Limited Resources

Educators learn from each school year and develop resources based on their past experiences and student development. As a teacher, I enjoyed using resources from other educators because they create student activities by differentiating on student needs. Lately, as teachers our hands are tied with using multiple resources. We have been restricted from using different resources to benefit student growth. Due to complicated issues involving surrounding schools, teachers are only allowed to use resources that have been intensively vetted. This sounds okay, given the thought that all resources should be vetted before student use, but it is not. Teachers are not allowed to vet their resources and they need to be vetted by others in our district and school setting. This is a lot of work on different people in the school setting, which means we have been limited to only using 1-2 resources for each subject. We find ourselves constantly in a bind trying to think of other resources to review, reteach, or even differentiate student skills. As a third-grade teacher, there are a lot of standards that we reteach each quarter. If we already used one resource to teach the standard the first time, then what other resources can we use to teach it again? Teachers barely have time to create lesson plans due to parent conferences, school meetings, and personal lives and now it is expected of us to start creating our resources for standards that exist all over the country. We go through many years in our professional telling each other “Do not reinvent the wheel” but that seems like our new reality.