When I was going through my pre-service training my facilitator passed an external hard drive containing all of her curriculum around the classroom for us to copy onto our laptops. She jokingly told us that the key to being a successful teacher is to follow the C.A.S.E. Method: Copy and Steal Everything.
Fast forward ten years and I am presenting at an ed tech conference. Scrolling through the hashtag for the event between sessions I see someone delivering parts of a presentation I gave at an earlier conference using the same templates I had created. Intrigued, I pulled up the deck on the conference website and was surprised that these resource weren’t credited to me. This individual, like many of us, was following the C.A.S.E method and like many of us, don’t always attribute where we are getting our resources and ideas from.
Fast forward ten years and I am presenting at an ed tech conference. Scrolling through the hashtag for the event between sessions I see someone delivering parts of a presentation I gave at an earlier conference using the same templates I had created. Intrigued, I pulled up the deck on the conference website and was surprised that these resource weren’t credited to me. This individual, like many of us, was following the C.A.S.E method and like many of us, don’t always attribute where we are getting our resources and ideas from.
I am not naive enough to think that I owned the ideas that I was presenting and I am glad that it was being shared with a wider audience, but as a profession I think it is time that we move past C.A.S.E. for three reasons.
First, by not attributing our ideas and resources we are choosing to ignore constructivist nature of learning. We refuse to recognize that these resources are the culmination of a series of new ideas and innovations that have been shared and improved upon over time by many different individuals.
Second, we are preventing the creation and sometimes expansion of a professional learning community that can act as a hive mind to brainstorm new innovation and suggest solutions of implementation barriers. For this reason, now I always include in my decks the name and contact information for any resources I reference during my presentation in the hopes that the audience will connect with this individual and expand our learning network.
Third, and most important, we are setting a bad model for our students by not modeling what it means to be a good digital citizen. Instead of perpetuating the illusion of the sage on the stage, we should be honest with our students with where we get our ideas. This empowers them to seek out information from their classmates and other sources and removes the pressure that they should be the ultimate source of every correct answer. When we stop hiding behind the C.A.S.E Method powerful conversations like this become possible: “I saw my friend try this out with her class and I wanted to try it out with you, too. She said that her students really enjoyed it. Maybe we can talk with her class via Hangout when we are done to share our work and see how we might improve?”
First, by not attributing our ideas and resources we are choosing to ignore constructivist nature of learning. We refuse to recognize that these resources are the culmination of a series of new ideas and innovations that have been shared and improved upon over time by many different individuals.
Second, we are preventing the creation and sometimes expansion of a professional learning community that can act as a hive mind to brainstorm new innovation and suggest solutions of implementation barriers. For this reason, now I always include in my decks the name and contact information for any resources I reference during my presentation in the hopes that the audience will connect with this individual and expand our learning network.
Third, and most important, we are setting a bad model for our students by not modeling what it means to be a good digital citizen. Instead of perpetuating the illusion of the sage on the stage, we should be honest with our students with where we get our ideas. This empowers them to seek out information from their classmates and other sources and removes the pressure that they should be the ultimate source of every correct answer. When we stop hiding behind the C.A.S.E Method powerful conversations like this become possible: “I saw my friend try this out with her class and I wanted to try it out with you, too. She said that her students really enjoyed it. Maybe we can talk with her class via Hangout when we are done to share our work and see how we might improve?”