Practice What You Preach - The Case for Sharing Lesson Plans

-- By HeatherStevenson - 20 Dec 2009

Final Version

Selling Lesson Plans

A lesson plan is like a teacher's road-map, guiding him through a class period and elaborating the strategies that he will use in order to help his students learn a particular aspect of a curriculum. In the past, lesson plans were often hand-written notes, stored in binders, xeroxed, and shared among teachers within a school. However, the methods of creation and sharing of lesson plans is changing. In class, Professor Moglen discussed the tendency of the internet to transform goods previously outside of the capitalist economy into commodities. As with many items that formerly carried little economic value, with the rise of the internet and the discovery that people will pay to purchase lesson plans, the "commoditization" of the personal lesson plan has rapidly accelerated. However, while the ease with which the internet allows for sharing of lesson plans will almost necessarily change the frequency and form in which plans are shared, the involvement of money is not a given. It seems possible that lesson plans could be shared under the Creative Commons' framework, as some software has been, in order to increase sharing and the quality of lesson plans.

Why Sharing Lesson Plans Makes Sense

Good teachers write lesson plans, and rework those plans each year based on the needs of individual students in a particular class. If some teachers were to share lesson plans for free, additional teachers could continue modifying the lesson plans to meet the needs of particular groups of students and then share the modified versions of the lesson plans. Over time, many different versions of an original lesson plan would be available such that less and less modification would be necessary for each teacher. For example, the original poster of a lesson plan might write a lesson plan on dividing fractions. An ESL teacher might use that lesson plan, but modify it to meet the needs of English Language Learners, and then share the version targeted at ELLs. A third teacher could take that ESL version and modify it further, focusing on the particular needs of very new English Language Learners who share a primary language. Over time, many versions of the same lesson would appear, each suited to a particular group of students. Similarly, teachers might try the lesson and find ways to improve it generally - those improvements could also be shared. By mimicking processes already used for open source software, teachers could create less work for themselves AND write stronger lesson plans. The continued process of revision and new modifications would create incentives for teachers to post both original lesson plans and modifications, because anything posted might later be re-posted in a modified (and useful) form.

Why Sharing Lesson Plans is Better Than Selling Lesson Plans

Some websites are already set up that allow teachers to share lesson plans with each other. Sharing lesson plans makes more sense than selling them. If a teacher creates a lesson plan and then sells it, he will profit financially from its sale and the purchasers may profit (in time, knowledge, lesson quality, etc.) as well. However, any modification or improvement made to the lesson plan by the purchaser does not benefit anyone but him and his students. Presumably, purchasers are not authorized to resell their modified versions of a lesson plan, particularly if they've made only small changes. Thus, in a sale-based lesson plan market, the additional work of purchasers benefits only them. In contrast, when teachers share, the modified lesson plans may be posted and the efforts of those teachers who modify lesson plans may benefit lots of other teachers. Thus, by sharing (as they so often tell their students to do) teachers will in fact receive greater benefits overall than if they were to sell their lesson plans.

I don't understand why the free culture option, which is the center of the analysis, is postponed to a paragraph at the end, which seems to take off in a separate direction. The controversy over who should benefit, the teachers or the taxpayers, is resolved in the free culture arrangement: both teachers, collectively, and school districts, collectively, benefit. If the lesson plans and other teaching materials produced and shared are shared on Creative Commons' BY-SA-NC terms, every teacher will get attribution and recognition, every modification and improvement to lesson plans will have to be put back in the commons, which means they will constantly adapt and improve, and no one will be able to make commercial distribution use of them, which means the companies that want to sell lesson plans will have to make their own. This is the optimal solution to the problem you explain, but you don't explain why.

ORIGINAL TEXT

---++ Selling Lesson Plans A lesson plan is like a teacher's road-map, guiding him through a class period and elaborating the strategies that he will use in order to help his students learn a particular aspect of a curriculum. In the past, lesson plans were often hand-written notes, stored in binders, xeroxed, and shared among teachers within a school. However, the methods of creation and sharing of lesson plans is changing. In class, Professor Moglen discussed the tendency of the internet to transform goods previously outside of the capitalist economy into commodities. As with many items that formerly carried little economic value, with the rise of the internet and the discovery that people will pay to purchase lesson plans, the "commoditization" of the personal lesson plan has rapidly accelerated. However, while the ease with which the internet allows for sharing of lesson plans will almost necessarily change the frequency and form in which plans are shared, the involvement of money is not a given.

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How Lesson Plans Are Sold Good teachers have always used lesson plans in order to help their students achieve the maximum possible amount of learning in a small amount of time. Though variations in pedagogy (and skill, personal preference, experience, time, etc.) lead to very different plans, almost all teachers are required by their employers to write something down in preparation for the classes that they teach. New websites like Teachers Pay Teachersfacilitate the process of purchasing and selling lesson plans by teachers. As on Craigslist, users may post a lesson plan and ask for a particular price from purchasers; unlike on Craiglist, the same lesson plan may be purchased and downloaded many times, allowing the poster to earn money from the sale of the lesson plan to multiple people. The concept of paying for educational materials online is not new. Websites like Edhelper.com have long offered worksheets, created by employees of edhelper, and accessible to teachers through an annual subscription fee. However, now that teachers have started selling lesson plans that they created for use in their public school classrooms, a debatehas arisen as to who owns the plans.

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What Selling Lesson Plans Means from a Practical Point of View If teachers can simply purchase lesson plans, it means that they will likely spend less time creating the basic framework of each day's lesson, and they will spend less time creating worksheets used to reinforce students skills and knowledge. This may be a good thing: some teachers will use the extra time to refine the purchased lesson plans, creating plans for differentiated instruction based on the different needs and strengths of individual students in their classes. On the other hand, some teachers may be inclined to unthinkingly use the strategies planned out by another teacher for a different group of students. Notably, the possibility of purchasing lesson plans (or even of using lesson plans purchased by a school district with a set of textbooks) is not new. School districts often purchase textbooks and accompanying curricula. Furthermore, stand alone workbooks have long been used to reinforce memorization of material, such as multiplication tables, vocabulary words, or important dates in history. However, in the past, the materials purchased were typically created specifically for sale, rather than for use in the creators' classrooms.

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A Better Option Free lesson plans, created by teachers and for teachers, are available as well. Teachers should choose to use these free sites rather than the pay sites, both by submitting their own plans and using those of others. Because there are multiple free websites, there is likely a larger selection of lessons available for free than on any one pay site. Clearly, the more teachers that contribute to free rather than pay sites, the greater the difference in selection will be. Furthermore, there is no reason to assume that websites that charge automatically do or must provide better quality lesson plans; the difference may simply be one of differences in beliefs or preferences of contributors. The internet should be used to create the possibility of collaboration and sharing in order to improve the quality of education both in the U.S. and abroad; this improvement could better occur if teachers chose to share rather than profit financially.