Do you DC's school have text book for KS3? What do you do to support?

[LoveAutumnsky]

DC2 is in Y7, there is no text book in his school at KS3. How can you revise what teacher taught without text book?

Anyway,I bought science text book as DS looked at what the teacher use. But there seems not text books for other subjects. I went to the book shop, there are only exam revision books.

What would you do?Thanks.

Apologies, that sounds a bit ranty. I just can't get my head around the illogical views with secondary education where limited responsibility/independence is accepted and promoted but then parents/teachers complain when the students lack those skills.
If nobody nurtures those skills then they'll never learn.

Love that you are also using the Cornell method LolaSmiles! A game changer for my KS4ers.

I love it Chloe.

I've used it at KS5 for a while and dropped it to KS4 a couple of years ago.

I like graphic organisers, cloze exercises and questions at KS3.

The idea that "they can't do it" from colleagues annoys me. They can, if staff and parents promote those habits and teach them how instead of spoon feeding

It seems to work with no text books. Not sure how. DD1 very very successfully completed GCSEs with no textbooks. DD2, when in y10, did ask us to buy the maths text book, which she does use.

I am a bit confused about the link of text book with spoon feed. With text book, it only means students have resources to revise easily, but of course students still need to work themselves. Nowadays, the paper text book can be changed to online resources, it’s the same. I know some university, they put the lectures videos online, so students can revise. No matter what kind of method, I think students should be able to access the stuff teacher is teaching directly.

love
It was an overall comment given that one reason we apparently should have text books is so students can read around what they've done in class (as opposed to, say, using the internet or the library or their intuitive to read widely). Combine that with the idea that it's somehow ludicrous to expect students to take appropriate notes from 60 minute lessons, and it's clear how and why there's a growing problem in schools where some staff and parents don't see why study skills and independence and responsibility should be expected, and then seek surprised when GCSE Students can't take effective revision notes.

Students love revision guides and they love writing them out and making nice notes and highlighting things to death at GCSE, but they're not effective study skills.

It's easy to say "at university" but as I've said to another poster, it's totally different.

University students should have note taking skills. If they don't then they've been spoon fed from 11-18. Equally they are taking notes on lectures and wider reading with much broader remits.

KS3/4 students are at an age where it is absolutely appropriate to teach note taking skills so they can learn effectively. Their lessons are typically 60 minutes long, have better, clearer resources than lectures, the input is broken down into sections, often they're given the sub headings to help,

A university student could miss a lecture and then download the PowerPoint and catch up. A y9 student wouldn't be able to do that from a lesson because a lesson isn't a teacher talking through a PowerPoint, and not everything I say is in the PowerPoint.

Lecturers can choose if they want to put the lectures online because it's just them talking. You can't record teacher lessons to put online as there's loads of student contributions and also people would rightly be fed up with being inundated with parents who think they're experts on teaching classes.

Maybe instead of expecting schools to be providing text books (which will mean writing their own for lots of KS3 as the topics differ school to school), or expecting staff to provide notes, or thinking every ounce of the school day can be made available at home, people just expected their children to work appropriately in school.

It's like when someone doesn't work in y7-10 and in y11 suddenly home want to know whether they can buy a revision guide through school, why don't we order them, what intervention is on, their DC can't revise at home so needs revision classes. The onus needs to be on students.

I think students should be able to access the stuff teacher is teaching directly.

They can. I think the issue with spoonfeeding is the parents (or teachers) doing it for them i.e not thinking that the children can write decent notes, therefore, they won’t be able to.

Chloe
I think the PP was going down the route of at university the lecturers record their lectures and put PowerPoints online therefore students in secondary schools should have that sort of access, completely ignoring the totally different contexts.

I've had parents request their child can record my lessons before. It turns out they were getting their tutor to critique my lessons and the tutor was contradicting my guidance and giving advice from old specifications, but naturally the tutor was right and I was wrong and so I should allow DC to record my lessons "for clarity when they're revising". I'd have said no anyway but especially with parental history of them instructing staff how to teach their subject better.

That’s shocking Lola but nothing surprises me anymore.

Parents place so much faith in private tutors as opposed to actual their child’s actual teachers (possibly because they are paying) but they really could be anyone. I know of so many private tutors who don’t even have any teaching qualifications and therefore, don’t understand anything about exam boards/attending exam spec training been an examiner (which many teachers have) or have ever been in a classroom. The parents are swayed by their Oxbridge degrees or ‘recommendations on Facebook’, and rarely even ask any questions about their background!

What are they revising for? Do you mean like a general read over at home or prep for an exam?

At our school the general curriculum for each subject is on the school app. When it comes to time for exam prep links and books are sent home.

Mostly I leave them to get on with it although I do check in with them how it is going.

They have textbooks in every subject which ch are given out at the start of the yearand taken in at the end.

Is it a state school Tvstar?

We can't send text books home in one of my subjects because we can't afford to buy text books for the whole year group. As it is for one lesson a week we have to share one between two as we don't have enough for the three classes timetabled are the same time.
GCSE and A Level specifications changed at the same time. With no extra money provided to fund the new resources. This combined with reduced budgets has resulted in this situation.

They have textbooks in every subject which ch are given out at the start of the yearand taken in at the end.

Well, text books don’t exist at Key Stage 3 in my subject, so.......

Is that a state comprehensive Tvstar?

We had that for certain subjects at A Level, but there wasn't enough for GCSE students due to budget cuts and there aren't KS3 textbooks for my subject that cover all the texts we study (same for every school I've worked in), so we either select the best texts for our cohort or we make less effective curriculum decisions based on what textbooks, of varying quality, are out there.

My DDs been in 4 state schools across two counties.

All they’ve had access to school extra net with things like maths watch.

As they’ve got older we’ve had via school bought various text books and revision guides. Don’t think school should be supplying these.

They’ve also had office 365 accounts recently as well.

I went to school in Ireland and you bought all your books at that start of the year either new or second hand and if they where in good condition at the end the school bought them back off you to sell on.

Thus most people looked after their books and returned them but it wasn’t a drain on school resources if you ruined it.

DD was provided with a couple of textbooks at A level. She had to pay a deposit for them which she was given back when she returned them.

@LolaSmiles

That's ridiculous to critique your lessons it's incredibly insulting to you and from a purely selfish perspective it's doing the child a disservice as they'll be confused. That said many students - even those without diagnosed SEN will have trouble both taking notes and understanding a lesson simultaneously. Even within NT children there is a big difference in processing speed and it would be wrong that children have no external record of the lesson except their own notes. Even if it's a picture of the black board uploaded online which they can look at in their own time.

Most countries outside the UK seem to have textbooks. The no-textbook thing in the UK looks quite weird to outsiders.

Ireland has textbooks and frankly their education system looks better than the English, Welsh and Scottish systems.

FullOfJellyBeans
They didn't just make the request to me. They asked multiple teachers!

It's why I'm suitably skeptical about claims that lessons should be available at home / all PowerPoints etc should be made available online.

Some lessons I have no PowerPoint, others we are doing group discussion, others they work through workbooks or exercises, others we work straight into the text. Sometimes the lesson goes off on a tangent, often I'll adapt the lesson in the middle of the lesson, add things in, take things out to meet student needs etc.

All of that is entirely standard secondary teaching which can't be made available online. That's just life.

People are more than capable of knowing their students and putting things in place for them (eg. Printing diagrams, knowing who needs tables printing or headings already pre filled). I also have a resource board with tables and graphic organizer templates that students can help themselves to if it helps rather than sorting the layout themselves.

Most countries outside the UK seem to have textbooks. The no-textbook thing in the UK looks quite weird to outsiders.

I suspect that most countries outside the UK have better funding for education Kokeshi123. I don't think you realise just how underfunded the UK education system is.

When DD was at school her school was the fourth worst underfunded school in the country. The SLT, governors and parents campaigned for fairer funding. We had the backing of local MPs and the press. The HT appeared on TV and the news item was featured on the national as well as the local news.

Thankfully the campaign was successful, and the school received an injection of funding, but it still isn't enough.

The result of underfunding is no textbooks, larger class sizes and fewer subjects being taught. Schools are dropping subjects like music, drama, photography etc to concentrate on the core academic subjects.

Not just that gin but a totally different system.
One of my colleagues worked over in Asia, can't remember where, and said that every y8 student did the same maths lesson on the same day and the lesson content was identical for every class.
Compare that to the differentiation and SEND support we have in the UK. It's not perfect, far from it, but I think we've got to be really careful before drawing inaccurate conclusions from international systems.

Shanghai and Finland both score well in international rankings. Their systems are chalk and cheese.

I recall that there was a discussion on MN a while back about students from countries like China where they had been hothoused all the way through school, but weren't taught to think for themselves.

They learned through rote and mainly studied science and maths subjects rather than subjects that involved providing opinions and different points of view. DH has worked in China and South Korea and confirms that the workers need directing all the time because they have no initiative at all. Yes they can score highly in a maths exam, but they don't know how to critique an industrial process and work out why it isn't working.