Shedding the Textbook
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With 2014 upon us, the cool thing to do is talk about resolutions. My “new year,” as an educator started in September, and I have successfully stuck to a quiet resolution of mine – to loosen the stranglehold that our textbook had on my American History class.
In the past, we were studying “a chapter” over the span of a couple weeks. Our daily agenda teemed with phrases like, “Chapter 9 – Section 2.” Students might have even communicated that we examined pages 660-664 as our lesson on a particular day.
Insert my mindshift here. What if the textbook became a resource for class rather than our guiding light?
Facilitating this change has required a conscientious effort to communicate our topics by eras, events, and learning goals. More than once, I have used my handy skin eraser to fix my instinctive agenda indicator on the dry erase board and update it with a better series of descriptors for our tasks.
Fear not – we haven’t abandoned reading. In fact, students definitely read more than they used to in my class. The DVD player sat as an idle ornament for the first five weeks of the school year too. By using primary documents, snippets from our textbook, web resources, and other secondary sources, our course material has actually been enriched by this change. For the concrete sequential types, myself included, we still have an anchoring point associated with a textbook chapter; however, I am freed to guide us into altered sequencing. If it seems more appropriate to get deeper into a war before examining its impact on domestic conditions, we do that. It doesn’t short-circuit the students because they know that the textbook functions as a resource rather than something biblical.
What I appreciate most about it is the way it has spun into communicating about what we are studying. How much more does a student need to understand in order to know “where” we are? It’s no longer a number, so their conversations with parents can be generated through statements like, “We’re looking at the huge influx of immigration to the U.S. during the late 1800s and early 1900s,” rather than, “We’re in chapter 15 now.” One of those is a good conversation-starter while the other is easily derailed with shrugging.
Another step in implementing this change has been renaming assignments. Few task names carry textbook chapter or section references, at least not as a primary name. I will still provide page references in association with work we do when the textbook is the main resource to be used; however, it puts us on stride with unit goals in our standards-based learning structure when skills or goals are identified by formative assessment names. Thus, looking at a series of quotations expressing concerns with bank and railroad practices of the late 1800s is called, “Farmers’ Voices,” on the handout and in the grade book.
I would also contend that this series of adjustments invites students to look at text differently. Questioning word choice, phrasing, or the organization within a chapter of a textbook or other document become more acceptable and natural because the book does not function as my “right-hand man” in governing class. If we aren’t using textbooks on a particular day, they remain shelved. At first, students took this as a signal that we were going someplace or watching something, but now it isn’t even grounds for conversation. We have bigger things on our minds.
Lastly, the chore of tackling topics within a finite time frame becomes less daunting. I’m writing this on a day in which our governor has closed Minnesota’s schools. At best, thirteen days remain in our first semester. Not being married to the textbook for curriculum muffles the ticking clock (a little). I’ve defined what we need to finish by what my students need to accomplish in terms of learning goals rather than pages to flip.
Student-centered learning requires defining a course’s expectations as a function of factors relating to what students are indeed learning. In order to fortify this adjustment, one must apply supplemental learning resources and alter communication of daily and unit outputs. These practices translate into more precise and meaningful learning.
http://mrsstrukel.edublogs.org/2014/01/06/shedding-the-textbook/
