Caveat Emptor? Unless It?s Free
March 17, 2008As I have been working to create UbD plans over the last couple of days, a couple of things have become glaringly obvious to me.
The first is that the quality of available study guides and teachers’ guides varies widely. Most of them only have a handful of “good” lesson plans. What I mean by “good” is that I can use the plans without too much modification for my students, it is sufficiently challenging for high school, and it doesn’t involve too much of what I think of as “fluffy” work. I am totally all for using what I can without reinventing the wheel. My English Education professors encouraged us to steal, steal, steal. This was back in the day when listservs were well-populated and would have been great for teachers to share ideas, but teachers weren’t on them, and it was well before the age of blogs, wikis, webquests, etc. Our best source for ideas, if I recall, was ERIC. I had to create entire units by myself, stealing where I could, but mostly finding I had to buy anything that was really helpful (Perfection Learning units, Shakespeare Set Free, Novel Guides, etc.) It was a pain, and I envy new teachers for the fact that they have access to the Internet with this wealth of ideas. It must be much easier to create plans now than it used to be.
Tags: Caveat, Emptor, free, Unless