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

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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!!

Haven't been in secondary education for a decade now, but I remember a Head Teacher taking our department to task because we didn't use text books and expect the pupils to take them home to do homework. We pointed out that each book cost the then equivalent of £30 and as we had an 8 form entry at that point, it would be something like twice our budget just to buy them - and then of course if you plan lessons around them you are at the mercy of kids actually remembering (or bothering) to bring them in.

Also at the end of the year they would be lost or defaced so would have to be replaced. Apparently that was our fault for not having high enough expectations.

I have fond memories of taking my text books home from school and looking through them - I guess at my school at least then, we could be trusted to look after them and got into loads of trouble if we forgot them. But the past is a different country.

I was also completely gobsmacked to find that in English literature, even at Year 10 and 11, the students are never set a homework to actually read some of the book themselves at home. They don't possess a copy of the book! They read it aloud together in class, apparently. That must be so slow and tedious for someone who's a quick reader and enjoys reading. I imagine it must be difficult for schools when students lose the books or forget them. But it just seems like dumbing down to me.

I remember being criticised for using a textbook in my lesson (was during my PGCE) as at that point in time you needed to follow a "script" and had to be all singing and dancing and constantly engaged with students. Allowing them quiet time to read through a text and do questions was considered unacceptable.

Books cost money.

The government keep changing the curriculum. Why invest all that money for books that will be irrelevant in 5years? Just look at T-levels, they had even had their first cohort go through and Rishi was already talking about plans to scarp them and introduced the advance British standard.

Any textbooks pre-2016 are out of date after changing from the A-G grades to 9-1 and school budgets have got tighter, cuts need to be made somewhere unfortunately and they just couldn't justify buying them. Especially when there are too many students who have no sense of respect and just draw willies in the books.
At least online it's all there and all up to date, and doesn't risk damage and graffiti in the same way.

I teach Eng Lit & Lang, IGCSE & IB, in an international school - money isn't an issue. We happily provide lovely new texts, encourage students to annotate, scribble & personalise them, & we are delighted when good annotations are passed down to siblings & friends.

This costs an absolute fortune.

If I had to trim the budget, I'd buy cheaper & flimsier editions of the texts, ask students to annotate in pencil & hand them back when done, & use handout extracts when annotation was essential. This would be a shame & an irritating constraint, but manageable: it's still not an option for every cash strapped school.

'Textbooks', as in 'books that explain ideas' as opposed to 'physical copies of the text we are studying', are invariably, for most subjects, wincingly out of date before the print dries. They're also online in site licensed form instantly - so the teacher can print off the bits that are useful, without needing everyone to lug 6 textbooks home & back to school every day.

oh & they are liable to circulate as unlicensed pdfs very quickly. Do the useful bits get quietly used at this point? Yes. It's a bit like home taping in the 80s.

I do like the idea of a good, solid tome of a text book. It would simplify things. If I were a student, I'd find it super reassuring to think that anything important was 'in the textbook'.

It just isn't how studying works in 2024.

At both my kids (state) schools we were told to buy the set texts, GCSE revision books in sciences, and at A level 1-2 Textbooks at £20-30 each. Guess we were lucky. The books were central at A level, though I think the point about students learning to assemble key info is important too.

This is probably a big contributor to children becoming dumber, you could say it's a different way of learning but I'm yet to see evidence of it being better

Because information seems to be out of date quicker these days, plus doesn't the curriculum seem to change evey 2 seconds?

There are a couple of problems, one is the cost of the books, I did a lot of supply and a lot of schools have a set of books kept in the classroom and used by several groups so the student can't take them home.

So any homework is on a printout or online.

The other is that if the curriculum changes then the books are out of date.

The use of IT in different settings is also variable. Personally I like Moodle but the students need to have access to it and a phone isn't always enough.

Eg one unit I regularly taught was 'Anatomy and physiology', most people get the students to make a poster of a eukaryotic cell that they copy from a picture on the internet.

With Moodle I can give them an unlabelled picture and have them either type in the various features or I can give them a drag and drop menu.

But you need a decent sized screen.

I think constantly changing curriculum is a bit of a red herring. Fair enough for subjects like history, geography, english lit, etc where whole chunks of a syllabus can change, but not really for Maths, sciences, and even MFL where the basics/fundamentals are the same whatever the syllabus, certainly prior to GCSE years.

Whole chunks of the science spec can change though? It's not feasible to study e.g. the whole of biology at GCSE, so the bits that are left in/taken out do change. Also, the genetics we teach at A-level now weren't fully understood when I did my A-levels. There is loads of genetics on the spec where the mechanisms involved have been discovered in the last 10 years or so...

Yes, at KS3, we're not studying the latest genetic research, but the national curriculum can and does change in terms of what is included and expected of each age group. Also, tbf at KS3 I don't use textbooks that much especially with my low ability groups, because often they are pitched too high in terms of reading age- so they're just inaccessible to a lot of the students. And I say that as a teacher who likes textbooks!

So use the textbooks for the relevant bits and use worksheets/handouts for anything new that's not in the textbook. Tell the students which parts of the textbook are no longer relevant. That's exactly what our teachers did back in the 80s when we were using CSE and O level textbooks for the "new" GCSE syllabii. Worked fine. When, say, 80% of the textbook is still relevant, it's bonkers not to use it and instead waste all the time and resources to create new resources from scratch for the entire 100%.

For subjects like Maths, there were huge books of question banks for every aspect, starting with simple on each page working through different levels to the most advanced. Teachers would tell us which page to do for practice in class or homework and tell us how far to go, or go as far as you were confident down the page. Again, very little of that would change year to year - the basic practice question banks are the same.

I appreciate the problem with deeper detail at GCSE and A level, which is why I mentioned that in my earlier post, but in earlier years, most of the content won't really change that much. A diagram of the components of a leaf in year 7 biology isn't going to change much.

I have had to actively teach my sixth formers how to use printed books in recent years. I think the rot set in with Covid.

They do not understand:

How to navigate them.
How to take notes from them.
How to look things up in an index.
What footnotes are.

It's been a real surprise and when I started teaching 13 years ago, students were perfectly confident with textbooks.

Mind you, younger teachers don't seem to use them either...

I think a lot comes back to "comprehension". Back in my day, in English lessons, we'd do comprehensions based on things like a recipe, an instruction book, etc. Nowadays it seems comprehensions are mostly on fiction. I'd say that should be in Eng Lit, not Eng Lang. It's no surprise that people can't follow instructions or can't find facts in a paragraph if they're not taught it anymore. I used to be really good at "real life" comprehensions at school and crap at fiction comprehensions, especially when the fiction ones often go in a tangent asking things like "what did the author mean by ........" or "is xyz a good title for the piece, explain why", i.e. open ended answers rather than factual answers.

Yep in my teacher training we were told that a text book lesson would fail at an Ofsted inspection so we were never use them to base a whole lesson on.

I tore my hair out day and night trying to find entertaining ways of conveying information and ‘improve learning’. Between that, bullying managers and behaviour management I soon burnt out and left teaching. Oddly though, it was the desperate days when I did resort to text books that the classes were calm, happy and seemed to work well on exercises.

Also lots of other high performing PISA countries have no problem with text book learning. Or retaining teachers in the profession 🙄.

Yep, my school did a training session with an Ofsted inspector who said not to use textbooks and if you were regularly using textbooks in lessons you should 'reflect on your teaching'.

I used to use textbooks quite a lot in maths, however they haven't written a decent textbook for KS3 in over a decade so we stopped using them and the GCSE ones we bought a decade ago were crap and we couldn't afford to replace them when the new 9-1 GCSE came in so they are also out of date. We now subscribe to a couple of websites which have PowerPoints and worksheets which link to the PowerPoint so it is very easy to get a coherent lesson from them. With a textbook, you still had to plan the teaching to fit it.

@Screamingabdabz

Yep in my teacher training we were told that a text book lesson would fail at an Ofsted inspection so we were never use them to base a whole lesson on.

I can see why the text book shouldn't be the "only" resource used in an entire lesson, but surely that doesn't stop the lesson being based upon a chapter or section of a text book, with "extras" provided by the teacher, i.e. extra worked examples, or a factsheet explaining a particular point in a different way, or a slightly related off tangent piece of information, etc etc.

When I taught accounting for adult education at a local college of FE, I very much followed the official text book in terms of the background knowledge, which I augmented with examples/information of my own on the board which students were welcome to copy into their notes, and I also gave extras, handouts of a similar question to do in class (usually copied from a very old textbook I had from years earlier when I was a student!), first as a worked example on the board and then for the class to do themselves with discussion afterwards, and then the "homework" was the end of section questions in the text book. So fundamentally, the lesson followed the text book, but always with a few supplementary examples, questions, etc.

I'd always tell the class which section(s) I'd be doing the following week, so if they were absent, they could work through the text book section themselves so as to keep up, or at least have a rough idea so I didn't have as much time to spend on individuals to keep them on track.

I certainly used to use that method when I started teaching (I trained on the job though and there were no other subject specialists - I'd have been a fool to try teaching advanced Economics without a textbook!) I have a whole shelf of them now.

The good thing with a decent textbook is it's been properly edited. You just don't know with online resources - there are some great ones but you need the knowledge to evaluate them, which you don't have as a beginner.

They are pricey though and I can't in good conscience suggest a student shells out £40 and carries around a doorstep, but we do make them get Hodder My Revision Notes plus a more discursive book, so a spend of about £12 in year 1 and maybe £8 in year 2.

General anti textbook prejudice I find kind of ridiculous. A resource is a resource whether on paper or pixels.

@Badbadbunny I'd be more than happy to buy the textbooks my DD needs but have no idea what to buy! Why the school doesn't just provide a list of books is beyond me.

@stickygotstuck I completely agree with you. My ASD DD hasn't got a clue what's going on in school. I paid for a tutor for English, who provides a text book. My DD got a 5 in her mock exam. All other subjects she's scraping 2-3. And it's simply because she can't put all the scraps of paper, online resources, notes etc. together to form any kind of revision plan. It's really frustrating for me to watch but I don't know how to help her. The obvious answer would be to get her a tutor for everything! But who can afford that?

I totally agree. I teach A Level and structure my lessons around the content in the textbook, which is based on the exam board spec. It reassures the students that we are learning the necessary content and they can reinforce it with the reading at home. Of course, I add my own resources and activities but the text provides the structure.

@JustGotToKeepOnKeepingOn it'll be because:

Different subject leaders will have different views on textbooks.
Schools are dealing with poverty consequences a lot so will be nervous of recommending a spend that could easily run in to £hundreds.
Plus if the teachers don't use the texts in class parents may grumble. And they are heavy and go out of date.

However! You can easily work out what to buy. You just need to know the exam board for each GCSE. The exam boards endorse textbooks - they're not always fantastic but at least someone from the board has glanced over the content.

CGP are reliable as are Hodder My Revision Notes.

If unsure or there are too many options, look at Amazon reviews or post in Secondary Education or Staffroom on here and subject teachers will help you.

GCSE maths is similar across exam boards that has not always been the case and might not be in future.

My brother and I did very different maths O Levels. His included statistics, mine didn't, mine had linear programming and basic calculus.

Science changes as we discover more, Pluto is not a planet but for a long time we did not know that.

To be fair to DS's school, he was provided with textbooks for most GCSE subjects, not that they ever seemed to use them. His work, for every subject was totally unorganised - printed out workbooks, random photocopied pages, written entries in his exercise book not relating to anything, work completed and submitted online. He had an armchair in our study piled up with random printouts and started-and-abandoned exercise books. It meant his revision was entirely haphazard and entirely based online/practice papers. I started to 'weed' the pile as he finished each GCSE exam, and was horrified to find so many useful (albeit bitty) resources he could have used to revise from, rather than resorting to YouTube videos.

Despite this haphazard approach he did well enough for GCSE, but we have impressed upon him that we expect to see a lot more structure and organisation for his A levels.

When I was at school, our school purchased all the textbooks on all the subjects for each level, year after year. At the end of the school year, you could sell your books back to the 'book room' if they were still in good condition, or keep them. Eventually the book room had enough secondhand copies of all the required textbooks so that each student could choose whether they wanted a new copy or a used one at a much lower price. I don't think the curriculum changed that much back then.😀