Who Needs Teachers? Your Textbooks Do

It used to be fashionable to talk about how technology was going to solve all of our educational equity and excellence problems—bringing relevant, high-quality content to all students, scaffolding instruction to meet each student where he or she was, and engaging every student in meaningful learning, even if that student didn’t have access to excellent teachers…or any teachers. Maybe teachers weren’t necessary anymore, we argued. After all, students can reach out to Wikipedia and YouTube and online calculators and so on, to get any bit of information they might need. They can teach themselves! And, with new national standards, everyone will be learning the same things at the same pace, so…problem solved.

Ha, ha! Obviously, none of this has come to pass. Perhaps less obviously, none of it even made sense.

With learning standards stuffed with more content than could ever be taught in 20 years, much less the 12 we’re given, and standardized tests focused on the low-DOK, low-Bloom levels of thinking that computers can easily score, perhaps it was easy for some of us to think that the primary role of the teacher was to disseminate information.

It is not. It never was.

Look at the great teachers of history. We don’t remember Socrates because he told people a lot of things; we remember him because he asked a lot of annoying questions that made people think about things. Teachers do not simply hand out facts; they shape minds.

Please note: I did not say teachers should not provide factual information to students. You can’t ask students to think about literature, history, science, and mathematics if they don’t know any of those things. And Googling a term is not the same thing as knowing something. Neither is reading a textbook chapter.

So, what is the role of the teacher when it comes to using a textbook? School districts spend millions of dollars adopting these things, and school boards all over the country engage in fierce debates about which ones are most appropriate for their students. Occasionally, we learn that a textbook presents information in a way that one group of people or another objects to. Or—worse—we learn that a publisher is presenting information differently in different states, as this recent New York Times story uncovered. Shockingly, we learned that the Texas and California versions of an American history textbook differed slightly in what they chose to include, and how they framed or presented that information—not only because of each state’s learning standards, but also because of the partisan politics that informed both the crafting of the standards and the adoption decision-making criteria of the local school districts. Shocking!

Except…is it? Textbooks are written by actual people, not machines—and some of those people, or their publishers, may have political biases, agendas, and points of view. Some of them may even be hypocrites who care only about making money. This makes textbooks different from every other book ever written…how?

The only way in which this discovery could be truly shocking is if we genuinely believed that textbooks (or any books) were supposed to be completely neutral, objective, and bias-free—that they could and had to tell the single, reliable, uncontestable “truth,” and that all a teacher had to do was assign students to read a chapter and then answer the questions at the end.

That’s nonsense. Every text has an author; every text has a point of view. That’s true even when an author tries not to have a point of view.

This is why, where young people are involved, every text needs a teacher. And every teacher has the right—the obligation, really—to take a stance regarding that text and engage readers in a critical dialogue about it—even if the extent of the dialogue is a single question, like, “How can we know whether or not this statement is true?”

I know: textbooks were never meant to be objects of critical debate. The whole point of a textbook was to take a tremendous amount of complex information, boil it down into bite-sized chunks, and feed it as effortlessly as possible into student brains, much the way a mama bird might chew up a worm before feeding it to her chicks. That’s why textbooks are invaluable if your goal is to cram students full of facts, and insufficient, or even problematic, if your goal is to get students to think. But in this hyper-partisan, fake-news, Russian-bot, deep-fake world, it is critically important to get students to think about the content that is streaming relentlessly into their brains. Even when that content comes from a textbook publisher. In the end, it’s not what the text does that matters most; it’s what you do with the text.

As Clare Basil recently argued, in defense of Classical Education:

This approach requires understanding our nation’s history, not only by reading a list of texts considered crucial to our history, but inquiring after how those texts––the ideas they embody and the movements they give rise to––shift how Americans define themselves as a people.

How can teachers do this? Not by limiting what students read or see based on their own biases; and not by suppressing their own voice and silently feeding text to their students. Teachers can help students start to think critically about what they read, and see, and hear, by asking three little questions—every day, all the time:

1. What do you think?
2. Why do you think it? (in other words, how can you prove that you’re right?
3. Why does it matter?

Or, if you want to get a little more complex, teachers can build critical thinking by doing the following:

• Providing historical and cultural context and perspective
• Demonstrating how to evaluate textual evidence
• Eliciting and challenging student opinions
• Holding students accountable for defending their opinions with evidence
• Introducing new information that supports or contradicts the text
• Teaching students the basics of rational argument, and the rhetorical fallacies that poor arguments make use of.

You can do this with an essay, a novel, a movie, a song. You can even do it with a textbook. You are not obligated to agree with every word a student reads, just because the district paid a lot of money to obtain those words. But you are obligated to engage with those words…especially if you disagree with them.

Look: everything that comes into a classroom, in physical or virtual form, is simply a resource for teachers to use. None of it can take the place of that teacher. Not even if the publisher says it can. Not even if the principal says it must.

Remember at the end of Dirty Dancing (if you’re old enough), when Patrick Swayze says, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner?” and pulls Jennifer Grey out onto the dance floor?

Well, I say: “Nobody puts Teacher in a corner.”

Grab that textbook and kick off your shoes. It’s time to dance.

 

Everything Counts

Originally published on the Achieve3000.com blog.

How do you prepare for an important challenge you’re about to face? Whether it’s running in a race, acting in a play, or taking a test, preparation usually involves honing your skills and then applying them in practice simulations. If you’re going to run in a 10K race, you might pace out the course to become familiar with the hills, turns, and potential bottlenecks. If you’re acting in a play, you rehearse the lines and stage movements with the other actors until your actions become second nature. Test-taking and reading practice are no different. You learn basic math and reading skills, and then you apply those skills in testing situations, so you can be ready for the “Big Show.”

The question is: can practice that is not laser-focused on the task-at-hand still be valuable?

In test-world, teachers sometimes think students should only practice their skills in the context of test-like scenarios in order to prepare for the final Test. Many educators fear that exposing students to other forms of assessment would confuse and distract them, or otherwise weaken their aim. But outside of test-world, nobody seems to talk that way.

Are you a runner? Well, then, you should certainly get to know the course before the big day, but any running you do will be worthwhile – whether it’s directly on the course or not. In fact, there are many benefits to practicing on a variety of terrains of varying difficulty, because you never know what might happen on race day. What if, for some reason, the police had to block off part of the racecourse and re-route people? This might make the actual course on race day hillier, or curvier, or just different. The same applies to studying, math and reading practice. If your training is too narrow, your ability to apply your skills and knowledge in the real world of change and unpredictability may be constrained.

Similarly, if you’re acting in a play, you should rehearse your lines and your movements as much as possible. You should have everything memorized. BUT…what if someone drops a line, or two, or twelve? What if a piece of scenery falls down and blocks the exit you’re supposed to use? Anything can happen.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led the Allied forces during and after the D-Day invasion (and should therefore know a thing or two about logistics), once said, “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Why? Because facts-on-the-ground can change, and therefore surely will change. Successful soldiers must be ready for anything. Successful racers must be ready for anything. To create a culture for successful students, we too must prepare them for anything.

Grant Wiggins used to say that every standardized test was a transfer task. He claimed that chasing after a test and thinking you could get your hands around it with any certainty was a fool’s errand. There was simply no way to teach every fact and figure required by the state standards, and no guarantee that a fact you chose to cover would definitely be included on the test. The blueprints were simply too broad, and the previous years’ tests, if they were available at all (and in many states, they weren’t) provided no guarantee of what might be asked this year. Teaching fact X to prepare for test question X was hopeless. You might hit that bullseye, but you might also miss the target.

That is why Wiggins talked about tests as transfer tasks. The goal, as he saw it, was to train and hone your skills like an athlete—both narrowly and broadly; in focused drills and in madcap scrimmages. As he said:

When I was a soccer coach, I learned the hard way about my players’ ability to transfer skills from practice to a game and the need to better assess for it. The practice drills did not seem to transfer into fluid, flexible, and fluent game performance. It often appeared, in fact, as if all the work in practice were for naught, as players either wandered around purposelessly or reacted only to the most obvious immediate needs.

The epiphany came during a game, from the mouth of a player. In my increasing frustration, I started yelling, "Give and go! Three on two! Use it, use it--all the drills we worked on!" At that point, the player stopped dribbling in the middle of the field and yelled back, "I can't see it now! The other team won't line up like the drill for me!"

Seen in this light, everything that makes use of core reading and writing skills counts. Reading graphic novels counts. Reading the sports page of your local newspaper counts toward your reading practice. Debating the merits of South Park vs. Family Guy counts. Writing witty YouTube recommendations to see if the algorithm is narrowing or broadening your interests counts. None of these things will manifest themselves directly on any state test, or likely on any classroom test, but they all help students practice their skills in reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Helping your parents find the best “snacks for the cost” while grocery shopping counts toward your math practice. Arguing with your friends about which NBA star’s shot record is better counts as debate and critical thinking practice. Learning that when taking a position on something like climate change in an argument, it’s incumbent on you to bring some evidence to the table—those things count, too. All these situations that build your critical thinking, your computational thinking, or your creative thinking count. And yes, so does practice in the context of the Big Test, to the extent you can predict its shape and structure. It definitely counts. It’s just not the only thing that counts.

Learning is cumulative and commutative and strange. Seeds you plant in one place sometimes grow into plants in an entirely different place. It’s a sometimes-blind investment, a leap of faith. When students have to perform in some kind of challenge, including a Big Test, they’re going to need to creatively apply their skills and knowledge, at least to some extent. Something will be strange and new and unpredictable. Something will not be “lining up nicely” for them. That’s where knowledge transfer comes into play. That’s where creativity becomes essential—because what is creativity, really, other than the putting together of existing things in new and unexpected ways? The more different kinds of LEGO pieces we have in the boxes of our brains, and the more practice we have in using them to build different things, the better we’ll be able to build when the need arises.

So, should I have my students read fiction if they are only going to be assessed on non-fiction? Yes—not only because fiction is a good in itself, but also because a crucial way to understand something is to contrast it with its opposite. What can an essay do that a story cannot? What can a poem do that neither can accomplish? Read about a single topic across multiple forms and genres, and you’ll come to understand the super-power of each genre a little better.

Should I give my students math problems with graphs and images if the Big Test only uses words and numbers? Yes—if only to learn how my students think. If my classroom test on fractions only uses numbers, and students get the questions wrong, I might think they don’t understand the concept. If I give them a variety of questions, using numerals, words, and images, and find that they score higher when a question includes an image, there’s something else going on.

Teachers and students are not archers trying to fire arrows at a single target, losing crucial points if they miss the bullseye. That is not how any of this works. There are hundreds of targets, each with its own bullseye. Every arrow fired is worth the effort. Every arrow fired increases our strength and accuracy. It all adds up.

Life is a transfer task. Everything counts.