It's All About the Textbook

Continuing in Subjects Matter: Every Teacher's guide to Content-Area Reading, we learn about the use of textbooks in the classroom. Textbooks fall on both ends of a wide spectrum - they are too much yet they are not enough. Textbooks are used too much to cover a vast range of content, but they do not contain the proper material to support a students' learning and understanding of the material.  "Textbooks are overused and should be supplemented generously or replaced with other reading materials where possible." If textbooks are not supplemented with appropriate materials, most of the information will go in one ear and out the other.

Textbooks can be difficult for students to read, never mind understand. They are structured and used in so many different ways that it's hard for students to learn anything out of what they read. Some textbooks are just way too difficult, above students' reading levels or poorly designed, but some textbooks are better than others. One thing that the authors suggest is doing a "Meet Your Textbook" activity. During this activity, the teacher goes through part of the textbook with the students so that they can understand the structure of it and how it can be used as a reference for class. If students are assigned a reading from the text, it is also a good idea to provide them with a "guide-o-rama study guide," in which the teacher guides the students while they are reading, helping them understand charts and illustrations and provides support and thoughts along the way.

Another activity discussed is SQ3R, a strategy for reading and understanding. Before reading, students should SURVEY the chapter or section to get an idea of what they will be reading about. Then they should QUESTION what they are about to read, which can be done by turning subtitles into questions, for example, to guide reading along the way. Then students should READ, RECITE, and REVIEW the material being covered. The book Improving Adolescent Literacy: Content Area Strategies at Work also talks about SQ3R as a reading strategy, along with some revised methods such as SQ4R and SQRQCQ, which is mainly used in mathematics. These methods proved students with a basic method to approach various types of texts and to understand and remember what they read.

If you are using a textbook in your classroom, which is up to you, as an educator, to decide to use one or not, it is important to know what information is useful and important to instruction. Textbooks cover a wide range of content, some of which may not even be accurate, and don't always have the depth or explanation necessary to understand it. According to the NAEP, "while a reasonable number of U.S. students have basic factual and operational knowledge in most subject areas, only a fraction understand a field well enough to do higher-level operations or performances." This is mostly because too much content is being "covered" instead of understood. Someone has told me before "Content is like a river - it's better to be short and deep than wide and shallow." In other words, it's better to cover less content and go into depth with it that to just touch upon a lot of content. Part of being able to do that is knowing what's really important. As we previously read in Understanding by Design, there are different levels of importance, topics that students really need to understand and be able to apply to different contexts and topics that are not as important that we can just touch upon and get a basic understanding of. Students don't want to learn things that do not pertain to them or that they won't use in the future. It's a waste of everybody's time.

No matter what subject you are teaching, it is important to know what resources are appropriate to use in the classroom, and if you are going to use a textbook, know how to use it well.
This link leads to an article about how to choose a textbook and other materials that might be pertinent to your classroom.
http://www.cirtl.net/node/2515