Coworkers passing off your ideas as their own

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Coworkers passing off your ideas as their own

by PREKCATEACHER

Jan 6, 2018

I am a prek teacher at a small private school. I recently found out that one of the teachers at my school has been passing off my curriculum ideas as her own.

This is really bothering me for a couple of reasons. I want to have a unique classroom and it hurts me to know that all the time I spend planning and creating new ideas is being passed off as someone else's.

My question is how would you handle this? I have had this problem in the past. My school is small with only 6 classes and everything we do, the other teachers know about. In the past when I approached my coworker about it, she told me I was being petty and a know it all.

Has anyone else had this happen and what did you do?

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men52 I just came out of "retirement" to teach at a small preschool that has only 3 classrooms. My adult children are older then most of my co workers and my total years of teaching is probably equal to the total years of the youngest teachers. I am only saying this to let you know my perspective is coming from a different direction then yours.

...See MoreI just came out of "retirement" to teach at a small preschool that has only 3 classrooms. My adult children are older then most of my co workers and my total years of teaching is probably equal to the total years of the youngest teachers. I am only saying this to let you know my perspective is coming from a different direction then yours.

I come from a very different training and teaching philosophy then where I am now. I find this type of teaching as much more demanding time wise due to lesson planning. I was used to setting up my environment each fall and letting it evolve following the children's development and interests. Here I am expected to follow a different theme each week and teachers change things often even daily. I would have disliked this way of teaching if I didn't have on line resources like Pinterest to go to. From what I can see, the other teachers all seem to get their ideas from there, too. I really don't think there are really that many unique ideas out there anymore.

I came from a teaching background that seemed to relish the sharing of ideas for the good of the children we were guiding. As part of our training we adults had to look within ourselves to make changes to be giving and happy people. It took years to drop negative feelings about things I couldn't change about others. Although all of us teachers had the same training and philosophy, even in the big school I taught in, I still stood out as the teacher the parents asked for their child(the school had to drop the parents being able to request a teacher after that like most schools do now). I am a naturally competitive person so secretively I enjoyed that role, but I was always happiest teaching in my own schools where any notion of being compared to others didn't exist.

Where I am at now the teachers have a lot of flexibility to teach the way we want as long as we present a copy for each day that week lesson plan. At our school the two teachers in each classroom share the leading. In mine my co teacher leads for four weeks and then I lead the next four weeks and alternate through the year. After decades of shouldering that responsibility on my own with twice as many students that we have here, it is wonderful. As co teachers we are very compatible, but we found a lot of differences in how we do things. I have found that she loved my ideas and has been implementing quite a few of them during her teaching times. She didn't ask me and to tell you the truth, I felt honored that she is doing so. I think it is because I know my ideas have been so much better for the children and respectful of our time as teachers.

So, ideas I spend time developing for the themes don't bother me when other teachers use similar projects. This is because there is already someone out there in cyberspace that already had the same idea. I am happy that my co teacher is using my classroom management ideas because doing it the way I do makes so much more sense and is better for the children. She said speakers at the early childhood conferences are always telling the participants to do the things I do, but they don't really say HOW to do it. She is excited to see those ideas implemented and working in a classroom.

At this school they keep copies of the lesson plans for each theme in a classroom filing cabinet. These go back for many years. I could use these for my planning but I haven't. However, my ideas are going in there like all the other teachers' ideas after me. All of us have the freedom to look at the lesson plans of any of the teachers in the other classrooms. There isn't a feeling of any teacher being better or having better ideas. They embrace the unique talents and skills of each of us. It's not our ideas we decide on for our classrooms that make us stand out individually. It's the attitude of being our own unique selves and implementing the ideas to make the classroom environment the best it can be that is important.

I understand what you are feeling as I remember when my daughter first started having friends that were always copying her. She was so annoyed. I remember telling her that those friends were insecure with their own ideas. I like to think that adults who do that are either insecure or admire my ideas so much that it is an honor to be copied. I guess it takes an attitude adjustment from ourselves.

Just remember that your students are receiving the best of your time and effort. If more students are getting the same benefit then think of that as a positive, too. Enjoy the rest of your school year with your little ones!

Jan 7, 2018

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