Slashdot Mirror
Public School Teachers Selling Lesson Plans Online
theodp writes "Thousands of teachers are using websites like Teachers Pay Teachers and We Are Teachers to cash in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare. While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, raising questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms."
The teacher owns the material, it is they who develops it and in no way has to do with the schools.
The teachers developed workable lesson plans. Unless things have radically changed since I last taught, the time to develop lesson plans is probably not built into the schedule. You do that on your own time, or in a very short time period like a 30 minute 'planning period'. If the government would like to own these lesson plans then perhaps they should consider paying for the time used to develop them.
they aren't charging the students, they are selling plans to other teachers. so that less experienced teachers can free up time and buy a plan for something they are having a tough time coming up with good ideas for.
this marketplace should be very good for both new teachers needing ideas and experienced teachers with the skills to put together great lessons.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Lesson plans meet the definition of "work for hire" under US copyright laws and as such are owned by the school system or municipality unless there are express agreements giving the rights to the teachers. Teachers are employees and not third party contractors, such as many programmers, and lesson plans are within the scope of a teacher's employment. Lesson plans are the property of the school. State law is only relevant if it expressly gives the rights to the lesson plans to the teachers. Otherwise, the plans belong to the schools.
A disclaimer: I am a PhD student and I teach classes at the college level.
I think the issue is not as clear cut as the parent makes it seem. While "teaching" is work for hire, at the college level in many cases you are hired to teach a specific course, often with the assumption that you have already taught it before and therefore have some experience in the matter.
Note that this means that generally the teacher brings the lesson plan with them when they are hired. Moreover, it is common for friends and colleagues to share their lesson plans.
Overall, I believe the consensus among teachers (at least the ones I know, both at the college and at the public school/kindergarden level) is that the lesson plans you come up with (usually improvements over other people's lesson plans) are yours to do with as you wish.
The work you are hired to do is teach. The lesson plan is a "tool" you bring from home - much like the knowledge you acquired over the years (which lessons plan arguably are)
Also, lesson plans are often very personal - from my experience even when you get someone else's lesson plans you have to do quite a bit of work to adapt them to your own style.
Finally, do you believe that when I graduate and move to another institution I should have to ask permission of my current employer to use the lesson plans I developed? or perhaps that I should be barred from using/improving them altogether?
The rampant out-of-control population increases are all in "developing" countries full of brown people, a very inconvenient truth that you will never hear during the eugenics debate.
While what you write is technically true, it is exceptionally misleading. Someone I once knew liked to call statements like that "hate facts."
The fact is that the "countries full of brown people" are approaching the point of population stabilization far more rapidly than the first world did. It took the US roughly 150 years to do it, it took south korea roughly 30 years to do it and the other countries still in he process will get there even faster if current trends continue.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
That's not true, most courses in the US use canned lesson plans that the district pays a small fortune to obtain. My father is a school administrator (and has been for districts large and small) and I can tell you a significant portion of the budget goes to buying lesson plans*.
Put your dad on. I want to hear about these lesson plans they are buying.
I think there seems to be a huge disconnect in this discussion. There is a difference between "lesson plan" and "textbook." Your dad buys textbooks and workbooks. Those are not lesson plans. Those are the seeds of lesson plans.
Lesson plans are what the teacher does with those seeds and, in many cases, they have to supplement with stuff they've made themselves (to be honest, I'd love to work somewhere where I just follow some external lesson plan--I've never heard of such a place and again think you mean "textbook"). Teachers share this stuff around all the time, edit, and use as necessary. All these pay sites are doing is adding a little money to it, and as a teacher, I'm all for it. I don't mind kicking a little dough to a compatriot-in-arms for their good ideas, and I might even throw some stuff up there myself.
Now, I am a university professor, so my situation is different, but if anyone asked me to sign an IP waiver that said that whatever materials I made belonged to the school, I'd laugh and walk. That is my bread and butter. Teachers are free agents; we usually move around. If something happens and we need to change jobs, we're not re-inventing a 20-year-career; we're taking the stuff we made.
Hell, I take stuff I didn't make, but use. There's no controls on this stuff, and until it gets published (which is usually never), people do whatever they want.
At a meeting at my last school, the head of the department responded to a question about ownership of materials we were making for the department with this, "Well, those are all property of the university, obviously." I chortled, and I was sitting right next to him. He looked at me, shocked, and I said, "where did it say that in my contract?" This was about half a second before the room erupted in a mixture of scoffing, laughter, and loud complaining.
When the noise died down I said, "That's fine if that's what you want to do, but that is the kind of thing that would need to be stated explicitly in our contracts. There are two sides to that, of course. On the one hand, you'd be safe from anyone ever taking stuff they did here and publishing it, which might make it hard for you to use for free anymore, but on the other, well, I'm not making anything for any of my classes anymore, unless you pay me per lesson or something." No clause was ever added to the contract, and I am using a lot of the materials--some of which I didn't make--at my current job, edited for the new situation. There is no way that I could re-do those years of work while moving my career ahead. Some of that stuff is now in my permanent bag of tricks.
So, there's how it works, and I suspect your dad would agree with me. I'm pretty sure it's you who doesn't get it.
As for teachers selling lesson plans, I am concerned that teachers should be using their "on the clock" prep periods to create lesson plans (that's what teachers I know do, or claim to do).
Following our district's format for lesson plans, it usually takes a couple of hours to plan lessons for the week. We get 50 minutes a day for a prep. In that time you need to contact parents, make copies, set up your classroom for the days activities, go to various meetings, and generally recuperate mentally since it's the only other time of the day besides your 30-minute lunch where you don't have 20-25 children hanging around. I could include grade papers in that list, but that's usually incredibly time consuming as well so most leave that for home.
I don't agree with the selling of lesson plans as I believe in having these resources available freely, but what this is a quick fix to a complicated problem: teachers not getting paid enough while not having enough time in the workday to achieve what is asked of them.
Unless the employment contract explicitly transfers ownership of creative works to the employer then the lesson plans legally do not belong to the school.
That's simply not true. The employment contract doesn't need to explicitly mention anything about ownership of creative works. If you are simply an "employee" as opposed to an independent contractor, your work falls under the work for hire doctrine, and your employer owns the copyright.
In the world of copyrights and contracts this stuff is cut and dry, the default in all cases - including software development - is for ownership to rest with the creator, full stop.
No, it's not cut and dry. See, for example, the Community for Creative Non-Violence. And the "default" would depend on whether you're an employee or a contractor. If you're a coder who's been hired as a salaried member for some company and that's your full time job, the "default" is probably that you're an employee and you're creating works for hire, so ownership rests with your employer, full stop.
That said, at least at the university level, the culture is that works by professors are not works for hire. I'm not sure if there really is a sound legal basis for that (probably depends on their employment contract), but any university who tried to assert ownership over professors' work would find itself being attacked on all sides.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
My wife is a teacher, and what she is paid for with her salary is a 40 hour week. She spends hours upon hours at home creating her lesson plans and grading homework. Teachers used to be able to get this done at school. But with the newest and best ways of teaching, there simply is no time anymore. I dont see anything wrong with teachers trying to make a little money on something they worked hard on at home, that worked well in their classroom.
It's laughable at the number of people here who think that teachers get time to create anything during public school hours. My wife is a third grade teacher. She spends literally all of her at work free time in meetings. Parent meetings. Administration meetings. Team meetings. She gets zero time to grade papers, produce teaching plans, or anything else at school during her regular working day. She makes a whopping $45k a year which for the Atlanta area will barely rent a one bedroom apartment and keep up a run down car. If it were not for my job we would have to move just to make ends meet. Not to mention that she has $60k of education debt @$350 a month. Plus she still has to do continuing education and pay for it out of her pocket. It takes roughly 15 to 20 hours of her time at home per week to grade papers and do lesson plans. It's just this school perhaps? Not on your life. She has worked at 4 different schools and every one of them is exactly the same. Ask any teacher, I bet you get nearly the same results. I agree the public school system is crap. But it's not the teachers fault. They have to teach what the national, state and local school board(s) tell them to teach. Not to mention that they have to try and get Johnny who doesn't speak English and is dumber than a box of hammers up to the same level as the rest of the class. For which the rest of the class suffers, because the teacher has to spend one on one time with him. Before you go bagging on how it's always the teachers fault, perhaps you should put your brain back in and actually think of who controls what the teacher does. Because they sure don't get to teach what they want to. If they did, kids might actually get a quality education.
the administrators down at the administration building, the bus drivers, the bus mechanics etc, the compliance officers, the fund raisers, HR people etc.
My local school district, Fairfax County Public Schools has some interesting stats;
see http://www.fcps.edu/fs/budget/documents/approved/2010/ApprovedBudget10.pdf
there are 13,744 teachers
there are 8,393 NON TEACHING POSITIONS.
likewise
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/BarbaraHollingsworth/Fairfax_School_Boards_Gateway_drug_101909.html
The school board recently wanted to spend 130 million (with 73 million on a spa facility and cafeteria for administrators) on a new administration building when students are studying in trailers. It would have also consolidated a number of school based positions forcing those positions to have to travel to/from the schools.
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
The idea that higher taxes are needed is purely ignorant of the problem.
At least you didn't use the "throwing money at the problem wont fix anything" canard.
How can rural schools consistently spend less than many big cities per pupil yet turn out better educated students?
Lower. Cost. Of. Living.
2. Overly generous pay to teachers with seniority without regard to ability
3. Over priced administrators.
Yes, heaven forbid you should expect a descent salary after getting a masters degree while continuing your education and getting a few decades of experience on the job while working 50+ hours a week.
4. Ridiculous retirement packages.
Yes, heaven forbid that someone still gets a defined benefit pension plan instead of having to risk their livelihood in the Wall Street casino.
The reason its hard to push increases of taxes through is because they've been brainwashed by decades of uncountered conservative propaganda.
Fixed that for you.
Taxes are the last thing we need more of for this problem
You get what you pay for. That applies to public schools as much as it does to food inspection, Wall Street oversight, disaster preparedness, health care and infrastructure.
Low taxes have high costs.
The problem is, as a teacher, I frequently share my ideas with other teachers without expecting payment... or at least, not in money - my desire is to generate more ideas and sharing freely encourages others to do the same - the more ideas, the more good ideas (albeit more bad ones too). In terms of rights, the teachers are usually the rights-holders, but we are at the same time frequently required to hand in our planbook at the end of the year / tenure of employment.
There is frequently not a huge supply of graduates. Schools in my area offer bounties ranging from 5 to 10 thousand above the standard salary to "high needs" fields such as science, math, and foreign language. The main problem is not this, however, but increasingly low numbers of people willing to interact with students in a changing culture (which focuses less on discipline and responsibility and more on personal whims) and, to be honest, one that does not foster a high value for our education system. Funds are almost always tight and though the ideal setting for most classes is between 12 and 18 students, none of mine are even under 25 (most are in the 30s). For those who think that firing administrators is the way to go--they are not paid all that much more than classroom teachers, there are never that many on a campus, and they work far more hours than the pay increase is worth.