WeTeachNYC

• Context and Challenge

  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 & Relevance: Limited time made it hard to find materials tailored to specific needs.

  • Teacher Agency & Trust: Educators distrusted “top-down” professional learning and lacked ownership over their growth.

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

  • Sustainability: Reform agendas and leadership changes threatened to make new efforts obsolete.
    
    

• Key Decisions and Actions

  Key Decisions & Actions

  1. Design for Trust and Teacher Agency

     • Built in educator voice through surveys, interviews, and advisory groups.

     • Created personalization features with user-controlled data sharing.
       

  2. Metadata & 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.
       

  3. 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.
       
       

  4. Beyond Tech: Supporting Adaptive Shifts

     • Trained central teams to foster online communities.

  Provided coaching, planning tools, and peer learning opportunities to embed sustainable practice.
  

• Outcomes

  • 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; today, 400,000+ public users rely on the site.

  • Equity: Became DOE’s go-to hub for culturally responsive–sustaining education (CR-SE) resources.

  • Efficiency: Reduced costs by bringing resource management in-house.

  • Durability: Still in active use a decade later, outlasting its original grant funding.

• Lessons Learned

  • Trust is the foundation: Teachers engage when their expertise is respected.

  • Metadata matters: Invisible design decisions make or break usability.

  • Build for longevity, not launch: Reform-agnostic design ensures survival.

  • Technology ≠ culture shift: Lasting change requires adaptive supports alongside tools.
    

• My Role

  Founding 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.