Skip to main content

Sharing resources is priceless and it should stay that way.

My mother’s attempts to get me involved in a variety of after school activities and clubs as a child taught me two important lessons about myself: I’m not a social butterfly and I am certainly not a natural team player. However, I have also learned that, despite the fact that I spend five hours of every day isolated from my peers and acting as a benevolent dictator in my classroom, teaching is a team sport.

I learned this largely through mentors and other colleagues who provided me with schemes of work, lesson plans or just someone to bounce around ideas with. However, in evenings of creative despair, the internet also regularly came to the rescue. Unfortunately, the website which was a lifesaver and an inspiration for much of my career, the TES, has started allowing teachers to charge for their resources. This is a move which I passionately disagree with for three main reasons:


  1. I’ve always been of the opinion that a lot of teaching is about rehashing lessons which someone else has already taught. Even if you have an original idea…it probably isn’t. Indeed, many teachers commenting on James Theobald’s blog about charging for resources and plagiarism (www.othmarstrombone.wordpress.com/2014/08/24/why-i-think-selling-resources-to-teachers-is-wrong/) have stated the same thing. However, standing in front of year eight and confidently teaching about soft engineering while secretly knowing the activity was designed by an online saviour (who saved you several hours of your evening) is drastically different to passing off someone else’s work as your own for monetary gain. Unfortunately, this type of plagiarism seems to be the case with some contributors on the TES.
  2. My head of faculty often tells me off for buying my own resources. I try to control myself, but if I want to make an outrageous display or create a ‘stream table’ to simulate a river, I like being able to get cracking with complete freedom and while I still have motivation. However, I don’t feel that teachers should ever feel obligated or pressured to do so. Equally, schools should not feel pressured to spend extra money on lessons or resources from other teachers and departments. Theobald put it excellently, by saying that by charging for resources, the TES is “exploiting their [teachers’] commitment to their job”.
  3. Most importantly, it may make me an idealist, but I believe that every teacher’s primary aim should be to help every pupil, regardless of whether they teach them or not. To offer resources on the condition of monetary gain sends an entirely different message. In contrast, the support I have received through unofficial teaching networks on Twitter and through the ‘hub’ provided by my school’s federation appear to still have that goal at heart.

The TES can offer as many ‘sales’ as it wants; so long as people can charge for resources, I won’t be returning.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knowledge Organisers: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

The term "knowledge organiser" has been used a lot over the last few years. They are a tool of which I am a passionate advocate. However, opinions of them appear to be divided; While I have met many teachers who share my passion, others have been nonplussed or told me to 'just use a revision guide'. To me, knowledge organisers are the ultimate tool of inclusion. They will never replace the benefit of being taught by an expert. However, they create a situation in which every child, regardless of special need, attendance or socio-economic status, can have access to the core knowledge they need to succeed. However, this only happens if knowledge organisers are written well; I believe, in order to realise their benefits, knowledge organisers must be focused, sequential and accessible . Accessible: Many pupils will arrive at secondary school lacking in cultural capital, with a limited vocabulary or with little experience of subjects such as history or geog
Post a Comment
Read more

Knowledge Organisers and Quizzing: Minimising the Matthew Effect

I believe that knowledge organisers can be the ultimate tool of inclusion. However, used poorly they can amplify the Matthew Effect, supporting most able while simultaneously disadvantaging those who need the most support. Put simply, they can cause the knowledge rich to get richer and the knowledge poor to get poorer. Over the four years which my department has used knowledge organisers, we have developed a number of techniques to minimise this effect and ensure that knowledge organisers benefit as many pupils as possible. Quiz questions: In order to encourage pupils to engage with the knowledge organisers, all of our homework is based around either answering quiz questions or practising quizzes which they have already completed. Originally, pupils wrote their own questions and answers. They were required to write a minimum of 7 questions and answers which the teacher would collect feedback on while they were completing their starters. Pupils would then have a set amount
Post a Comment
Read more

The Battle of the Knowledge Organisers with metacognition.org.uk

The world of Knowledge Organisers is often a dichotomous one. Are you team ‘narrative’, or team ‘grid’? In this blog, Becky Sayers and Nathan Burns explore the purpose of both types, as well as their respective advantages, disadvantages and applicability across subjects. So place your bets, as the fight is about to start…!   Becky Sayers writes about the definition, purpose, advantages and disadvantages of the ‘narrative’   Knowledge Organiser. The ‘Narrative’ Knowledge Organiser Why do we use Knowledge Organisers? As a faculty, we have been using Knowledge Organisers for around seven or eight years. If I’m honest, the original reason I used them is because I was told to do so by a faculty leader in whom I had immense trust. I did not understand their overall purpose and, as a result, the pages I produced were fairly poor quality. However, over the years we have thought carefully as a team about their purpose and, as a result, the Knowledge Organisers we have produced as a te
Post a Comment
Read more