WeTeachNYC
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In 2015, the NYC Department of Education (DOE) faced a fragmented professional learning landscape. Instructional resources were scattered across dozens of 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.
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Key Decisions and Actions
Design for Trust and Teacher Agency
Built in educator voice through surveys, interviews, and advisory groups.
Created personalization features with user-controlled data sharing.
Metadata and Taxonomy Strategy
Developed a NYC-specific tagging system that balanced rich metadata with low-burden processes.
Enabled multiple discovery pathways: quick searches for time-pressed teachers and reflective browsing for deeper learning.
Sustainability by Design
Branded the platform as reform agnostic to endure political shifts.
Equipped DOE teams with analytics dashboards and community management tools for long-term ownership.
Beyond Tech: Supporting Adaptive Shifts
Trained central teams to foster online communities.
Provided coaching, planning tools, and peer learning opportunities to embed sustainable practice.
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Scale & Adoption: Reached 70,000+ educators, 4,000+ resources, and 60+ active communities of practice.
Impact: At its peak, 22,000 teachers accessed the library weekly; 400,000+ public users relied on the site.
Equity: Built Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education criteria into the resource submission process itself, so culturally responsive-sustaining materials were a standard of quality rather than a separate collection
Efficiency: Reduced costs by bringing resource management in-house.
Sustainability: Still in active use a decade later, outlasting its original grant funding.
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Trust is the foundation: Teachers engage when their expertise is respected.
Metadata matters: Invisible design decisions ensure usability.
Build for longevity: Design the platform so it can adapt over time.
Technology does not guarantee culture shift. Lasting change requires adaptive supports alongside tools.
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Inaugural Product Lead (2015–2021)
Directed the end-to-end design, build, and scale of WeTeachNYC.
Managed vendor and off-site developers for the custom build.
Led educator research to embed teacher voice at every stage.
Aligned multiple DOE divisions around a shared digital vision.