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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Educational publishers have the resources to provide a wide variety of new materials that could facilitate these necessary changes. They have editorial departments that keep up to date on education research. They can make connections with education researchers so they can work with teams of writers and editors to develop materials. The publishers can have researchers spend months organizing and testing sequences of lessons to find out what best supports student learning. They have design and production departments to produce the materials in an appealing and accessible format for wide use. They can build professional development into these new materials, which could be a foundation for teaching educators about the common core. But publishers won’t do any of this if they don’t have to.
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Instead of a well-considered evaluation of available materials, schools tend to adopt and purchase educational materials for superficial reasons, either because they don’t have time for a thorough evaluation or they have little faith in textbooks. But if textbooks are sold based on design or inconsequential elements, publishers will prioritize visual design and superficial features. This would represent an unfortunate cycle of repetition and promote the status quo.
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On the other hand, educational publishers would bend over backwards to make effectiveness their top priority if the top-selling textbooks were those with the best sequence of lessons to develop each standard in depth, the most effective teaching methods, and the richest content. They would do the work that schools so desperately need. But to identify materials with effective characteristics, customers have to know what those characteristics are.
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Contrary to what many think, some textbooks are superior to others and do, in fact, meet some of the standards with fidelity. If the most effective materials for a particular population of students, such as higher- or lower-achieving students, were available to teachers, they could use them and focus their energies on meeting the needs of their students. Instead, many must devote time and energy to writing curriculum, although few have any experience in this demanding work. Teachers need to know and understand the new standards, but they should also be able to distinguish materials that faithfully reflect the standards from those that do not.
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Next, the adoption team should establish evaluation criteria for curricula and then employ those criteria to analyze instructional materials.
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Finally, the team should confirm that instructional materials in use share specific characteristics: The development of each required standard at a grade level is comprehensive, with a clear introduction, development, practice, and assessment. Content, readability, and skill expectations are appropriate for the population of students. Organization promotes natural learning progressions and logical development of skills and concepts. Lessons include an engaging and appropriate mix of learning activities and experiences that develop the critical concepts as identified by the standards. Teaching methods reflect effective practices as identified by research and experience. Materials support a change in teaching practices and are different from materials currently in use.