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When I think about whether or not teachers should be able to sell their lesson plans I first stop and ask myself ‘should teachers be allowed to give away their lesson plans’. Are teachers legally allowed to give away their lesson plans? If they are allowed to give away their lesson plans, why would they not be allowed to sell them? If they can give them away then it says that they have the authority to grant re-use permission to others. If they are able to grant re-use permission to others for free they should be able to grant it at a small fee as well. That is my logic. Whether or not they should be able to sell something is contingent upon whether or not they are able to give it away. Same goes for MOOcs, etc—if they are able to give them away, they should be able to sell them. I personally have given away, to some person or another, every single lesson I have ever created. I do believe I am allowed to give them away, or sell them if I wanted to. I created them, at home, on my own computer. If I were to create a program at home in a programing language on my own computer, I would be allowed to sell that, so because of this, and following this logic, yes I believe teachers should be able to sell their lessons.

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Faculty members, in traditional classes, should have the right to sell their resources without profit to their institution because they are created them with “university resources, facilities, or materials of the sort traditionally and commonly made available to faculty members”  (AAUP, n.d., p. 3).  In addition, many faculty members work much harder on their lesson plans and other resources than they feel they are paid for and should be compensated fairly by being able to sell them online.

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Teachers should absolutely not be able to

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Kranch (2009) states that institutions should incorporate a contract or clause or “formal written policy”. to protect the material created by the institution and the developer. In this written policy, the institution can identity the monetary means and develop rights for both themselves and the developer. so if this was to land in a court system the contractual law would be upholding.
I believe that teachers should have the right to sell their material. Ensuring that they give credit to the person that they reference.

Response:
Ron , is correct. It is common practice that teachers have developed books for courses based on a course they taught in the past to help other.
In Nursing school the universities develop study booklets and sell them to students. would that mean they shouldn't do this?

Kranch, D. (2009). Who owns online course intellectual property? Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 9(4), 349-356

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Jessica and Michelle, you both provide really interesting perspectives to the CON side, or the belief that teachers shouldn't sell their lesson plans.
According to the academic exception, the institution is the owner of your material that you create during your time at the college. I think that it becomes hard to say that no I don't own this material when I've worked to develop and create it and I cannot sell it. We often don't really think of why the institution would want ownership over those materials, or what the rights to innovative, creative and engaging lessons, rubrics, resources, etc. Great comments!

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I have to say that there are strong arguments for both sides of the debate.

PRO: Like Ron, I believe that if teachers create their own materials on their own time, then they should have the freedom to share or sell those lessons as they see fit.  What they do with the profits of these sales should be up to the teacher.  There are so many free resources available online to teachers if they do not want to pay for lessons, but having the option to purchase a tried-and-true lesson from an experienced teacher can only benefit the purchaser and his/her students.

CON: Of course, if an instructor was hired by an institution to specifically develop course materials, the copyright for that work (created with the institution's resources and funding) should  belong to the institution. The academic exception to section 13(3) of Canada's Copyright Act allows academics more freedom than their K-12  and college counterparts to have first copyright of the materials and research they create at a university.  However, most universities already have policies in place to protect their investments with specific mention of profit sharing of commercialized works.

Copyright Act. R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42: Retrieved from http://laws‑lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-42/

Hu, W. (2009). Selling Lesson Plans Online, Teachers Raise Cash and Questions. The New York Times A, 1.

Jones, B. J. (2010). Stake Your Claim: What’s at Stake in the Ownership of Lesson Plans? Conference on College Composition & Communication

Kranch, D. (2009). Who owns online course intellectual property? Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 9(4), 349-356

Triggs, S. (2005). Academic Freedom, Copyright and the Academic Exception. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. Retrieved fromhttp://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/article/view/182188/182196

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Just for the purpose of a debate, I am going to say NO (even though I think yes...).
Teachers, who are under contract and given "prep" time or hours under their contract should not be allowed to sell their lesson plans, tests, assignments, etc. to the public without compensating the institution.  When the institution hires a faculty member, if the faculty member is contracted to that institution, any classroom materials created should be owned by the institution because the faculty is being paid for the time to work on these plans.
Many institutions are trying to be on the cutting edge of research, teaching and learning; if faculty are selling their lessons, then the courses being taught are no longer unique; this also addresses the idea of using their plans at other institutions as well.  As noted by The Association of American Universities (cited in Kranch, 2008), universities should own the intellectual property that is created at the university by faculty, research staff and scientists because they used the university resources and funding to create their work.  The idea here is the faculty are being hired for their ideas, whereby the university is essentially paying their salary for these ideas that should not be reproduced elsewhere.

Kranch, D. (2009). Who owns online course intellectual property? Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 9(4), 349-356

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Excellent points made, Alysha. Sometimes we do find it difficult to teach a topic, or might find something to teach in a new way that really engages our students and these websites provide those tools for us to use.

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Ron, you bring up a great point about teachers creating textbooks and making them mandatory for their courses. Students are much more greatly affected by that.
The article also notes that lesson plans being sold may even benefit classrooms because they are tested and have been formulated to work in different environments, which could enhance and improve a student's learning experience.

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Teachers should be able to sell their lesson plans provided they are the sole creator or the other parties to the creation (such as another teacher, support staff or the institution) have also consented to it. As Triggs (2005) and Kranch (2009) note, the academic exception is well supported in law and in practice and should remain to respect the intellectual property rights of teachers.

However, as a college instructor who is well paid for his work, I would not personally feel right selling or charging others for my lessons plans as long as the material was being delivered free of charge. If someone is buying the content to resell then perhaps that would be different, but if the material is being reused to share knowledge freely then I would be okay with that in this era of MOOCs and other open learning models.

Kranch, D. (2009). Who owns online course intellectual property? Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 9(4), 349-356

Triggs, C. (2005). Academic Freedom, Copyright and the Academic Exception. Workplace, 7(1), 60-79.

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I do think that teachers should be able to sell their lesson plans online to other teachers, and must agree with Ron that I think it should be only if they have developed the lesson on their own time.
Rotherham (2012) makes mention to it being about a collaboration of ideas among teachers and that lesson plans are teachers "tools". He goes on to state that if you give someone a better hammer, they will do a better job (Rotherham, 2012). I think his point is that with all the negative reactions about it diminishing a teacher's role, or makes the teacher less engaged, there could be a flip side.If they are buying better lesson plans, then they teach better lessons. Just because teachers are purchasing from other teachers does not mean they are bad teachers. It could mean that they have hit a road block in what is effective to their students, or their students are lacking engagement, or they are looking to brighten up their class and can fill in the knowledge gaps (Jones, 2010).
Ultimately, if buying the lesson plan from another teacher and the implementation of that lesson is in the best interest of the student and all students are learning more effectively, I say go for it. I feel they are the ones who suffer in the debate, and they are the ones that could potentially miss out on well developed plans, handouts, quizzes and assignments.

Jones, B. J. (2010). Stake Your Claim: What’s at Stake in the Ownership of Lesson Plans? Conference on College Comp & Comm

Rotherham, A.J. (2012). Should teachers be allowed to sell their lesson plans? Time. Retrieved from http://ideas.time.com/2012/09/20/should-teachers-be-allowed-to-sell-their-lesson-plans/

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I believe teachers should be able to sell their lesson plans if they were created in their own time and using their own resources. I don't necessarily agree with it but I believe it is their right. As I wrote in the first activity, under the language of the Canadian Copyright Act, work made in the course of employment fall to the employer (Copyright Act). However, there has long been an academic exception for academics that gives them first copyright (Triggs, 2005). Academic institutions have typically avoided taking educators to court over the copyright of learning materials but with the advent of technology and the establishment of a real monetary value on the content (Jones, 2010), legal disputes are going to increase (Triggs, 2005). In light of this what needs to happen, and in many cases it already has, is language in the contract of employment that dictates the educators rights to any content, created in their own time and during their working hours.
Hu's article brings up the question of ethics, does it cheapen the position? Why aren't we asking about the conflict of interest of many faculty who publish texts and make them mandatory for their class? I think that's a far greater issue and it puts the students in the front and center of the debate where I don't think are in question of learning materials.

Copyright Act. R.S.C., 1985, c. C-42: Retrieved from http://laws‑lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-42/

Hu, W. (2009). Selling Lesson Plans Online, Teachers Raise Cash and Questions. The New York Times A, 1.

Jones, B. J. (2010). Stake Your Claim: What’s at Stake in the Ownership of Lesson Plans? Conference on College Composition & Communication

Triggs, S. (2005). Academic Freedom, Copyright and the Academic Exception. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor. Retrieved from http://ices.library.ubc.ca/index.php/workplace/article/view/182188/182196

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A Georgia kindergarten teacher has made more than $1 million selling her lesson plans online. Can U.S schools crowdsource their way to better student performance?

Nicholas Alan Cope / Getty Images

You won't get rich as a teacher, right? That's no longer true for a small but growing number of educators who are making big bucks selling their lesson plans online. On a peer-to-peer site called TeachersPayTeachers (TPT), Georgia kindergarten teacher Deanna Jump has earned more than $1 million selling lesson plans - with names like "Colorful Cats Math, Science and Literacy Fun!" - for about $9 a pop. Since the site launched in 2006, 26 teachers have each made more than $100,000 on TPT, which takes a 15% commission on most sales. In August, Jump became the first on TPT to reach $1 million. Her success has been aided by the thousands of followers of her personal blog who get notified each time she retails a new lesson. Another reason she thinks her stuff sells so well: "I've used it in my classroom," says Jump, who just kicked off her 16th year of teaching. "I know it works."

( MORE: Why Teachers' Contracts Should Be Negotiated in Public)

Standards and testing may hog the spotlight in education, but they spell out only what students should be able to do, not how to get kids to learn those skills. Lesson plans are teachers' tools: lend someone a better hammer, and he'll do a better job. But a lousy carpenter can't fake it even with the greatest tools money can buy, and the lesson plans that come with textbooks often aren't very engaging or aren't in line with the Common Core State Standards that 45 states recently agreed to adopt. There's a lot of concern among teachers about meeting these standards, particularly since more states have started tying teachers' evaluations to their students' performance. And the rising popularity of lesson-sharing sites like BetterLesson, which in June signed up its 100,000th teacher, points to one of education's most ironic problems: teachers don't share very much with their colleagues. Yes, there are master teachers who help coach less effective co-workers, but faculty members still get relatively little time with one another. Schools don't prioritize it, and teachers' contracts spell out their day down to the minute. What we consider schools are often just loose confederations of independent contractors, each overseeing his or her own classroom.

The need for more collaboration helps explain why the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the U.S.'s second largest teachers' union, launched a site this summer called Share My Lesson, where teachers can get free lesson plans. It's unclear how the union's corporate partner, TES Connect, intends to make money from the venture or whether the Deanna Jumps of the world will post their material on the site, given that it doesn't pay for content. "If teachers don't want to share, they don't have to," says AFT president Randi Weingarten. "But this is a huge opportunity for teachers to work with each other to improve our craft."

( MORE: Why Grit Is More Important Than Grades)

That may sound like a raw deal until you think about what's been happening in higher education, where more and more colleges are getting professors to put their syllabus and, more recently, videos of their lectures online. But it's a new frontier in the long insulated K-12 world. And as a legal matter, it's not cut and dry: if teachers produce a lesson as part of their regular work, even if it's on their own time, does their school or school district have any right to profits from it? In 2004 a federal court in New York said yes. Look for more litigation as the money involved with these sites grows.

Of course, not everyone thinks crowdsourcing lesson plans is the smartest solution, including one of the companies that lets teachers download free lesson plans à la carte. BetterLesson's main goal, which has interested several venture-capital firms, is selling schools and districts customized curriculums in multiweek chunks that come with daily lesson plans and work sheets. Founded by a Teach for America alum, BetterLesson summed up its philosophy in a recent post on the company's blog: "Give a man a random resource, he teaches for a class period. Give him inspiring examples of complete units on poetry, narrative writing and sentence structure, his next few months of instruction are transformed."

Regardless of who foots the bill for more-effective lesson plans, this sort of professional sharing is long overdue. Too many teachers are on their own. It's a sink-or-swim system, as Weingarten has often noted, but it doesn't have to be that way.

MORE: Can Parents Take Over Schools?

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Should Teachers Be Allowed to Sell Their Lesson Plans?

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A Georgia kindergarten teacher has made more than $1 million selling her lesson plans online. Can U.S schools crowdsource their way to better student performance? You won't get rich as a teacher, right? That's no longer true for a small but growing number of educators who are making big bucks selling their lesson plans online.

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Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.

"Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that's a great thing," he said. "But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession."

Teachers like Erica Bohrer, though, see the new demand for lessons as long-awaited recognition of their worth.

"Teaching can be a thankless job," said Ms. Bohrer, 30, who has used the $650 she earned in the past year to add books to a reading nook in her first-grade classroom at Daniel Street Elementary School on Long Island and to help with mortgage payments. "I put my hard-earned time and effort into creating these things, and I just would like credit."

The humble lesson plan has gained value as focus on testing and individualized instruction has increased. At the same time, the Internet has diminished the isolation of classroom teachers. Just about every imaginable lesson for preschool through college is now up for sale - on individual teachers' blogs as well as commercial sites where buyers can review and grade the material.

Teachers Pay Teachers, one of the largest such sites, with more than 200,000 registered users, has recorded $600,000 in sales since it was started in 2006 - $450,000 of that in the past year, said its founder, Paul Edelman, a former New York City teacher. The top seller, a high school English teacher in California, has made $36,000 in sales.

Another site, We Are Teachers, went online last year with a "knowledge marketplace" that includes lesson plans and online tutoring.

Kelly Gionti, a teacher at the High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice in Manhattan, has sold $2,544 worth of unit plans for "The Catcher in the Rye" and "The Great Gatsby," among others, helping finance trips to Rome and Ireland, as well as class supplies.

Margaret Whisnant, a retired teacher in North Carolina, earns an average of $750 a month from lessons based on her three decades of teaching middle school classics like "The Outsiders," enough to pay for new kitchen counters and appliances.

"I have wanted to redo my kitchen for 20 years, and I just could not get the funds together," she said. "Well, now I'm going to have to learn to cook."

Lisa Michalek, 40, who taught for six years in Rochester and now works for Aventa Learning, a for-profit online education company, said she spent about five hours a week tweaking old lesson plans and creating new ones, like an earth science curriculum that sells for $59.95.

"I knew I had good lessons, so I thought, 'Why not see what other people think of it?' " Ms. Michalek said.

After $31,000 in sales, she has her answer. Alice Coburn, 56, a vocational education teacher in Goshen, N.Y., said she saved two to three hours each time she downloaded Ms. Michalek's PowerPoint presentations instead of starting from scratch. "I hate reinventing the wheel," Ms. Coburn said.

Others find comfort in having a class-tested lesson by a more experienced teacher. Lauren Perreca, 24, used a $10 lesson on the Vietnam War novel "Fallen Angels" as a reference last year while creating her own lesson for her classes at Weston High School in Connecticut. She also revised her reading questions about "Lord of the Flies" after comparing them with two other lesson plans.

"At first I was self-conscious I had bought something, because what did that say about me?" she said. "But I realized I wasn't just taking it and using it, I was adapting it to fill in the gaps of my knowledge."

Now Ms. Perreca has started selling her own lesson plans, like a 54-page "Macbeth" unit with quizzes and homework assignments ($10) that she wrote in graduate school. She said she spent $140 of her $523 in earnings on cookies and books for her students, and used the rest to splurge on dinners out that she could not otherwise afford.

Her students are incredulous. "They're like, 'Who would want to buy those? They're so boring,' " Ms. Perreca said. "I'm like, 'Hey, I'm making money.' "

In Ms. Bohrer's class the other day in Lindenhurst, N.Y., five children were counting M&Ms while she made sure they digested the lesson before the candy. The exercise, which comes with directions, sorting mats and work sheets, has sold 31 times for $3 a pop. A variation with Lucky Charms is popular around St. Patrick's Day, she said.

"M&M sorting is not a new concept," said Ms. Bohrer, who has been teaching since 2001. "I made it easier for teachers to do. They just have to click and print."

Daniel Street's principal, Frank Picozzi, said he supported Ms. Bohrer's online business because his students reaped the benefits of her initiative and creativity.

Ms. Bohrer recalled that when she used to share her lesson plans at no charge, a poster of her reading strategies was passed around so many times that it ended up with a teacher in another school who had no idea where it came from.

"I'll share with friends," Ms. Bohrer said, "and if anyone else likes it, I'll tell them where to buy it."

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Selling Lesson Plans Online, Teachers Raise Cash and Questions

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Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University , said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.

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An article in the New York today outlines the pros and cons of teachers selling their lesson plans to other teachers online, and there are decent arguments on each side, but we found one aspect kind of odd: the Times repeatedly mentions the vacations, home improvements, and other "extravagances" teachers buy with their lesson-plan money. You know, exactly the way they would mention all that stuff if these teachers were thieves or Bernard Madoff instead of entrepreneurs. It's bizarre:

While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation."

home renovation? Even? The article goes on to mention over and over the personal products and services upon which teachers are spending the money they make selling lesson plans of their own invention. It seems like, if this were any other profession, they would just say "They sell something, legally, and then keep the money, spending it on themselves the way they do their salaries."

Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions[]

home renovation? Even? The article goes on to mention over and over the personal products and services upon which teachers are spending the money they make selling lesson plans of their own invention. It seems like, if this were any other profession, they would just say "They sell something, legally, and then keep the money, spending it on themselves the way they do their salaries."

Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions[]

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The Times Asks: Should Teachers Sell Lesson Plans?

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An article in the New York today outlines the pros and cons of teachers selling their lesson plans to other teachers online, and there are decent arguments on each side, but we found one aspect kind of odd: the Times repeatedly mentions the vacations, home improvements, and other "extravagances" teachers buy with their lesson-plan money.

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Please read the articles provided to you here, and respond to at least one or both sides of the debate.
Should teachers have the right to sell their lesson plans without compensation provided to the institution?
Keep in mind the question of intellectual property ownership; who owns these materials, the faculty, or the administration?

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No, teachers SHOULD NOT be able to sell their lesson plans/classroom resources without compensation to the institution

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No, teachers SHOULD NOT be able to sell their lesson plans/classroom resources without compensation to the institution

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Yes, teachers SHOULD be able to sell their lesson plans without compensation to the institution.

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Yes, teachers SHOULD be able to sell their lesson plans without compensation to the institution.