Exactly what I’m doing this year with my 8th Grade Physical Science students…
A Classroom Experiment: Ditching a Textbook – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education: “I’ll be replacing the traditional ‘conflicting viewpoints’ textbook, though, with materials gathered from a variety of resources: the web, the news media, the popular press, and more traditional scholarly venues. As the semester progresses, the students will take on some responsibility for determining course content.”
I’m hoping guessing this will be a precipitous trend in the coming decade with a tipping point about 2-3 years out.
My children will never know of dreaded back strain due to poorly conceived cookie cutter textbooks.
Primary sources, love of reading and engaged critical thinkers will then thrive.
I can see the benefits. The problem is that you are an outlier. I don’t think that most teachers will (or can) create their own course material. Teachers in most schools are overworked, especially given increasing class sizes due to budget cuts (which I’m sure you can school me on). If teachers need to do that much more prep work, it effectively shifts the cost of textbooks from the school to the teacher. I don’t think that schools will use the savings to compensate teachers for their work… especially after politicians see “savings” and cut education budgets further.
Great points, David.
Agreed on the outlier part… Teachers are overworked/underpaid and it has a great deal to do with how teachers are compensated and viewed in our economy. I know I’ve personally had to grow thick skin after hearing the “well you get 3 months off and you only work from 8-3″ statements (which are, of course, completely false).
However, I have hope that enough teachers will get fed up with the current top-down textbook driven system to start a quiet revolution. The budget cuts could actually end up doing a good bit of good as quality teachers are forced to examine what is really important.
Besides, we as teachers shouldn’t settle for mediocre when so much is at stake. I’ll continue being an outlier, but if 100 million people can find some value in Twitter over 4 years then surely a few hundred thousand teachers can work to make textbooks a thing of the past.
I have bookcases of textbooks… some I love to refer to, but none that I would solely use to teach a course. There are too many other resources …. students want for variety in resource is evident in their everyday life full of social networking and imagery bombardment. Game on! Show, use and delight in books… just not in one-sided ideals of textbooks.