Write for Us!

Contact Leigh Morrison at lmorrison@theoldschoolhouse.com. Please include a little bit about yourself and your background, what subject areas you are most interested in, and why you are interested in being a part of SchoolhouseTeachers.com. Being a homeschooler is not required, but please feel free to share about your homeschooling background as well if you’d like.

Lessons include the lesson material, links to other resources (as appropriate), and generally an assignment that enables parents to gauge the student’s comprehension of the work and provides gradable content. If worksheets or questions are provided, the inclusion of an answer key is encouraged.

Purchasing a particular book cannot be required as part of the class, but for classes where additional reading is helpful (such as history) or where a text is required (such as literature), as long as the book can be generally obtained through a library, referencing it in your lessons is fine.

Classes release new lessons to students on a regular basis, usually weekly. Unit studies and worksheets have more flexible schedules. We ask that material be submitted at least 10 days before it is due.

For example, some of our lesson designers prefer to create the entire course ahead of time and submit it to us all at once. Some prefer to work ahead and submit a month or two of material at once, then continue to turn in a week or a month at a time. Others prefer to work and submit on a weekly schedule. We work with each person to find the balance that is best for both of us and to find the best time to start sharing the course with our members. Once we start a class on the site, we generally try to have new lessons each week unless we make a different arrangement beforehand. That way we can let our members know about the schedule at the time we launch the class. The key for us is to be able to reliably release content to our members on a schedule they can depend on. We all have life things happen that delay lessons by a day or may even require a week or two break from lessons (cars or computers breaking down, children getting sick, etc.). We understand that, and so do our members, and we will always do our best to work with you whatever comes up.

Class length varies based on the type of class. If it is a core subject, such as history or math, we like to have at least 18-36 weeks. If it is an elective or a specialized supplemental class (for example, a writing unit focused solely on a type of poem or writing a compare/contrast essay), there is no minimum number of lessons.

As far as compensation, all of our lesson designers have complete access to SchoolhouseTeachers.com for their entire family for as long as they are with us. Quite a few of our designers contribute for the membership and as a way to help the community of members much like a co-op setting.

In addition, for those writers who are publishers, small business owners, or bloggers, each six-month period the class runs (adding new content on a regular basis) earns the author advertising through The Old Schoolhouse(R) Magazine. Please contact Leigh Morrison at lmorrison@theoldschoolhouse.com for more information.

We have homeschool moms, authors, and grandparents who create the material solely on a volunteer basis in exchange to a free membership to the site. They don’t use their advertising credit; the financial benefit to them being the free access to our materials (and a few who don’t have children help out just to be a part of blessing the homeschooling community).

We also have lesson designers who have their own businesses and sell their own curriculum or services, who create previously unpublished content for our site. They earn advertising credit that they use for their business and in turn can sell what they create, integrate it into larger projects they publish and sell, etc.

Others of our teachers share a portion of their published curriculum on our site in exchange for the advertising and exposure.

Nothing on the site is live, so there are no schedules in that respect. And there is no obligation to grade papers, etc., though we do ask that you be responsive to email questions if they come up (most of our students don’t email with questions, but some do and they like to know the option is there).

Lessons can be all written text, a combination of text and video, all video, presented like a slideshow (such as PowerPoint), or done in a variety of methods. There aren’t any specific hardware or software requirements for creating a lesson. For written material, we can accept Word, PowerPoint, Open Office, etc. For video, anything with a .mp4 extension is usually fine. Lessons are emailed to the editorial team at the site, and we take care of formatting it and posting it to the site.

Please contact Leigh Morrison at lmorrison@theoldschoolhouse.com to discuss the specifics.

Please contact Leigh Morrison at lmorrison@theoldschoolhouse.com to express your interest in joining the group.