Creating Lifelong Learners

A New York Times article reports on teachers selling their lesson plans online and raises ethical questions about the practice.

Both the article and the letters to the editor in reaction to it are informative.  I have several thoughts about this which I’ll break down in three categories, business, ethics, and practice.  First I’ll address my own bias.

My Bias

In addition to this blog, I run Open Court Resources.com which contains thousands of teaching resources contributed by teachers (including myself) that are available for free.  The web site contains advertising that offsets the cost of running a web site including the thousands of hours of my time spent creating, maintaining, and editing the site.  If you read the article about how much money some people have made selling lesson plans, I will tell you that if my web site was a business, I’m in the wrong business.

I do sell a training CD through the web site that I created.  It’s the only pay item available on the site.  I spent two entire days of a summer vacation creating the CD and unlike the virtual resources, the CD is a product that is shipped physically to your house.

Business

As reported in the article, the top selling teacher on the web site Teachers Pay Teachers has earned $36,000.  It’s impossible to know how much the average teacher earns but it is certainly less than the $600,000 in sales that the web site itself has racked up.

I started my own web site hoping that if I gave away my own materials for free it would ultimately help me because other people would add to what I created and lessen the workload for everyone (like “Field of Dreams” for teaching resources).  Ultimately, my own web site helped me immensely when I moved from first grade to second grade and already had racked up hundreds of ideas and resources I could use in my own classroom.  Other teachers write to me to tell me my site has helped them as well.

I have no moral problem with teachers selling their lesson plans.  I applaud their ingenuity.  However, I do feel that the greatest value in the internet is in a free flow of ideas that allows you to browse resources quickly and try them out risk free in your classroom without paying.

Ethics

Do taxpayers own lesson plans?  No.

If a firefighter invented a better fire hydrant based on experience gained working for the fire department, isn’t that his own idea?  If a police officer wrote a book about how best to stop crime, wouldn’t it benefit society to have that book published? What incentive would the police officer have to write that book if all the profits went back to the government?

In terms of teachers specifically, lesson plans are written outside of school hours and I do believe that they belong to the teachers who wrote them.  If it’s legal for textbook publishers to market lesson plans, why can’t teachers who have the ability to market test their own ideas be allowed to compete?

Practice

What the article does not address is whether someone else’s lesson plans work.  I don’t believe they do.

My own scribbled plans probably wouldn’t do many other people any good.  Someone else’s plans aren’t likely to apply perfectly to my own students and my own style of teaching.  Only 10% of the materials on my own web site do I use personally in my classroom.  But the other 90% is valuable to other people and they tell me they use it.

While it is possible to get ideas from other people’s plans, blogs, web sites, lesson planning is a personal thing.  The best teaching…multimedia-rich, experiential, constructivist doesn’t come out of books or plans or sites—even though those resources can be a jumping off point.

Real lesson planning is personal to teachers, students, and the real world in which those plans will be carried out.  I suspect teaching by numbers doesn’t often work.

What are your thoughts?

Here are some resources I’ve compiled to assist you in planning for your return to school:

Need something to do?  Want to get to know your students?
Activities for the First Day of School

Want to beef up on classroom management?  Here’s everything you need from job charts to management systems:
Classroom Management for Teachers

For Open Court Reading teachers, I’d start with
Unit Openers
then Concept Question Boards
and finally have a plan for more explicitly teaching reading comprehension this year

In preparation for going to back to school, e-mail delivery of Creating Lifelong Learners resumes today.

I hope my readers have had a restful summer.  As a reminder, this is the official blog of Open Court Resources.com (not the publisher of Open Court Reading but a teacher created resource) as well as the personal expression of me, Mathew Needleman, teacher, filmmaker, and technology integration guru of sorts.

You are receiving this because you subscribed to it and will receive weekly updates as long as you continue to subscribe.

I will continue to write about teaching language arts as well as integrating technology into the curriculum.  I am entering a new job as a provider of intervention to at risk students.  I suspect that I will be writing about that in the months ahead as well as commenting on changes in educational policy taking place at the state and national levels.

Thanks for reading.

I had a conversation with a friend about the possiblity of the L.A. Times eliminating their printed editions and becoming an exclusively online newspaper.

I visit the L.A. Times web site every day but I still find that there are articles in the printed edition that I somehow miss online. I also find that reading on the computer is difficult for my eyes and I tend to skim more than I do when reading the physical edition. If given a choice between reading the printed edition or reading online, I would choose to read the actual newspaper.

However, here’s what the L.A. Times (and other papers) could do to improve the online experience of reading and I would be willing to pay for it.

1. Allow more customization.
I’d like to be able to have their web site show me sections of the newspaper that are of most interest to me. When baseball season is over, I don’t really read the sports section. I always read the business section and I like to read it first. Please let me arrange the web site like I can arrange my own newspaper.

2. I’m more interested in some stories than others. Similar to the way Netflix lets me find movies I’d like based on my ratings, can you intuitively figure out which articles are of most interest to me and show me those first?

3. Don’t put everything on the front page and make it easier to find other articles if I click away from your front page.

4. Show more videos. They’re interesting. The pairing between TV News and printed information is perhaps the most informative and and most user friendly format possible in this multimedia age.

Do you have any ideas?

Wrapping up this music themed mini-week on Creating Lifelong Learners, here are three music related podcasts I subscribe to:

Sound Opinions
from National Public Radio (home of This American Life) comes what they call the world’s only rock ‘n’ roll talk show. Based in Chicago, they’re the Siskel and Ebert of pop music. My favorite shows have included classical album dissections and analysis of particular genres like funk and disco. They also have interviews with established artists and have all their old shows available from their web site. The elevate the discussion of rock ‘n’ roll to serious criticism. I’ve discovered lots of new music from the podcast.

Morning Becomes Eclectic
I’ve also discovered new music from this podcast which features live performances by artists you’ve heard of and some you haven’t.

KEXP Song of the Day
This podcast gives you a free song every day. Most of the songs I don’t like but every four songs or so you find a winner. Looking at the past episodes, I find many songs I already own. This is also a good way to discover new music.

Bonus

If you become a fan of iTunes on Facebook you get occasional free tunes in addition to the free weekly selections on iTunes. You’ll have to endure Facebook advertising from iTunes in exchange.

Barely Legal Radio
I talk about this one all the time. If you’re interested in the legal side of the music business or are in a band that’s starting out, this show is for you. It’s hosted by entertainment attorney and member of the Vandals, Joe Escalante.

Any favorites to add?

Michael and Branding

How Michael Became a Brand Icon
What we should do to brand ourselves, our schools, our businesses

Death by an Overdose of Showbusiness
What we should not to to ourselves, our schools, our businesses

Humanizing Michael

Robert Hilburn Remembers
Long time L.A. Times critic reflects

Quincy Jones Remembers
After “Bad” the rest was just noise, Jones says of Michael’s life and surrounding controversy.

Teaching About Michael

As always, Larry Ferlazzo is there with resources for teaching.

Like many people, the iPod has drastically changed my music listening habits.  When I got my first iPod (five years ago and free via freeipods.com) my mission was to make it so that hitting shuffle would never bring up a bad tune.  Finally, I was able to extract just the songs I liked from albums that were overall made of crap.

So it’s rare that I buy albums even though I spend hundreds of dollars a year on music between iTunes and the Amazon music stores.  Nevertheless, a few albums get through.  Last year I was excited about Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” and Beck’s “Modern Guilt.”  I think “In Rainbows” is a masterpiece but a year later I have to be in a bad mood to listen to it with the exception of the opening track which helps me when I’m working out.  I tell my fiancé that Radiohead was the music I listened to when I was single and sad all the time.  Beck’s album, while poorly reviewed, was one of his most consistent albums in years.  I agree that there’s something empty about it but several of the songs are pleasantly surprising when they pop up on shuffle play today.

This year, I was excited about the new Wilco album which is released today but has been available via the band’s web site for months.  I’ve been a fan of Wilco since a friend of mine had me score a scene in her travel documentary with “California Stars.”  Years afterward I found “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” in a local music store (remember when we had those?) and I still consider one of my favorite albums of all time.

“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” led me to explore Wilco’s entire back catalog and even side projects like Tweedy’s work with the Minus 5 and Loose Fur and his previous work with Uncle Tupelo.  Tweedy is an incredible songwriter and his body of work is remarkably consistent, his voice is one of my favorites because it’s appealing and yet not that intimidating.  I feel like I can sing along when I’m listening.

I was a bit disappointed by “A Ghost Is Born” I thought that they took the experimentation of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” too far.  There are some great songs on there but many of them descend into noise…too much noise.  While one can skip over the noise at the end of “Reservations” at the end of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” putting noise in the middle of the album makes it hard to get through it.  But the heartache of songs like “Wishful Thinking” and the killer bridge of “Theologians” bring me back to this album a track at a time when putting together playlists.

“Sky Blue Sky” got rid of the noise but also got rid of the rock.  To say the album is mellow is putting it lightly.  Some of the songs like “Impossible Germany” and “Side with the Seeds” have a nice payoff eventually but you have to stay awake to get to those points.

The newest album “Wilco (The Album)” finds  a perfect balance between the too much noise on “A Ghost Is Born” and the too much mellow on “Sky Blue Sky.”  The guitar solos that dominated “Sky Blue Sky” are used just enough to avoid stealing the show.  The songwriting, as always, is top notch and as an album it’s distinctly listenable.  Highlights for me include “Wilco (The Song)”, “You Never Know”, “I’ll Fight”, and “Country Disappeared.”

The album does not approach the perhaps impossible heights of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” but it’s a terrific mix of melody mixed with just enough darkness and depth to make this a great album that doesn’t make you feel depressed to listen to it.

Some schools are cutting back on homework says the L.A. Times…

“As adults, if every book we ever read, we had to write a report on — would that encourage our reading or discourage it?” asked Eileen Horowitz, head of school at Temple Israel of Hollywood Day School. “We realized we needed to rethink that.”

I’ve learned that there are two things you never discuss amongst teachers, religion or homework.  Teachers are particularly passionate about homework.

While it’s true that the students who complete their homework tend to be the ones who do well in school, I’m not sure that doing homework is what helps a student do well.  Students who complete homework tend to have the parents who help them with their homework.  As a teacher I found that homework completion only showed me who had help at home and who didn’t. In thinking about about my own educational career, I do remember learning in class but my only memories of homework are of frustration.

I don’t think we should abolish homework completely but we might want to take a look at its effectiveness and not simply assign homework just for the sake of it.

cross-posted in In Practice.

I’m not opposed to the theoretical idea of merit pay. However, I have not read of any fair plan to address who would earn it. I have the following concerns…

Having worked with several principals, I have found that all of them tend to have favorites on staff. I would not want my pay to be determined based on how a principal personally feels about me. I also would not want my pay decided on by a single test or even multiple standardized tests that may not measure what I am teaching in class. Even though I’ve worked at low-income schools throughout my career, I have good friends who work at high performing schools and they don’t have it any easier than I do even though the pressures of working where they teach are of a different kind. I don’t think that time spent working is a fair indicator of how much a teacher should be paid since it seems to me that some teachers spend their whole summer working at school but doing little to do with instruction. Should teachers who are the most organized and spend less time working after school not get bonuses?

It seems to me that even the worst teachers want their students to do well. It’s not as if they’d teach better if only they were paid a bonus. In places where students aren’t learning it seems it’s because teachers don’t know how to do better rather than because they don’t want to do better.

Finally, in a field where we already make less than similarly educated peers in private industry, I wonder if not being able to count on a particular income would be enough to discourage promising people from entering or staying in the profession.

Your thoughts?