Why on earth aren't subject text books plugged more???

[pgtips2]

Nowadays, it seems everything is either on a screen or a booklet or a crumpled bit of work sheet copied to death.

When I quizzed my youngest they said they'd never even looked in the text book! They're lucky to have them both as print and online copies but I was aghast.

These are books which are basically either written or used for the GCSE curriculum/exam board they're sitting.

Surely, the first point of call should be - after the teaching / lesson - to look at the chapter and then make sure you do the end-of-chapter/topic tests.

But instead my kids use various online resources - which although great resources such as Save my exams and PMT, surely should be the follow on rather than the source - it just seems strange NOT to start with the book.

I think using a book as a basis provides more of a structure in your mind of the topics covered and you can sort of remember almost - after a while - where a specific explanation or question is. I should think much better for kids/boys with slight ADHD issues (suspicion here).

Thoughts please!!

Money, perhaps.

My DS has finished school, but even though it was a private school, they didn't hand out textbooks. Afraid to ask parents for more money. I bought them myself for the correct boards/courses. Same when my DD took GCSEs.

And astonishingly, when I took a load to 3 different charity shops, none were interested in GCSE/A Level textbooks and revision books. I couldn't believe it.

I can't get my head around my DD having NO text books. It's dreadful... when I asked where the textbooks are I was told that everything DD needs is 'on the system'. I can't access it and DD is ASD and can't fathom what she's meant to do. If we had a textbook we could do it together.

And don't get me started on the revision books... why won't the school just give parents a list of what we need? I'd happily buy them... all I get is... oh just Google it... there's loads of stuff on line. I didn't do well at school and left years ago... I have NO idea how to help DD.

School can’t afford to buy them.

Cost and longevity. Think of all the curriculum changes in the last few years!

As above, though, there are online version. Not as good but they're still not used as a basis for the learning or revision. Madness!

I'm an organised person but even I would feel like I had a split personality with the various online platforms, print outs, booklets etc etc

I realise not all schools can afford print copies but there are online versions, I'm pretty sure, at all schools.

But they just don't seem to be the center of learning or revision at all!

Surely, the best way would be to teach kids how to use text books (online or text) as a basis for core learning/revision.

I dread to think how much time teachers spend on 'lesson plans' and copying! I mean here not just the actual cost but the indirect cost as in time.

I absolutely cannot stand this. The information is scattered everywhere, notes and questions on Teams with answers on random pages in jotters, not clear what goes with what. I used to do a lot of revision at school by reading through handouts but obviously producing these is a cost the schools now can’t afford. I tried printing out everything for my DC in advance for the subjects that were the biggest problem (sciences) but not every teacher provides the materials before a lesson and it still didn’t seem to work. I’ve had my DC2 desperate to revise for tests but so confused over where to find all their course materials to do so. I insist they go over their stuff at the end of each day now so they have some idea how it all fits together while it’s still in the forefront of their brain! If a kid any organisational difficulties I don’t know how they manage to cope with it.

Our school often only offers an online version or a classroom copy. Neither end up working well for dd. I’ve taken to buying copies of the textbooks myself to keep at home. Thankfully I have the kind of money to get away with doing that. Also thankfully, I don’t need to do it for every course. If she starts struggling because of lack of book access though, it is my default move at this point.

Which subjects and what level/exam board? I'm happy to try and help if I can (feel free to private message, if you want).

FWIW, the school where I work offers the chance to buy revision resources and textbooks through our school account- as it's a bulk order, the students get a discount compared to the online prices.

Unfortunately, we can't afford to give every student a text book- but we do have class sets and they can borrow one from the library.

@Ponderingwindow Yes, agree, and I've bought text books too. But realise my kids are wholly incapable of how to use them!

Even if online copies, there must be soooo much duplication of effort in producing these handouts, booklets etc. I'd rather the teachers spent time on drilling down on where my DC is weaker/stronger (I'm sure they do this too but no wonder they're flat out!).

It's just so much more neater and organised. Also, the topics in the text book are aligned with the exam board curriculum and key learning criteria.

I do wonder if the lack of print (though I don't think the online books are used either) text books are a short sighted economy??

God, I agree. I've got a recurring nightmare about DS getting to the end of his GCSEs, and having nothing but a pile of handouts to revise with.

Even when schools do have text books, they're barely used. It's all a confusing mixture of "scrappy home made worksheets", photocopies, notes/questions written by hand in exercise books from the white board or dictation, etc.

Likewise, I was very surprised that text books were barely used. When doing viewing at open days before he choose and at parents' evenings and other events, there seemed to be piles of textbooks everywhere. Son was even issued with his personal textbooks for some subjects. Yet, they still weren't used. Most of his text books looked brand new when he handed them back just like they were when he first got them. None of his homeworks were ever to read chapter x or do the questions on page yy - it was always to complete a worksheet, or go online and do a particular set of questions on xyz website.

Back in my day, you used a text book and it was like the bible/gospel for that year - we read from it in class, did the end of chapter questions for homework, teacher would work through it, etc. I hadn't realised all that had stopped. I found it much better that way as you had a single point of reference and more importantly, if you missed a lesson you could easily catch up yourself, just by reading the next chapter and doing the questions, in the hope that's what they were doing, which was usually right as teachers tended to follow the order of the text book.

Must be a mammoth waste of time for teachers to all be writing their own materials, creating their own worksheets, thinking up homeworks, finding online resources and putting details up on the school homework portal, etc.

Yes, I know text books go out of date. But surely most of the basics remain valid. I.e. pythagoras is still the same as it was 40 years ago. I remember back then we were using old O level textbooks for the new GCSE, but all that happened was the teacher would tell us to ignore, say, chapter 10 as it wasn't on the syllabus any more, or only go up to question 10 out of 20, because q's 10 to 20 were "too hard" for the new exam structure and wouldn't be examined, etc. All pretty simple "tweaking" really to use the same books for a slightly different syllabus. Same with the sciences - fundamentals are the same, i.e. gravity, equation for voltage, periodic table, components of the heart., so a generic text book of years ago is probably still 75% valid (or more) today.

I can't imagine such a fragmented way of teaching (i.e. lots of different resources, home made resources etc) is a "better" way of teaching. To my, it just causes confusion and complication if the pupil has to look at numerous different resources to find the information they need, especially at revision time. Would be far easier to just have a textbook or two.

Our GCSE textbook is £30, we teach a full cohort with 220 per year. The pdf version was free

Too expensive.

I used to teach for twenty years.

At a level the textbook we used they covered the whole course was 50 quid for a physical copy and 50 quid per online log in.

So the cost of buying online log ins was the same as physical textbooks.

We just couldn't afford it.

We only had four teacher log ins for eight teachers as it was.

As a former teacher I asked myself this many times. We actually had textbooks but only used them when a supply teacher was in!

Text books, work books and revision guides etc can cheaply be bought from Amazon.

There are also lots of second hand ones on ebay going very cheap.

We ended up buying several for our son, which he far preferred to the random pile of photocopies and worksheets. Once he'd finished with them, we sold them on ebay.

For the ones that don't come with answers at the back, you can usually get them emailed by the publisher upon request, or sometimes you have to buy answer sheets for a couple of pounds or so (basically to cover postage) if the publisher won't email them.

Textbooks are mostly terrible. They can be written without seeing the specification and don't easily address the skills expected of the mark scheme.

They might have interesting content, but are limited in getting students to apply what they've been exposed to meaningfully. Learning doesn't stick even if they're used properly.

There's also teenage complacency. Having the stack of books means the answers are all there. They just need to read and highlight nearer the time and that will translate to success, if they ever get round to it.

And when students come to university, they will look anywhere for information except textbooks, which we provide in the library and as no-cost online versions. If we force them to use books (e.g. by setting them tasks in labs where they're not allowed mobile devices but have access to a set of books), they don't know how to use tables of contents or indexes: they only know Ctrl-F.

@Badbadbunny i agree with you. When I was a TA I was present in lessons where the textbooks came out and, interestingly, I felt like doing a simple reading comprehension was a dying art, despite the fact that this is an essential skill for life/exams. Can only speak for certain subjects mind you.

I also found behaviour was quite good in some text book lesson, you wouldn’t be able to do every lesson like that but quite often they’d just get on with it.

Some very ignorant posts here about handouts or 'scrappy' resources. It's one thing if kids don't organise them properly or look after them, but they're designed by those who know what they're teaching and what the examiner is looking for, to be specific for the students' needs (having been the one to recently and regularly check what they know and understand and where they're still going wrong) and to scaffold what they need, including important vocabulary or connected ideas, examples, prompts etc.

Notes, models, resources, criteria, independent responses and feedback in exercise books contain all the knowledge and how to address areas for improvement.

I find it depends on the teacher, some will use textbooks more then others and they are a limited resource in school as well. So we only have 4 full sets of Chemistry, Physics and Biology books for our year 10&11's with so not many available really. Cover lessons will always get priority as they will need the text book for working from normally.

They do seem to use th more in KS3.

And while I agree to some extent with the poster about worksheets being good quality material. In science much is pre-printed handouts that we used to have to actually write, which helped you learn the material. I think the over packed circulum has a lot to answer for on this though as not enough time to go over work more throughly.

I do think that DD found having physical workbooks and text books at home for her GCSE'S helpful as well as online content as she could then do book work and not spend all her time peering at a computer screen. She made her own physical notes when doing revision as well.

I could not agree more. And no, I would not call most of the above comments 'ignorant'.

What is ignorant is schools seeminlgy being unable to grasp the amount of unnecessary effort, time (both the students' and the teachers') and juggling skills that not having one source of reference and having lots of different scraps of paper and online 'resources' takes for most brains.

Just imagine an ASD brain etc...

To put it bluntly - a child who could achieve all 7-9s with textbooks (or whatever, as long as it's all in one place and in some form of logical order) will be lucky if they get a pass if you make them collate dozens of overlapping and unconnected 'scraps'

It will also get them exhausted, stressed,anxious and absolutely hating school.

Plus, they will leave school unable to use a work of reference, or a simple index.

I must admit to being perplexed when my daughter asked for help with her GCSE maths; I asked for the text book so I could see the 'worked example' and she said there were no text books!
I said, well where were the examples then, and she didn't know!

“Ignorant” my arse. We have the text books and DC1’s advice to DC2 with regard to these subjects was “Just read the books, that’s what I did”. There’s absolutely no way the muddle that I have been witness to for some subjects (not all) is specific and targeted.