachers engage when their expertise is respected. Trust is the foundation everything else sits on.

  Metadata decisions are invisible to users but they're what makes a platform usable or not.

  Design the platform so it can adapt over time.

  Technology alone doesn't shift culture. Lasting change needs adaptive support alongside the tools.

• My Role

  Inaugural Product Lead (2015–2021)

  I directed the end-to-end design, build, and scale of WeTeachNYC, managed vendors and off-site developers for the custom build, led the educator research that put teacher voice into every stage of the process, and aligned multiple DOE divisions around one platform.