Login or sign up to view/download this Featured Lesson by Pamela Bookbinder, 11th grade history teacher at Global Enterprise High School in New York, NY.

At BetterLesson, we're kicking off the new year with a campaign to recognize highly effective teachers called Featured Teachers. While part of the campaign is to capture and share their curriculum with other teachers on the site, the second part includes an interview to learn more about the teacher as well as to glean their insights into effective teaching practices.

We start off the Featured Teachers campaign with one of our very own, Christopher Cullen.

Chris taught 6th grade science at Roxbury Prep in Boston, MA from fall 2007 to spring 2009. He now works full-time with BetterLesson. Here is our interview with him:

1. Three words that describe your teaching persona:
Calm, Quirky, Demanding

2. Why teach?
I decided to teach because the process of education has made all the difference in my life and I wanted to continue to be an agent in the process to both give of myself as well as to continue to learn.

I continued to teach because it was an awesome challenge day after day, because I grew by embracing the challenges in a reflective and open way, and because I loved the relationships I developed with students in and out of the classroom as their teacher and on the soccer field as their coach.

I stopped teaching so that I could work with Alex at BetterLesson in an effort to strengthen the teaching profession through sharing and collaboration tools as well as through working to help teachers receive recognition for their work.

I learned that if I can teach, I can do anything. I will return to teaching down the line.

3. What would you be if not a teacher?
Learner.

4. What do you do to optimize student engagement in class?
High expectations. Clear instructions. Fast pace. Body movement. Short clips of multimedia whenever possible.

5. Coffee, tea, or caffeine-free?
Water wakes me up!

6. Describe your classroom management style in a few sentences.
Very clear expectations and strict enforcement of the rules. To be fair is to be consistent.

7. Favorite Cartoon/TV/Movie Teacher:
Mr. Miyagi

8. Most vivid teacher dream?
100 students show up to my class, and I only have 25 sets of copies. I can't do anything to get their attention.

9. Favorite Book:
The Prophet

10. Is teaching a science or art?
With 25 sixth grade students in a class, teaching is theater and its success depends on practice, reflection, and refinement.

11. Anything to add?
I owe all of my professional development as a teacher to the wonderful staff at Roxbury Prep.

Login or sign up to join the featured network Urban Education Exchange.  The Urban Education Exchange is an organization that provides a network of urban educators with a precise, proven methodology for teaching reading comprehension.  Their mission is to eliminate the achievement gap.

Login or sign up to view this featured lesson by Paul Hobson, 3rd grade teacher at King Chavez Arts Academy in San Diego, CA.

BetterLesson headed down to DC last week to meet with the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy.  We discussed a broad range of topics and brainstormed different strategies for BetterLesson to integrate with state and federal organizations.  We very much appreciated their insights and excitement about BetterLesson, and we're excited to continue the conversation over the coming months.

Since the beginning, we've had it in the back of our minds that BetterLesson would bridge communities of educators on an international scale. But since we know the American school system better than others, we've spent most of our time focused on teachers, curriculum, and communities from within the United States. Nevertheless, international educators have begun to notice our site. When we launched our beta version of BetterLesson in August, one of the most common requests we heard was to include a registration menu for international educators. Since we've added this feature, teachers from Australia, China, and Russia, among other countries, have signed up. This past week, Swedish educator Jesper Isaksson gave us a favorable review in a post on his blog, The Teacher Chronicles. Check out his screencast too, which rivals one of our own, and includes a serenade by jazz vocalist Melody Gardot.

An international demand for this type of platform is extremely encouraging. Our primary goal at BetterLesson is to help teachers share resources and communicate with professional peers beyond the classroom walls.  If teachers can break the cycle of isolation by collaborating and interacting in real-world ways with teachers far and wide, then we're well on our way to reaching this milestone.  The value that international teachers bring to BetterLesson is tremendous.  The potential for collaboration and communication among educators from diverse places brings with it a power to enrich and impact the culture of educators everywhere.  We look forward to even more collaboration that transcends borders, among teachers whose context may be radically different but whose professional goals are deeply aligned.

Alex, Erin, and I recently attended NewSchools Venture Fund's Community of Practice event in Redwood City, CA.  The event is a wonderful opportunity to connect in person with people whom we normally connect with via email, phone, and other virtual technologies (for me, that now includes Erin and Alex, who are still rocking Boston while I pioneer San Francisco).

One of the best parts of the conference was the "Solution Village."  For two 1-hour sessions on the first day of the event, NewSchools-backed entrepreneurs led mini focus groups through solutions they are implementing to address specific challenges in education.  Alex led a focus group through BetterLesson's effort to help teachers connect and share instructional content and practices.  Accompanied by Sarah Sanborn, a 9th grade English teacher at Leadership Public Schools (and BetterLesson power user), Alex demonstrated how BetterLesson was helping teachers collaborate both within and beyond their school walls.

Professional development highlights included listening to guest speakers Reed Hastings of NetFlix (his "Freedom and Responsibility Culture" manifesto is a must-read) and Chip Heath of Stanford Business School (his Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is also a must-read).

The BetterLesson team proudly presented as a "side dish" at the 23rd Web Innovator's Group (WebInno) this year.

WebInno, a conference dedicated to the Boston Startup community, gave us a unique opportunity to showcase our site and engage in conversation with thoughtful attendees. As a member of the tech team, I'm usually in front of my computer, not in front of a crowd. This was the first time I got to truly demo the site and pitch to strangers, and I think I did a passable job!

We met a number of folks involved in other educational startups, but the event was mainly for web entrepreneurs and technologists; there weren't too many teachers in the crowd. Therefore, we created a 'help a teacher out' beta-invite postcard that folks could send to their friends and family members who were educators.

Thanks to WebInno for putting together another great event.  We're looking forward to the next one.

This week I had the pleasure of meeting with teachers at East Palo Alto Charter School (EPACS) and ERES Academy. 

I'm grateful for the time I was given to share our website with these wonderful teachers during after-school hours.  After a long day of teaching, they deserve to be iced and massaged like Greg Maddux after 9 innings of painting the corners.  We're excited that BetterLesson has started to provide some late-inning relief!