Open Planner: Working Smarter, Together
What if...
- ...the design of curriculum and instruction belonged to self-organizing communities of experienced, practicing teachers and education researchers?
- ...teachers had free access to unit plans that had already been used, tested, and revised by hundreds of other teachers in the same discipline, working with a similar population of students?
- ...teachers could modify any worksheet or resource to suit the needs of their students? What if they could share these modifications back to the teaching community, all without the fear of copyright infringement?
- ...questions or feedback about a curriculum could be quickly sought after and discussed in public forums, mining the wisdom of like-minded professionals?
- ...teachers could post their questions or feedback about a particular resource, and the authors of the curriculum could both respond and benefit from the feedback?
- ...teachers could rendezvous with others in this online community the next summer institute or weekend EdCamp event, hatch new curriculum development projects, and connect around common professional goals?
- ...teachers with an idea for a new curriculum could easily work with others around the country who were equally excited to develop it?
- ...teacher resumes included such impressive accomplishments as "Led Curriculum Development Team for Project X, Open Planner," with a URL to their portfolio.
- ..."Master Teachers" could easily offer and promote ad-hoc PD workshops to a network of interested colleagues?
- ... teachers could become invested in the continual refinement and adaptation of methodology and resources through the use of a communally sanctioned action research process to gage their own effectiveness?
Open Educator is inspired by the success of open-source software development projects such as Linux, Apache, Wikimedia, Mozilla, Drupal, Moodle, and Elgg, among thousands of others built and continuously revised by self-organized communities of users, hobbyists, and professional programmers. Some of these programs have risen in a relatively short time to become industry leaders and innovative contributors in a world shared with proprietary giants such as Microsoft.
Such examples tell a story of a changing dynamic of information exchange that is still just dawning on our society. The production and feedback cycle of "knowlege products" has ceased to be dictated by the relatively fixed, hierarchical boundaries of intellectual property and high barriers to entry (i.e. few individuals can own a book publishing company or television station..). While the printing press and television both liberated information, in a sense, from critical restrictions of the previous age, each led to new concentrations of power and information failures. With the advent of WSYWIG webpage-driven web-publishing engines, users and producers of public knowledge and information can now be one and the same. Open Educator was founded on the belief that such a radical shift in the way information can be shared has radical implications for teachers.
When we look at the information ecology of public educators in this country, by and large we see a story of hard working, relatively isolated and emotionally/intellectually under-supported practitioners. Teacher expertise is developed "where the rubber meets the road," through the interactions and judgments they must continually make in the classroom. Unfortunately the demands of school schedules and disciplinary specialization place educators strangely out of touch with one another, unable to provide each other useful knowledge and information. Professional assessment and development are too often encapsulated in short-lived, top-down rituals that have little ability to bear meaning or help teachers grow. For the minority who stay afloat for the first three to five years of teaching, teachers often become the private masters of their domain, classroom as kingdom, more or less dependent on knowledge and habits chanced upon along the way, and that seem to work "well enough" in a survival regime. Because of this isolation and lack of meaningful feedback, teaching remains a freelance craft as opposed to a profession.
While the needs of learners are supposed to drive instruction, poorly designed textbooks, assessment, standards and curriculum packages can quickly limit our effectiveness at creating meaningful understanding. While commercial curriculum and test publishers may have much to offer (and clearly much to gain) in the print world there have been few mechanisms by which to document and share the practical wisdom of hundreds of thousands of teachers who must actually implement and use these knowledge products. Constructivist proponents of original lesson planning, such as Wiggins and McTighe, offer ambitious and rigorous alternatives to "pre-packaged" curricula, yet the time and energy required to invent good curriculum is quite daunting, especially to new teachers.
Privately funded new schools initiatives demand teachers be given more common planning time and smaller student loads so they can effectively socialize their expertise and build closer, more supportive relationships with students and each other. These recommendations are rich with opportunity and wisdom, however their economic sustainability is questionable, and they often fail to take hold even amongst their most passionate teacher advocates. Small schools still lack the benefits of large, discipline-specific professional communities; and the work of interdisciplinary teams, while professionally rewarding, can be exremely time consuming to do right. Furthermore, institutional memory can be all the more volatile and difficult to sustain when the players are few in number and information systems are poorly designed. In places with the most demanding populations, the passionate new "Gates generation" of educators is finding burnout a problem in just a matter of a few years. High staff turnover begets further attrition and burnout, and so the cycle of institutional amnesia continues.
At Open Educator, we believe many of the historic challenges faced by the teaching profession can be treated as systemic information failures. Designing information systems to address these classical failures has the potential to revolutionize the way we work.
