Is Teachers Pay Teachers Legit?

Teachers are always looking for resources for their classrooms, whether it be lesson plans, activities and games, worksheets, lesson planning tools, educational videos, or tools to make their classrooms run smoother. The curriculum and resources provided by schools often don’t meet the needs of every student and teachers will create their own materials to fill these gaps or tailor their instruction to their students.

Teachers also create a variety of creative materials to enhance their student’s experience, such as games, classroom decor, crafts, and technology resources. There are also a number of parents and homeschoolers looking for resources to support their children’s education at home. Teachers Pay Teachers is an educational online marketplace where Teacher-Authors can share resources that they create with other educators and parents. So, is Teachers Pay Teachers Legit?

Teachers Pay Teachers (TpT) is a marketplace where teachers can sell their original educator-created educational resources to other teachers around the world. Founded in 2006, “TpT empowers teachers with the world’s largest catalog of over 5 million pieces of educator-created content.”

Why Do Teachers Use Teachers Pay Teachers?

Teachers are provided with curriculums to use in their classrooms by their school or their school district. Many teachers supplement these resources with resources they create or borrow from their peers. Teachers also create resources to make their classrooms run smoother and more efficiently, such as lesson plan templates and student data tracking systems to name a few. These are examples of the resources one can find listed on Teachers Pay Teachers and that teachers look for.

Customers of Teachers Pay Teachers are looking for time-savings opportunities and to gain the expertise of other educators around the world. With the increased demand for more blended learning and distance learning resources and tools in the past few years, there has been an increase in these types of materials available on Teachers Pay Teachers as well.

How Much Do Items on Teacher Pay Teachers Cost and How Do You Pay For Them?

Most customers on Teachers Pay Teachers use their own funds to purchase products and support the storefronts of Teacher-Authors. Teachers Pay Teachers accepts credit cards, PayPal, gift cards, and account credits to purchase items. Most items listed on Teachers Pay Teachers range from less than $1 all the way up to $100+, depending on the item listed and the time it took the author to create the resource. Items listed on Teachers Pay Teachers are often drastically less expensive than purchasing a curricular resource from an education publisher.

Teachers Pay Teachers also has some features to assist teachers with funding their purchases on Teachers Pay Teachers including TpT ClassFund and TpT School Access. TpT Class Fund works similarly to Donors Choose, an education-focused crowdfunding site, allowing teachers to create campaigns dedicated to achieving an outlined goal that can be funded so they can purchase resources for their classroom from Teachers Pay Teachers directly.

TpT School Access allows teachers to access a school-funded subscription to Teachers Pay Teachers resources instead of utilizing money out of their own pocket.

Who Creates the Products Listed on Teachers Pay Teachers?

The products listed on Teachers Pay Teachers are created by creators, which Teachers Pay Teachers calls Teacher-Authors. According to Teachers Pay Teachers, these Teacher-Authors are comprised of:

K-12 classroom teachers
Instructional Specialists
School Administrators
Speech Language Pathologists
Early Learning Specialists
Homeschoolers
Tutors
Parents

Teacher-Authors create their own storefronts where they sell and advertise the resources they create.

What Kinds of Resources Are Available on Teachers Pay Teachers?

According to their website, Teachers Pay Teachers contains over 5 million resources to date. The resources available span from PreK to 12th grade and beyond. There are resources for every subject and specialty and are often priced relatively cheaply compared to published curriculums. The vast majority of resources listed on Teachers Pay Teachers are Math and English Language Arts resources for K-12 classrooms. This is evident with the ability to search by Common Core State Standards related to those two subjects.

That being said, there are many resources for subjects such as Art and Music, Social Studies, Science, and Foreign Language. Some examples of resources available on Teachers Pay Teachers, according to their website, are:

activities
lesson plans
task cards
printables
interactive notebooks
original books and poems
classroom decor and organizational materials
worksheets
teacher planning calendars
educational audio or musical resources
instructional videos for teachers or students
products that aid in the creation of resources, including fonts, clip art, and other graphics

The convenience of mostly print-on-demand resources and the price is a draw for many educators. The average price of a resource on Teachers Pay Teachers is usually only a few dollars. The website is easy to search and filter to find what you are looking for. Some filters you can apply are grade level, subject matter, price, resource type, and format. You can also search in a search bar by keyword or storefront name.

Why Do People Sell Resources on Teachers Pay Teachers?

It’s no secret that the teaching profession is sometimes underpaid and these underpaid educators look for supplemental income or second jobs to make ends meet. Teachers Pay Teachers allows teachers to make money on resources they are already making for their classrooms.

The average teacher spends time outside of their contract or paid hours planning instruction and prepping materials and may not have time for an additional job. Selling resources they would already be making or have already made is a time saver for Teacher-Authors and allows them to share their expertise and experience with other educators around the world who may be looking for a similar resource.

Many teachers also self-fund their classroom materials and supplies and selling resources on Teachers Pay Teachers gives teachers a way to make money to put back into their classrooms. Educators are experts in their fields and have vast amounts of experience working with students and Teachers Pay Teachers is an accessible way to make additional income utilizing the skills and expertise they use daily.

What Are Some Critiques of Teachers Pay Teachers?

Some critiques of Teachers Pay Teachers revolve around copyright infringement accusations from some sellers and publishers, the quality of some of the resources and the qualifications of those who made them, and the fees related to selling on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Education publishers, such as those who write and sell curricula and other resources, have found authors on Teachers Pay Teachers plagiarizing their published materials. There are also many instances of authors on the site copying each other and producing plagiarized materials undercutting the price of the original creator. Some creators have also created resources utilizing clipart, fonts, and other license imagery that violates the terms of the Teachers Pay Teachers selling agreement.

Though there are previews of the materials for sale on each listing along with accompanying reviews from other purchasers, some criticize the quality of some resources found on Teachers Pay Teachers. Though the reviews on products are from verified purchasers, reviewers are incentivized with Teachers Pay Teachers credits for their reviews that can be used for future purchases. This often leads to many quickly written reviews simply to obtain the credit rather than thoughtful reviews that could benefit other buyers.

Related to the quality concerns, you do not need to prove that you have any qualifications, such as a teaching license, to create educational materials and sell them on Teachers Pay Teachers. This can lead to some additional questioning about the quality of the resources produced by these sellers and their effectiveness in the classroom. Customers looking to use the materials listed for sale should use their professional judgment on whether the quality of a purchase meets their standards of best practice.

Competitors to Teachers Pay Teachers have sprung up, the most well-known being Classful.com. This competitor advertises no seller subscription fees or platform fees, which is different from Teachers Pay Teachers. Teachers Pay Teachers offers a free Basic Seller storefront which provides the seller a payout of 55% of their sales and a small transaction fee or a Premium Seller subscription where the seller pays a subscription fee yearly to receive an increased payout of 80% of their sales and a smaller transaction fee.

The fees associated with Teachers Pay Teachers are an additional critique of Teacher-Authors selling on the platform who believe they should receive a higher percentage of sales from their original content.

Conclusion

Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace for educational resources created by Teacher-Authors with the goal of sharing resources among educators. It allows educators and education resource creators to sell their originally created materials and has a mission of saving teachers time, allowing the sharing of resources and content expertise, and improving the learning of students around the world.

With any online marketplace platform, there are its pros and cons, however, if you work in the education field and are looking for a specific resource, Teachers Pay Teachers is the most popular and well-known site of this kind.