Write Your Own Curriculum, Then Share It¶
Yes, you can write your own curriculum and sell it. Start with the class you already teach. Write down each week in the order you teach it. Try it on your own students before you offer it to anyone else. If other families ask for it, it can become a course they buy.
Who writes their own curriculum¶
A parent teaching her own kids who builds a year of science because nothing on the shelf fit. A co-op mom who teaches the Tuesday history class. A microschool founder who is also the only person who can teach writing.
What it takes is a subject you know and students who can tell you whether it worked.
NavEd's founder, Ike, was schooled in a co-op that three moms built. One was good at math, one at history, one at English, and they pooled what they each knew. Writing your own curriculum starts the same way: you teach the thing you know to the kids in the room, and you write down what worked.
Start with the class you already teach¶
Write for the class you already run, not for an imaginary student. If you teach it on Tuesdays, you have a list of Tuesdays. Start there.
Lay out the unit, week by week¶
Here is a one-page outline you can copy onto paper. Make one for each unit.
- Unit name and length. For example, "Ancient Rome, twelve weeks."
- The question the unit answers. One sentence. What should a child be able to say or do at the end?
- Each week. A title, the reading or video, the one thing the child produces, and how you will know they got it.
- The pieces that need you. A discussion, a demonstration, a check-in. Mark them. These are the parts that will not travel to a family you never meet.
- The pieces that do not. Reading, a written response, a problem set, a photo of a finished project. Mark these too.
- What you would change. Leave a line at the bottom of each week to fill in after you teach it.
A unit can look thinner on paper than it felt in the room. The room had you in it.
Try it on your own students first¶
Teach the unit once from the outline. After each week, write down what confused them and what you skipped. A second run with those notes in hand is a different, better unit. Do not offer it to other families before you have taught it at least once, and ideally twice. The first run is how you find out what is missing.
If you are still choosing the material you will build on, our guide to curriculum selection for a small school covers that earlier step. If you want ideas for what to teach in a co-op class at all, here are co-op class ideas.
Put it where a child can work through it¶
NavEd Lessons is free for every school on every plan. A teacher builds a unit out of sections and steps. A step can hold text, links, videos, files, a rubric and a due date. A step can ask the student to turn work in as a photo, a video, a document or text, or be marked "turned in during class" for the things that happen in the room. You leave feedback, and the student can resubmit. A step can also link to a gradebook assignment.
So the outline above becomes sections for each week and steps for each task. You are not learning a new way of teaching. You are putting the one you have into an order a child can follow without you standing there.
When other families ask for it¶
Some people never want to share what they wrote, and that is a complete way to teach. If families outside your group start asking, you have a few options in plain terms. You can send them a file. You can put it on your own website. Or you can offer it as a course on NavEd Network.
On the Network, one teacher builds one self-paced course in a free workspace, with the same Lessons tools. A person at NavEd approves each seller and each course before it goes live. You set a one-time price, per child or per family. The family does not need a NavEd account. The child becomes a student in your workspace, so you are the one who sees and responds to their work.
NavEd keeps 3% of each sale. Stripe's card fee, 2.9% plus 30 cents, also comes out of the sale, and the buyer is not charged extra. Stripe pays you on a rolling delay of about 7 days. Building the course is free, and nothing is owed if it does not sell.
Some limits to say plainly. A course on the Network is self-paced, not a live class. The catalogue at network.nav.education/courses/ is new and has no courses in it yet, so a seller today would be among the first. The email you sign up with must be one that has never had a NavEd account.
How to Sell a Course You Already Teach walks through the listing itself.
You decide whether it leaves your room¶
A unit you wrote and taught is already a success if your own students learned from it. Sharing it is an option, not a next step you owe anyone.
When the unit is ready, you can start a seller workspace.