Secondary teachers-do you still use text books?

[Haggisfish]

I'm curious to know how many of us use text books on a regular basis. I use them with a level students but not at all for any other students. Occasional cover work may get set. I'm secondary science in a good with outstanding features school. How about you?

Use textbooks regularly with all ages, mfl.

I think it's one of the many ridiculous aspects of being a teacher in the UK that you're made to feel bad for using textbooks, which people spent a long time devising and which schools spent a lot of money on. Instead endless hours are spent creating resources...

MFL. I don't find what my school have is suitable for most students (not engaging or relevant enough - or too hard/easy) and we don't have money for new stuff. I only use some of the listening activities for more than just cover. I've never worked in a departments where textbooks were the norm but I'm it works for others.

Yes, I use them all the time with sixth form and now and again with KS3 (but the KS3 texts are old and don't cover all the syllabus). It's a top state school with limited budgets for photocopying and not enough computers, but there's a fund we can bid to for books -- I find them very useful, however, I was allowed to choose them.

Secondary science, similar school. I use them infrequently but when I do it's often to find information to questions I have set rather than the summary questions from the book. It still surprises me however that they can't use or tell the difference between the contents, glossary and index pages

MFL here. We use the interactive version of the textbook on the smart board, mainly for listening tasks and the odd reading text.

The trouble with investing in textbooks is: funding is scarce, we'd have to keep them a while and they go out of date quickly.

I do thing students would benefit from having something to take home, read, reflect and use for homework. I loved my Tricolore :-)

MFL here too. Before my childcare break, all our GCSE kids had a borrowed textbook which they used in class. I thought it was totally fine to use a combo of ppt for grammar explanation and practice, smart for starters/games and textbook. Since my return and with the controlled assessments, we no longer have enough books for the kids so I basically duplicate the textbook onto Smart. Takes me ages and, post kids with less prep time, find it a ridiculous waste of time. Why duplicate what's already there? If the content's good, why not use it? Books aren't old news.

We don't use text books, following critisism from ofsted that they had found text books in some classrooms.

Now half our lives is spent trying to unblock the photocopier.

One day, when text books have long been obsolete, someone somewhere in government will have a "revelation" and instruct all schools to start buying and using them again. It will be billed as a brand new initiative in education which will drive up results exponentially.

Hahaha! Interesting responses-I posted a big reply yesterday but it got lost. Ours are outdated, too, and we just don't use them. We must spend much more on photocopying though, than a decent set of new text books would cost. Hmmm.

The 'ministers telling teachers they need to use textbooks' thing has already happened. There was a report last November suggesting that the best performing countries use high-quality textbooks.

news.tes.co.uk/b/news/2014/11/19/teachers-must-use-more-textbooks-for-england-to-match-the-best-says-minister.aspx

I'm a maths teacher. I use textbooks quite a lot at KS4 and 5 because we have some good ones. The ones we have for KS3 are shit though, so I use a lot more worksheets. An Ofsted consultant once told me that if I used textbooks regularly I needed to re-evaluate my teaching. She can fuck right off.

History. Mainly use them for planning and cover work. Very rarely use them with a class.

Would be great to have textbooks sometime to avoid the endless paper-trimming/gluing that wastes time when you have worksheets...

Unfortunately pupils don't respect the books - MFL dictionaries routinely vandalised with obscene drawings, even in naice schools