Education Week: Solving the Textbook-Common Core Conundrum - 1 views
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For some, textbooks provide a comprehensive curriculum in which content requirements are developed in a systematic and organized way. Textbooks can give teachers ideas for sequencing, presenting, and assessing content, skills, and concepts. New teachers often depend on textbooks. For others, textbooks represent scripted, uninspired lessons that turn teachers into slaves and strip them of their creativity with a one-solution-fits-all approach. For this group, even intelligent, published education researchers lose their credibility when they become affiliated with a commercial textbook publisher.
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The release and adoption of the common standards have inspired two major initiatives. The first is to educate teachers about the expectations of the new standards and how schools will have to change to meet the standards. States, school districts, professional-development companies, and educational organizations provide webinars, in-service sessions, and courses on implementing the common core. But most of these don’t include any discussion about curriculum. Instead, they focus on educating the 3.2 million teachers as if they were individually responsible for revising their curriculum.
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The second initiative is the incorporation of the new standards into educational materials. In the interest of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, textbook publishers, who have invested tens of millions of dollars in their textbook series, are doing the minimum necessary to address the new standards. While they have added labels, paragraphs, activities, lessons, or chapters to reflect the standards, it is unrealistic to expect that they will re-envision their materials if they don’t have to.
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