Wot? No textbooks??!

[ampere]

DS1 has just started Y7 in a big comp.

He has brought home several exercise books to be decorated etc but it just occurred to me today (d'oh)- no textbooks at all! We were asked to pay £2.50 towards a Spanish book but it turns out to be a photocopied work book.

So..erm.. from where do they get their 'knowledge'? Worksheets in class? Big interactive whiteboards with internet text on it? (This is a non-tech school so no general use laptops!)

Curious to know!

[TheFallenMadonna]

We couldn't afford a textbook for each child. We have maybe 3 class sets (ie 15 books) of textbooks for each year group in our (large) department. So 45 books when we would need 250 ish.

I teach quite a lot of children who can't read at the level required by a Secondary Science text book though.

[Algebra18MinusPiEquals16]

I agree with that in theory, unfortunately though in my DSDs' school that doesn't happen as the resources they get are, for want of a better word, pants.

[Algebra18MinusPiEquals16]

"I teach quite a lot of children who can't read at the level required by a Secondary Science text book though."

that's really sad :(

[BelligerentGhoul]

Yes, it's sad - but it is indeed the norm in many secondary schools, especially in the inner-city. It doesn't mean that the schools or the teachers or the pupils are bad, just that everybody has to work that much harder to give the pupils a fighting chance.

[Algebra18MinusPiEquals16]

it's the norm in my DSDs' school... hard to find the balance between giving them accessible resources and dumbing down (I hate that phrase!) too much.

[BelligerentGhoul]

It is hard to do - but good teachers spend hours and hours doing just that: creating resources which challenge pupils without being inaccessible to them. I've been approached by publishers before re: some of my resources - but am too busy teaching with them/making more for my pupils to do anything about it! :)

[TheFallenMadonna]

Too right it's sad.

Being sad about it doesn't teach them anything though.

[peeweewee]

Belligerent Ghoul - well said!! {grin}

[mnistooaddictive]

Then you get to the VI students who have difficulty reading and have to have minimal text with no pictures or unnecessary diagrams!
Algebra - I think you might need to visit your DSDs school. You may be pleasantly surprised to see things from the other side. They may not be getting the best education but as I said earlier parents don't always get the true picture.

[notrightnow]

I didn't get a chance to come back to this discussion sooner - mnistooaddictive thank you for thinking about my point!

nearlytoolate I don't work in my own field any longer, so I don't know whether there are published guides on teaching children this stuff. I know that the American Library Association has done work on this area and the equivalent UK organisation CILIP might produce something too for their school libraries group. Also someone else in this thread (sorry I can't remember who) said that her child was given such guidance at school, so obviously some schools are doing a better job at this than mine!

When my own children are looking things up on the internet we follow these rules and ask these questions:

• Start with known reliable sources
  

Government run sites, museums and galleries, professional societies, portals/resources recommended by school, and peer reviewed reference works (ie Britannica, OED) are all good. Local library services and some schools often have online access to paid-for services and databases (there is a fantastic newspaper one for instance) which you can access from home with a library card number. These are often better places to start than a Google search.

Once you've found some information, think about

• Who wrote this?
  

Google searches often take you in to a specific page on a website, but use the 'about us' page or the homepage to find out exactly who is writing. If you're researching something about chemistry, are you looking at the work of a professional society or a 15 year old blogger? It's important to know. It might turn out that the 15 year old blogger is reliable and great, but you'd hope to find some other evidence to show this, like references to him elsewhere, or a link from a reliable source.

• Why was it written?
  

There are lots of enthusiasts publishing stuff on the internet, which can be a great thing, but errors can get repeated and passed around and people might have their own particular view or an axe to grind. Try to establish whether a source is reliable by looking for the same information in different places and comparing. Think about the relationship of the author to the information and their reasons for publishing it. Are they getting paid? Who by? Does this bias the information? Would you, for instance, trust Nestle if they said that formula milk is wonderful? Paid for encylopedias would not sell many subscriptions if they were not accurate. Wikipedia is a big social experiment that sometimes contains some useful information, but it's not a reliable reference source!

• Acknowledge your sources
  

Don't cut and paste and always state where you found your information. This habit can't begin too early in my view. I tend to encourage my children to print stuff out or make notes, read, then write their own text without reference to the original.

Remember that as a reasonably internet-savvy adult you do a lot of this automatically as you search for something, but children don't have the experience we have at processing information and they can only learn by having someone go through this with them, just as you'd teach them to read or do maths or whatever. It is slower than looking on Google, but in my experience gives better results and less frustration in the long run as they are getting better information from the start.

And whoever said further up that they could tell me of some good science resources - I would love that! It is my weak point and we have trouble finding good information that is not too simplistic but not over technical either. So all thoughts gratefully received.

This feels like a very long self indulgent post, but hopefully will be of interest to someone :)

[Lucycat]

I can direct you to some good Geography KS3 websites if you like?

make sure you have a decent atlas too

[notrightnow]

Yes please Lucy!

Perhaps we should have a 'mumsnet reliable homework help' thread :)

[harpsichordcarrier]

I am an English teacher and I have only ever used textbooks for cover work.
there are plenty of other ways to get information across.
We do use them in other subjects, though.

[peeweewee]

Wait - you're an English teacher and play the harpsichord??? Really? I thought I was the only one!!!

[penguin73]

"Why are there so many teachers across the land all re-inventing the wheel every year. What was wrong with the idea of textbooks?"

As exam boards and exam requirements change very frequently textbooks very quickly become outdated and a lot of information in them irrelevant. Moreover, it can be hard to differentiate with a text book, can be hard for kinaesthetic learners/SEN pupils/those with visual or reading problems to use effectively and are very expensive. I find it hard enough to get pupils to come with a pen, pencil, planner and exercise book never mind a text book as well....so will use them for the odd activity in class but never allow them to leave the school premises. The curriculum these days demands that we develop skills and personal qualities that require the use of other resources than just a good old text book and anyone observed asking pupils to copy out of a book would be slated. Find a book that is fully differentiated, covers all exam boards and includes opportunities to develop PLTS, ICT skills and cultural awareness and is affordable and a lot of teachers would be overjoyed - but sadly it does not exist.

[senua]

As a matter of interest, what are the teachers' sources of data when they are (effectively) writing their own textbooks? Is there any sort of review, by senior staff, of the resulting teaching material?

[peeweewee]

Senua - we have several ways of knowing that we are doing the right thing:

a) government websites that tell us what to cover
b) previous resources which have been reviewed
c) students behaviour/participation/learning in lessons
d) our own professionalism
e) results
f) collaboration with other schools/staff

Teachers are not untrained, unprofessional mavericks. If the senior staff were required to check what we were teaching then that suggests that teachers don't know what they are doing. The job of teaching (which includes significant choice of what/how to teach to best meet the needs of the students in that class) belongs to the teachers.

Even if I am teaching two Year 8 classes for example, each lesson will be different because the needs of the two classes will be different. It may include different resources. I get to make that decision, because I am their teacher.

[freerangeeggs]

Re: 'wordiness' - I'm sure the people who found that funny would be the very ones kicking up a fuss if their dyslexic child couldn't access our resources.

My partner is a maths teacher and he finds this to be a real problem. Kids who should be able to access maths work can't because of the (unnecessary) wordiness of the textbooks. The textbooks he has in school are very difficult for him to use because they need to be differentiated before he can work with them.

Honestly, it makes me quite angry when people make ignorant comments like those above. Some of my kids work their socks off but will never be able to access the language in these books. My heart breaks for them and if you could see them struggle I hope you'd be embarrassed for being so flippant.

[senua]

I double-checked with DS about textbooks this morning. He has them for most subjects, as I thought he had (the exception being English). His comprehensive school gets a CVA of 1022 and tops their LEA league table.
Textbooks seem to work for us.

[ravenAK]

I teach English, & keep textbooks almost exclusively for cover work.

They date ridiculously quickly, especially when you're reading/writing non-fiction & media, which is the biggie for the GCSE English Language exam.

I reckon to get 3 years out of non-fic resource before I bin it...when I inherited my classroom from a colleague a couple of years ago, I had to chuck out an entire filing cabinet's worth of articles on burning questions of the day such as the sinking of the Belgrano, should hunting be banned, & the relative merits of Blur & Oasis.

Obviously we have texts for Literature, but if you're doing coursework/a controlled assessment on a Shakespeare play, for instance, it's much more useful to give them A3 photocopies of the scenes you're focusing on, so they can annotate all over them.

Poetry's also more 'hands-on' than you can do just from an anthology - I spent several hours last night producing resources on Sylvia Plath's 'Daddy' to practise for the new 'Unseen Poetry' requirement - so there's flipcharts for my interactive board, word cards on Publisher to laminate & discuss before we read the whole text, writing frames to differentiate essay responses for the less able. Last weekend I was gathering a box of rubber worms, old watches, marbles, plastic carrots & ashtrays to teach the use of imagery in 'To His Coy Mistress'...

I do have a trusty set of books full of exercises on homophones & apostrophes, but they're mostly deployed to stupefy unruly classes into submission tbh .

[mnistooaddictive]

Senua - just because he has textbooks doesn't mean they are always used! Try asking him how many lessons he did without textbooks last week.