Reinventing the wheel or making it local?

I noticed an NYTimes article about the AFT's plans to develop a lesson-sharing site.  Good idea?  After all, if we are just copying from a textbook's teacher's guide, wouldn't lessons from a live colleague be just as beneficial?  We might not teach either the lesson from the textbook (what makes us think that the textbook author -- not an especially respected role in academia ... see its role in tenure decisions -- has special insight?) or the lesson share by a colleague would meet our needs.  Chances are we will use the lessons as a springboard to something of our own, or if we are just beginning to teach or new to a course, we may use the lesson until we can develop something on our own.

In my department, some folks are working with ITec people to develop courses that will pass the muster of the Quality Matters rubric and its evaluators.  Any borrowed course would probably need to be reconfigured to meet that rubric.

All of which seems to be a narrowing of the role of the individual instructor.  Even tenure doesn't protect one from having to conform to a lesson design that someone else has approved -- which is not to say that our beloved course that we've taught for years was well-designed.  We liked to teach it and enough students wanted to take it, so we didn't have to redesign it.

Many of us have had professors who not only didn't share or borrow, they simply reused.  One of my favorites (a Harvard grad, no less) used to photocopy his legal pad notes each time he taught his courses, freezing the original in amber.

Ultimately, it isn't the particular lesson that we share, but collegiality, a sharing of how we teach.  As many of us know, the classroom can be a lonely place, with little feedback from our peers.  Does everyone cause students to panic and withdraw?  Does everyone reach out to students in difficulty, only to be ignored?  Does everyone have problems teaching the x-number of uses for a comma?  We sometimes need to be reminded that we are not alone, and that no matter what the outward and institution show to the contrary, we really operate from a position of experimenting, not from a position of certainty.  That's what makes teaching so stressful ... and fun.