Ahhh, the dreaded textbook. As students, we all grew up hating it and immediately protested any reading assigned from it. My AP World History teacher from high school must have thought our textbook was the Bible of world history because we were assigned at least 10 pages of reading a night. By the end of the year I had read that whole textbook, but how much knowledge did I actually retain? Not much.
So what place do textbooks have in our classroom? A quote from Chapter 6 of Subjects Matter stood out to me, “If all the worrisome test scores and ranting pundits mean anything, it’s that textbook-based teaching doesn’t work” (p. 178). I agree with the text here and believe that our curriculum should not be based around the textbook, but I do think we can utilize it in strategic ways. I really loved the “Guide-o-Rama” study guide provided in the textbook. I think it is an amazing way to get students to read the text intentionally and get the main ideas from the passage that you want them to get. It is like this beautiful little map to help them decipher the text and help them learn how to be literate with textbooks. Personally, I would use this strategy in my classroom but I still would not center my teaching around the textbook. I would take ideas from the text, that I think are important and in the standards and make my own notes or powerpoint to teach the concepts. This way I can get the important vocabulary and ideas and make sure the students know them rather than just throwing them to the wolves with the textbook.
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(Word Count: 283)
Josh! AP world history textbook really are the worst, aren't they? To be fair to APWH teachers, though, there is a lot of information to cover, and I can see how it would be tempting to rely on a textbook to tell the story. I'd be interested in hearing from some social studies teachers how they might do something different. -BR
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