Sunday 4 November 2012

When ideas and resources come back around...

Over the past few days I have been sorting my paper resources and last night I was doing some planning for the term ahead, thinking about what I would be teaching and looking through my "soft-copy" resources. I found quite a few that I like and posted them on twitter directly and via tumblr.



One reply that I received was from my partner. The conversation is above. This is true and I didn't mean to take credit for designing the resource, only physically printing and laminating it. Oops, sorry Richard.

I understand why Richard would be possessive of his resources. We have both been very happy to share our work with each other over the years. Between 2002 and 2005 his school (let's call it school B) re-wrote their key stage 3 units and between 2004 and 2007 a school I worked at (let's call it school D) re-wrote ours. A lot of Richard's resources ended up in my scheme of work.

In 2008 I moved to a new school (lets call that school C) with a different scheme, so I just shared my resources created in school D, with the department in the folder "Helen". So now three schools have access to Richard's resources. Although in school C they were only used by a few people as we had a far more "innovative" curriculum and resources. (For "innovative" read "poorly thought out and rushed").



Richard then didn't work in the science department of his school (B) for a couple years as the school cancelled key stage 3 science (and most other subjects) in favour of a whole school project based year 7 and 8. Richard's resources were no longer required and were lost.

In 2011 a teacher who was working with me at school C applied and was appointed as key stage 3 science coordinator at Richard's school. At the same time project based learning was scaled back and Richard was now required in the science department again to make up numbers for the timetable.

The teacher who moved from school C to school B was required to over-see the re-write of key stage 3 science and took with him the folder named "Helen" containing resources made by Richard. (As you can imagine as there was now a key stage 3 science course where there hadn't been one in the previous few years).

The first I know of it is when Richard is checking out the resources in the scheme of work written as an example by his new key stage 3 coordinator and he is being slightly rude about a resource made by me!

Then a colleague came to him asking for support with how to interpret and use a resource that has a great big code over the corner. (This code was added in school D by me, but in the corner not over the content of the resource - blame Word for that movement). The colleague did not realise that Richard was in fact the original author of this resource.




This whole post was inspired when I noticed that an ex-colleague from school C who had "favourited" one of my tweets with a photo of one of my resources from the aforementioned "Helen" folder.

While at school B they have and are re-using all the resources that Richard and I have created and collected over the years at school C they are not.

I think that the whole complicated blog post and story shows that you can never be sure where ideas come from and they might even just be there under your nose.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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