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."

Comments

*First post..

[stillpixel]

The teacher owns the material, it is they who develops it and in no way has to do with the schools.

Re:*First post..

[edumacator]

In which they only work 180 days a year

It's actually a lot more than that. The students go 180 days. Most teachers are on 190 day schedule, but - and this is important - almost all teachers spend a good part of their two months off working to plan their lessons for the next year. We still get a lot of time off, but it isn't nearly as much as people think. Generally I get to school at 6:00 and leave around 5:00pm carrying a huge briefcase full of essays to grade. I spend about an hour or two grading every night. Not every night, but most. I go to about 20 or more school functions to support my students every year and go to two or three conferences over the summer. Most of my colleagues work about as much.

, get rock solid job security after a few years, have great family health coverage,and are provided a pension plan that absolves them from having to pay the social security "tax" every paycheck like the rest of us who probably won't even get anything out of it.

Every school day, nearly a thousand teachers leave the field of teaching. - http://www.all4ed.org/files/archive/publications/TeacherAttrition.pdf (PDF)

Your points are true but only for those who stay in teaching. The attrition rate for teachers is extremely high. So, the points you make are only valid for a small group of the teachers that actually make it to be vested. For most teachers getting to "avoid" the SS tax just means they lose those working years for their eventual retirement, assuming SS isn't insolvent by then.

Re:*First post..

[SEWilco]

Their work isn't in the public domain unless they're federal employees or their local laws place their work in the public domain. But it would be better for the educational system if more material were easily available. State legislators should place that work in the public domain so it can be easily reused, but encourage teachers to produce it. Teachers do get paid by the school to create lesson plans, but they should be able to sell or retype it into a marketable package on their own time. If there is a lot of public domain educational material, higher prices will be paid for it being organized or for new material.

Notice, however, that this only applies to material created as part of their job. Work created outside of the job environment still belongs to the teacher. School contracts might have to be more specific about the definition of school work. A teacher can mix their own protected work into a collection and sell the package, just as book authors do now. There is no requirement that the specific public domain material be identified; if buyers prefer that PD work be identified then they'll only buy such material.

Re:*First post..

[Glothar]

I understand people's hatred of unions (damn them for trying to rip power from the wealthy!), but for most people, hatred of the teachers unions are less about wanting better teachers and more about being upset at a small number of bad teachers. Many states outlaw teachers unions and many of those that don't prevent the unions from having any teeth (by preventing strikes, forcing arbitration, and so forth).

People like to trot out examples of how unions have protected bad (sometimes criminal) teachers, and I won't say I disagree that those are bad situations. However, its not nearly as bad as the number of teachers who would be fired for being gay, Democratic (or Republican), male in a "female" position (or vice versa), a bad coach, not a coach, or simply in a non-marriage relationship.

I wish the world were a nice enough place that we could ditch unions and get rid of bad teachers. However, I live in the real world. For every bad teacher I've seen protected by a union, I've seen another forced out of their position by the union and other teachers and administrators. And for each of them, there are probably two or three teachers who parents wanted removed for almost criminal reasons.

I had one teacher who was brought before the school board to argue for his job. His crime? "Not providing a supportive environment." The real problem: He had been named the head coach for boys basketball two years earlier and hadn't had a winning season yet. Another teacher was almost fired for "inappropriate behavior around females". Of course, no girl actually accused him of anything. It's just that he was the coach of the girls basketball team and a bunch of parents felt that the head coach should be a woman. Another was almost fired because she started dating a new man and that was viewed as "being an inappropriate role model" despite the fact that it was done as privately as possible (in a small town).

I've known teachers who were fired for being gay. I know teachers who were fired for wearing the "wrong clothes" on weekends. Many of the teachers I know right now pick bars to go to based on the fact that none of their children's parents will be there. They are basically forced to hide every aspect of their personal lives because nothing is off limits to insane parents. Often, the only protection they have is the pooled legal resources of the local teachers union.

The problem here is the public and how they treat teachers. The last thing they ever consider is to trust teachers more. If you raised the public's opinion of teachers, you'd have less attrition. Don't be so ignorant that you think that good teachers can't see who the bad teachers are. If you give them trust and quit tying them all up with the same rope, they'll get rid of the bad teachers for you.

Re:*First post..

[Glothar]

Most teachers have a contracted work day (7:30pm to 3:30pm locally).

In this area, this means that they are "on the clock" during that time and free to leave to do their own thing beyond that. They can be obligated to attend meetings beyond these hours, but only when officially scheduled. It's common for teachers to stay an hour after "contract" to work on grading or lesson plans, and its equally common for them to go home and do yet more work that night.

Since teachers unions are outlawed here and striking is illegal, the only recourse the teachers have against abusive treatment by parents and administrators is to "Work To Contract", meaning that they work the hours they are paid for.

This is only slightly less debilitating than a full strike. Students get cookie-cutter lessons and quickly fall behind schedule. Schools double or triple their paper usage as teachers fill students time with worksheets instead of learning activities. Assignments don't get graded. Grades don't get done on time. Sporting events are rescheduled. Plays and concerts are canceled.

It happens every five or so years. Apparently, that's how long it takes parents to remember just how much work teachers put in beyond what their contracts say they should.

Bind not the mouths of the kine....

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What questions?

[Lehk228]

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.

Lesson plans!=Textbooks

[kklein]

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.

Re:Lesson plans!=Textbooks

[UserChrisCanter4]

What he's talking about are products I've seen referred to as "scripted lesson plans," and he's correct; they're not just textbooks and workbooks, and they're not the "seeds" of lessons.

I have never actually had to use these products in my own teaching experience, but I have seen them and we did work with some of them in my teaching classes in college. Imagine a general math concept such as fractions. There are companies who sell entire packets of lesson plans, designed to be implemented by every teacher in the district and to be used for X weeks for fractions. The packet is three hole punched so that it can be easily distributed in binder form, and really is a collection of "canned" lesson plans. The ones I encountered went so far as to break a day's worth of instruction down into a format like this:

Warm up: 10 Mins [use warmup transparency 11a]
Lesson: 12 Mins [use overhead transparency 11b]
Exercise: 25 Mins [use worksheet 11c]
Suggested homework: [worksheet 11d]
Sample modifications for students with disabilities: X, Y, Z
The real version is much more detailed, of course; the ones I saw for English classes typically consumed three pages for a 45 minute lesson.

Typically, a district would purchase an entire years' worth of lessons and put teachers through extensive in-service training to discuss the proper way to implement such programs.

It's appealing on one hand; as you probably know, planning lessons is difficult, time-consuming, and requires a lot of trial and error. I wasn't truly happy with most of my lessons until after the third or fourth time I'd taught and refined them. These products take out the guesswork. The lessons have been tested (the companies pushing them talk a lot about how much testing goes into their development), and their pacing honestly looked pretty good. On the other hand, of course, it's deeply insulting to the teachers involved; it reduces us to robots, removes the opportunities for creativity, and generally brings everyone down to the same level of mediocrity. I assume this is probably why his father's school had to go all the way to termination - if you let one person off the hook on canned lessons, then everyone will want to.

He's right though. Such products do exist.

Re:Higher taxes needed

[wkurzius]

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.

Not true

[langelgjm]

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.

You all have no idea

[rlp122]

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.

don't forget

[ProfBooty]

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.