Please forgive cross postings.

I've been working with a museum to develop a new, hands-on field trip for
middle and high school students. We know that the audience for the trip could
be Social Studies or Family Studies or Technology Education classes. Early
work with focus groups indicated that teachers for these grades wanted a
curriculum guide to go along with the field trip, with a variety of
multi-disciplinary lessons cross referenced to state and local educational
objectives, so that they could better justify taking the trip. In addition,
they wanted all the student worksheets ready for photocopying.

The guide contains 14 lessons. We don't expect any one teacher to do all the
lessons. We have indicated 3 basic lessons that we recommend all classes do
in advance of the trip. From there, the individual teacher is free to select
supporting lessons relevant to their particular focus. We worked with a
teacher advisory group throughout the entire process.

We've completed the guide and now are faced with a dilemma. Because it does
contain primary source images and documents, all the student worksheets and
educational objectives, each lesson averages about 7 pages in length. The
total guide is around 50 double-sided pages. The cost of photocopying and
mailing the guide would be around $5 per copy.  While the cost might
eventually get built into the program fees, in the short term that is a
significant expense. Some museum staff are also concerned that an
unsuspecting teacher would receive the guide and panic before realizing that
they don't have to do the entire packet.

The suggestion was made that in contacting the teacher in advance of the
trip, one of the museum educator's could discuss the teacher's educational
objectives and then select the lessons that the museum educator felt met
those objectives. This would reduce the size of the mailed packet and the
mailing expenses. On the other hand, some of the museum educator's believe
that the school teacher could select the lessons better and might do more
lessons once they had a chance to see how fun and exciting the lessons are.
And once the museum educator's time in discussing the lessons is factored in,
the net cost is probably the same as mailing the complete packet.

Another idea was to mail the entire packet, but ask teacher's to return it.
They could photocopy any lessons they wanted to and the museum would only
have to reproduce a limited number of the guides. The potential is that
teachers won't do it and the museum will have the expense of continually
reproducing the guides. One suggestion might be to give them a $5 refund if
they return the guide.

Does anyone out there have experience in one system or the other?

Jeannine Finton
Education Consultant

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