Well, I for one was speaking largely to those posting on their little old individual blogs. I’m not saying go crazy with the lessons, but one or two a month would be wonderfully useful, at least for someone like me. I suspect most of you would not produce many poor examples that didn’t at least hold a few redeeming qualities.

If we were to create some kind of comprehensive resource, quality control would indeed become more of an issue. A voting system actually could work quite well in my opinion, although it would probably polarize the community at least a little and could lend itself to abuse. An alternative might be to form another group blog a la The Faculty Room or TLN that has a fixed pool of contributors and/or a strict peer review process for any submitted posts, with the topic being 100% curriculum.

For now, I resubmit that all you solo bloggers would be providing a valuable public service to post even just one of your very best lessons. Heck, let’s make it a meme. And you’re all tagged! (I ain’t teaching yet, so I’m exempt, suckers)

I’ve already posted about a less than stellar lesson which I based off of one of Dan’s which he admitted also didn’t so well. I think after a few more rounds (nobody has taken me up on it) it might turn out smashing.

Also, if I knew there was a resource like the one you’re proposing here (and particularly if you were involved in developing that resource), I’d happily go back through my old lessons and post the best of what I could find. I haven’t done that so far because I wasn’t sure the effort would be worth the benefit to others if they just sat on my little blog. If they were thrown into a big mix of lesson plans from other teachers, though, then perhaps one or two would be helpful to a few teachers, making all the effort worth it.

So my hand’s in the air.

I’m not sure how things work in the US, but here in New South Wales, Australia there is a precisely defined curriculum, broken down in great detail.

For example, you can find the Year 7-10 curriculum at

http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/syllabus_sc/#mathematics

Obviously, different school systems will break things down in different ways, but I would imagine most of the content would overlap significantly.

My suggestion was to simply have an index for each jurisdiction. So, if adding fractions was designated 3.1 in one curriculum and 4.3 in another, the corresponding entries in the two indices would simply point to the same resource in the corpus.

This way, a teacher would just go to the index that corresponds to the jurisdiction within which they teach and there should then be a one-to-one correspondence between what they’re supposed to be teaching and the items in that index.

Hence, finding resources is a simple matter of going to the corresponding index entry for the curriculum topic they are about to teach. No real searching involved.

Regarding the varying quality of material, I would think one could use some kind of voting system (a la digg) to order the resources for each topic.

Of course, this might need to be slightly more complex than I make it sound, since the precise specification of different curricula may mean there are multiple definitions of “best” even within a single topic.

However, all up, this seems like the most useful way to approach the presentation of the information.

Is there any way of balancing the need for making us all feel we can and should contribute with the need all of us have for limiting the time we spend wading through only marginally useful material?

Every time I see someone sticking their curricular neck out in earnest, I can’t help but internalize something positive. Even if the idea sucks, the passion behind it remains, which never ceases to provide a seed of thought that can usually blossom into a slightly less crappy idea of my very own.

It’s like examining one of ya’lls CM scenarios. I may not choose to act like you did it, but that doesn’t mean your experience doesn’t help me figure out my own style. So, consider this a plea from the uninitiated: please, give us your almost-OK lessons. Submit yourself to the court of public opinion with the knowledge that many (if any) of us don’t know any better than you do. I’m certain that I, for one, can’t help but become a better teacher for it.

FWIW

However, I would say there’s no reason to be concerned that you’ve not produced a perfect gem. What you have created may well be something that others can help you to polish.

Building up a corpus of lesson plans, that can be refined over time, is definitely better than everyone backing off because they don’t feel what they have is worth contributing and, as a consequence, all of us ending up with such a sparse catalogue that it’s next to useless.

Further, no matter how raw you feel they are, I’ll bet there are other teachers out there who would welcome your plans as starting points.

Give yourselves some credit, take a risk, and I’ll bet you discover you’ve contributed much more than you think.

Good luck to you both.

At I Love Math, outstanding stuff and materials that could use some cleaning up are side by side, and you need to sift through a good deal to find the real gems (what distinguishes I Love Math is, of course, that there is enough of the latter to make it more than worth the time it takes. Most lesson plan sites are a mess – ILM is the only one I’ve continued to use.)

So, what kind of quality control? What about some rating system where, instead of just voting a lesson up for its looking cool, teachers rate lessons by indicating that they have actually used [elements of] the lessons successfully? Or, if some 50 of us (or whatever) wrote something every month, some kind of voting system could determine the best 30 (or so) entries? The rest could be made available too, but somehow in a separate pile.