When Claire Benton first started teaching in 2013, she thought she could go about the school day without a cohesive lesson plan. After realizing the amount of work that’s required to even plan one day—so much so that she sometimes forgot to pack lunch—she very quickly felt the mental and emotional toll on her health.
And she’s not the first, as most teachers who are stressed or unorganized are more likely to have less effective classroom management. It wasn’t until about Benton’s fifth year when she became more intentional about her lesson planning, causing not only her mental health to improve, but also the educational health of her classroom. Starting in 2017, she advanced student growth in the top 25% of middle school math teachers in North Carolina for two years straight.
Recognizing the vital importance of well-organized lesson-planning for teachers’ mental health, Benton is using her 11 years in education and her proven entrepreneurial bent—she previously invented a kitchen sink organizer called the Kitchen Soap Saddle—to create TeachBase, an online, all-in-one interactive lesson-planning platform.
The easy-to-use platform designed to eliminate the stress and mess on teachers’ desks and in their lives is what got the Durham-based startup into CED’s Fall 2023 GRO Incubator. [We wrote here about the pitches at the GRO Incubator’s Demo Day on Nov. 16.]
“I feel like I did all the attempts to get out of education, when the truth is that that’s where I’m supposed to be,” Bentons said. “Every year, I have some of the highest scores in the county. I couldn’t run away from something that I was created to do. If this is what I’m supposed to be doing, then I might as well make an impact using some of my entrepreneurial endeavors and marry that into what I do everyday.”
After speaking with teachers across the state, Benton realized that other lesson-planning platforms or apps were either bought out by bigger companies, or were too complicated or didn’t “feel good” to use. They became inaccessible for teachers looking for a simple solution without having to resort to piles of paper or thousands of browser tabs.
That’s why in the spring of 2023, Benton created TeachBase to consist primarily of three parts: an interactive lesson planner, a shared (among teachers) lesson-planning portal and a straightforward task-management section. As a teacher herself, she emphasized the need of having her platform look and feel good for her fellow educators, as other platforms aren’t geared for their comfortability.
Lesson-planning portal the key
Benton feels most excited about the lesson-planning portal she’s implementing into TeachBase. Teachers spend lots of their time just creating things such as lesson plans and classroom activities, but most might not have the time to come up with new and exciting things every day. With the TeachBase lesson plan sharing portal, educators can type in what they want for a specific lesson and tweak the template for their own classrooms, eliminating time and stress for them and enabling them to better focus on their students.
“Now that I’m in my 11th year of teaching, I need to decide what I am going to do with my expertise,” Benton said. “[TeachBase] is the best thing that I feel like I can do with my knowledge. It’s a way that I can help teachers and it’s a way that scratches my entrepreneurial itch to make things.”
Benton said most people who haven’t been in a classroom in a long time, they’ll forget what it’s like to be in a classroom. In her experience, school administrators are bombarded with so many tasks that they don’t have the time or brain space to go over lesson plans with teachers or speak directly with students to discover their concerns. Therefore, teachers won’t get the direct help they or their students need.
With TeachBase, teachers will be able to take that weight off their shoulders and direct more focus on helping their students excel. With this platform, Benton hopes that not only will teachers use it to improve their classrooms, but that they will also be inspired by their own expertise to create easier and better solutions for the larger education system.
“I am sad at the state of education but excited at the new possibilities about all this awareness around where education is right now,” Benton said. “I want teachers to be at the forefront of what needs to happen…There’re so many creative ways for money to cycle inside the education system that we don’t get to tap into. So I need for teachers to understand that they are experts and they can make their own way within expertise.”
