Is it unfair to ask education consultants who are paid to present to share their slides with the audience?

Some of my colleagues and I had the opportunity to facilitate a workshop at the Long Island Language Arts Council/Nassau Reading Council 2022 Spring Conference held yesterday at the Melville Marriott. Our session was about the work we’ve done in our district to make a shift to workshop-based instruction using the work of Penny Kittle & Kelly Gallagher’s 2018 professional text 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents as our “field guide” for implementation.

After most professional organizations were forced to either cancel or shift their conferences online in the head of the pandemic, I was thrilled to have learned that LILAC/NRC was planning an in-person conference this year. While I’m still a tiny bit apprehensive about being in the company of large crowds, I didn’t hesitate to submit an enthusiastic response to their call for proposals. Thankfully four of my colleagues who have successfully shifted their practice (either in conjunction with or as a result of my initial research study) agreed to co-present with me. I felt that their presence and input was essential, as they are the teachers whose daily work with kids gives this idea breath and legs.

Our workshop was very well attended, and we truly enjoyed having the opportunity to share our work with colleagues from around the region. At the end of our session, several of us were approached by one or more members of the audience to receive feedback or answer questions. That, itself, was validating.

I don’t expect that our 60 minute presentation will have moved mountains or changed decades of instructional methodology, but if it inspires just one English teacher to experiment with workshop-based instruction in their middle school or high school classroom, than we were successful.

There are some things I think I need to make clear before I back into the point of this post. First, we submitted a proposal for this workshop; we were not “approached” or asked to present by any entity involved in the leadership of this association. Second, we understood that we would not be compensated for facilitating this workshop. In fact, we were still required to pay admission fees to attend. We neither expected nor received any kind of tangible “reward” for facilitating this workshop.

Though our team had been preparing for this conference for months, we didn’t meet in person as a full group until earlier this week. In the few hours we had together, we assembled our Google Slides presentation and discussed which one of us would take the lead for each subtopic within our session. As we assembled our slides, we included hyperlinks to various resources: teacher-created organizing documents, handouts and materials, ready-to-use assessments, samples of students’ work, links to the professional texts we found useful, etc. Most of the hyperlinks go right back to materials that “live” in teachers’ Google Drive accounts.

As we entered our assigned space and began setting up for our workshop, a few of my colleagues placed a 5×7 flyer with a QR code linked to a copy of our presentation. We told participants that they were welcome to download the presentation, access the resources, and use any or all parts of it to turnkey this work in their own school districts. We expect nothing in return.

Why did we do this? Because we believe in the value of this work. We want for it to be shared, to be modified, to be made even more useful for specific purposes. While I suppose it would be nice to receive some kind of attribution, that is, quite literally, the furthest thing from our minds. To be honest, I’m not even sure to what extent “attribution” is warranted… very few of these materials were developed completely in isolation, and with the exception of my published dissertation, nothing is copyrighted to any of us. Make no mistake – we did not pass off others’ work as our own. We did not link to other party’s handouts or materials that weren’t already in the public domain or that we didn’t have a right to share. Any work we might have created that was modified from an original source offered due credit to that original source.

That’s what teachers do, right? We don’t re-invent wheels… we modify them and make them our own.

And, quite honestly, this fits in with the “big idea” that we wanted folks who attended our workshop to understand: there is not a singular “correct” way to incorporate workshop-based instruction into a classroom. Though models may be provided, such as we have with Gallagher & Kittle’s text, it’s not practical to follow those models in lock-step and expect them to work beautifully within different settings.

Before I stray too far away from the point of this post, I’ll go ahead and get back to it.

I happened to be scrolling through my Twitter feed yesterday to see what kind of discussion was brewing from our conference. I was soon distracted by a series of tweets from an influential teacher-turned-author/consultant lamenting about being repeatedly asked to share her presentation slides after speaking engagements. She continued to explain how being asked to share her work is an example of how “the education system continues to exploit its people…”

This is where I need to pause and take a breath… because I have some strong feelings about this, but I also need to acknowledge that I am not walking in this person’s shoes, and there are some things from her perspective that I might not understand, including the context of her experience that motivated these posts. There’s not much information you can provide in a tweet or two.

I’m working with some assumptions here, but let’s assume that this particular author/consultant was paid to give a presentation at an educator conference of some kind (as, in this case, I doubt this particular individual would work for “free”). I find it somewhat odd for an author/consultant to accept an honorarium to give a presentation and refuse to share materials with the audience. Is the honorarium not inclusive of access these materials? Or should the materials themselves cost extra? Are the attendees expected to purchase a book? Pay a subscription fee for a “product?” Pay for that author/consultant to come to their school district and host the presentation again?

Consultants, especially those who are published and have made a name for themselves, are costly for many valid reasons. Yes, they deserve to be compensated for their work, but is it not somewhat “exploitive” for a consultant (or their publisher) to charge a school district or a professional organization a thousand or more dollars to appear and speak for 45 minutes or so… and that’s it?

I get it. Teachers are busy enough doing the work of “teaching,” and those who have worked beyond the four walls of their classroom to author professional texts and make themselves available for consulting opportunities work even harder. They deserve our respect and, to an extent, our gratitude. But are they not appropriately compensated for this work? If they are not, why do they do it? Because I’m sure that if work was being done for the sake of educational progress, sharing slides after a presentation wouldn’t be a sticky widget.

I can imagine that a great deal of earnings from authors’ text sales go to the publishers, but author/consultants are not “martyrs” to the cause. They made the choice to work with a publisher rather than to self-publish or write in a blog. They need the publisher as much as the publisher needs them. So perhaps the angst should be directed elsewhere, and not upon the teacher probably paid $150 out-of-pocket to attend a conference featuring them as a keynote speaker.

The way I see it, authors/consultants provide a service and/or a “product” that earns proceeds. By effectively marketing themselves as consultants and workshop presenters, they not only earn additional proceeds for their engagements, they continue to build credibility and create pathways for future opportunities to monetize their work. I find it surprising that anyone who is paid to give a presentation would refuse to share the presentation itself. I understand that, to an extent, the content in workshop slides will include some intellectual property… but should that not part of the “package deal” in their speaker fee?

I have never seen this particular consultant speak, nor have I read any of her published materials. I honestly cannot say for sure how much of her work was created in a vacuum and to what extent her ideas are truly unique. To me, a blanket refusal to share slides from a presentation seems a little counter-productive in the grand scheme of things. Does she expect that a member of the audience would use her slides to personally benefit from her intellectual property? It’s far more likely that an attendee would use the slides to somehow enhance the experience of the kids in their classrooms. Why else would a teacher-turned-author/consultant do this work if not, among other things, to benefit kids?

Perhaps I’m in left field here, but this didn’t sit right with me. Or maybe I myself am a part of the problem… maybe each time I share my work with others for free, I allow myself to be “exploited.”

No – that’s wrong. I don’t feel exploited at all.