Building a statewide adult education lesson bank
A friend who led the state adult education office asked me whether we could build a place for instructors to create and share lesson plans. Teachers were preparing their lessons independently, and she wanted them to be able to use one another's work while keeping it aligned with state academic standards.
We worked through the idea in meetings with her, a board of state officials, and individual stakeholders. I was responsible for turning those discussions into an application. I did much of the development myself and hired and directed a contractor for part of it.
The resulting Lesson Bank accumulated more than 2,200 registered accounts. Teachers contributed 309 lessons that passed expert review and became available to others.
Writing and reviewing a lesson
An instructor creating a lesson worked through a series of forms, choosing the academic standards it addressed along the way. Across the two primary subject areas, that meant 13 steps and 69 fields.
I expected those forms to need changes, so I built an editor for them. Field definitions and validation rules lived in the database, where they could be adjusted without rewriting the application.
I also suggested having an experienced educator review a lesson before it could be published. Selecting a standard was something the application could check. Deciding whether a lesson taught it well called for an educator.
The state staff agreed to that review step and took responsibility for choosing reviewers, assigning submissions, and managing approvals. I made approval a requirement for publication.
Putting it to work
I taught two in-person training sessions and made short instructional videos for the state to distribute. Feedback from early users gave me changes to make as instructors started working with it.
The project started under a university, then moved to the state agency's own domain and operation. My friend eventually left her position, but the Lesson Bank continued. State staff presented it at a national conference, and teachers from other states found it and registered without any formal interstate partnerships.
What I found later
When I revisited the project in 2026, the dates in the archive caught my attention. The site had been online until 2025, yet the most recent published lesson activity I could find was from 2019. Four submissions made between 2020 and 2023 were still awaiting approval.
I couldn't tell from those records what had happened within the organization. They did suggest that the review process had stalled: teachers had submitted work, but it hadn't reached publication.
For a similar project today, I'd spend more time with the state team on how reviews would continue as people changed roles or left. We'd need someone responsible for watching the queue and a way to hand that responsibility over. The approval requirement depended on people being available to carry it out.