To Textbook, or Not to Textbook: That’s my question
It’s been ages…and I’m not even sure regular posting will resume again. For those who have stuck around the Teacher in Development RSS feed, I’d like to thank you…and now ask you for your thoughts.
I think the biggest thing that has been keeping me REALLY busy lately has been the growth of the little company I am working to get off the ground. After a year or so of really hard work, we’ve finally landed our first "big" client. 18 people - at all levels- in an insurance company.
If you’ve been a regular of this blog - back when there was something to be "regular about" then you know that I strongly support and employ bookless classrooms. In brief, here are my reasons:
1. ESL coursebooks are "one size fits all." My opinion is that if you really want to see motivation happen, then you need to focus work around what is important or interesting to your students. Ask yourself, if you’re a coursebook regular: how often do you think your students experience disconnect when they step out of your classroom and into their offices?
2. Many schools equate book to level. When you finish Market Leader Intermediate, for example, you’re now ready to move up to upper intermediate. In my experience, when you finish a book, you’ve just…well…finished a book. In most cases, students still need more time to be considered "ready" for the next level.
Pros: Books make teacher’s workload much lighter. That much I know is true. It’s so much easier to just open up a book and presto: your lesson is basically set out for you. Sure, you need to prep a little, but in most cases, workload is reduced considerably.
Books are great a providing direction for the class. There’s great comfort in just finishing a page, turning it, and starting the next. One page leads to the next, five pages turns into a week or two of work, a unit turns into a month…and well, before you know it you have course work for a year set before you.
My style, while working one on one, has thus far been bookless with great success. From my end, going bookless has meant more work for me. More reading, skimming my google reader, podcast hunting etc. But the result has been class work that has not only mirrored my student’s work environment, and their language needs there, but work that has actually helped them do their job better.
Personalized, unique, student centered content creates powerful language learning environments. It’s not theory. It’s not wishful thinking…I’ve read about it, seen it happen and have experienced it.
But my experience up until now, has been betweem me and MY students. Nice and easy to manage.
Now that my little company is expanding, I’ve started to hire teachers, and have larger classes. So far, I’ve been trying to deploy the "student centered" and bookless style with my growing staff and pool of students.
It hasn’t been easy. In fact, many times feels like I’m walking against a really strong current. Textbooks are expected. Everyone uses them, and most frown on outfits that don’t give their teachers books to work with.
Take this recent post from a blogger I am coming to respect a lot: Alex Case over at TEFLtastic posts about making sure teachers can really teach: (brilliant post Alex, I’ll be referring to this a lot over the next few weeks as I work with my teachers.)
"Give them the resources they need in order to teach good lessons- good textbooks, classes with students in the right level, lots of supplementary materials that are easy to find" ("How to make sure teachers can really teach." Case, 2007)
So, teachers who teach well are also teachers who have great coursebooks to work with. A close teacher friend of mine, MA in teaching and school admin, who is also in the middle of starting up a company of his own, seems to share this idea as well. Great teachers need to use great material.
That makes sense to me. I feel a big pull…like a magnet, drawing me towards those coursebooks. But, I still resist and wonder: What if a great teacher was provided with plenty of proD, and ongoing support in creating a bookless classroom with his/her students? Could it be done on a large scale?
Here’s how I’m organizing currently:
1. Students are grouped according to level, and groups are kept to 5 members max.
2. Students do a needs assessment which is designed to let us know what sort of things they do with English on a day to day basis. We also ask about hobbies, interests, goals, etc. The results of this assessment provide us with possible content ideas for the course….instead of a coursebook. I currently find myself at this stage with all of my teachers….conducting the needs assessment, and searching for related content.
3. Instead of working with a set coursebook for direction, we are following a "Can Do" benchmark system set up by the Canadian government (check it out here: www.language.ca) I like to think of these objective statements like a skeleton. They give you a place to go, but how you get there..and how you look on the way, is up to you and your class. Big room for personalization. Every teacher who works with me gets a modified copy of these benchmarks and ongoing coaching on how to use them.
So, I wonder to myself and now to you, what do you think about this? I freely admit that this direction is not easy. It’s very hard to work with teachers and help them create unique class content. It’s not practical. But do you think it’s possible, or should I stop going against the flow and give into coursebooks?
Which, do you think, would provide the best learning solution for a student?
Where would you rather work, if you’re a teacher? Textbook classroom, or a more flexible environment?
What do you think?
This is a great question. I have been in teaching situations which provided no textbook and saw many teachers blatantly photocopying texts because in most cases there just isn’t enough time for a new teacher to prepare something “from scratch” every day. I’m currently studying Dutch (Flemish) as a Second language in Belgium. My school creates its own course packs for each level. I think this is a good solution because the course pack can easily be changed for the following year if some units seem to be irrelevant or need improving. You could take this concept a bit further and develop various modules at each level for your teachers to choose from. Anything new that the teachers develop could be added to the library of modules so each teacher doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel each time.
Comment by Jo — November 4, 2007 @ 3:41 pm
Very good questions. I’m in a much more established school, but my job is basically to try and find some way out of that connundrum for our outside contracts department (in company classes etc.)
We have found that:
- Some teachers demand a textbook for the reasons you gave. We then need to help them add a bit of needs analysis and ESP without too much additional effort, e.g. by adding a once a month ESP lesson to the syllabus or helping them plan how to mix up the order of the units in the book so students get what they need first.
- Some teachers need to use a book. That can mean problems such as too much chit chat, choosing unsuitable materials, having great ideas but not following them up with recycling and homework (that’s me!) etc, but it could just mean the best way of that teacher developing at the stage they are in is by seeing how teaching is tackled in different ways by different books. I still have stages when I get into a routine and need a new textbook as a stimulus too.
- Many students demand a book. Japanese students, for example, are very presentation conscious and tend to trust authority. In this case meaning the big publishers. They’ve also often never been taught study skills like filing their notes, so photocopies are rarely refered to again once they’ve been used in class.
With other classes and other teachers, we do decide not to go with a fixed textbook. Ways you can make this ESP planning easier for them include:
- Designate one textbook or other book (e.g. a marketing vocabulary book) that will be most useful for them to turn to when they can’t find topical stuff etc.
- After needs analysis, draw up at least the beginning of a syllabus with the teacher for their class
- Have supplementary files for all the different kinds of ESP classes and different skills that teachers can quickly refer to. If you have a limited budget, to start with, this could even just be photocopies of units from textbooks arranged by topic, then built up as you and the teachers find more resources. Or even cheaper, just a list of pages in different books for each kind of ESP.
Comment by Alex Case — November 4, 2007 @ 4:28 pm
Jo,
Thank you for your great comments. You raise a very valid point, and one that I understand well: most teachers, especially freelancers, simply don’t have time to prep their own lessons from scratch. A course book is great support.
So the course packs: are they created by the school, or by the teachers all working together? Does the school set the themes of the packs, or do they rely on student input?
I like the idea of teachers working together to create packs or modules. I see things like delicious.com working great, or even wikis, as group content banks.
Thanks for your comments Jo - I would love to learn more about what your school does. Have you been able to contribute to the packs? What was that like?
Comment by Aaron Nelson — November 4, 2007 @ 8:00 pm
Alex,
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments. I really appreciated what you had to say - both you and Jo have helped me to see this whole thing from a different perspective: that of the teacher and the students.
Especially, your points about books helping teachers remain on target (avoiding chit chat etc) really make sense. It’s important to realize that teachers are all at different places in their skill development, and sometimes books are just necessary to help them along. I know, back when I was just starting out, books were very important to me:structuring my classes, explaining grammar etc. Good point, and one I had not considered. (Isn’t it funny how some of the most obvious and important things you should consider just seem to hide out from ya?)
Then you also mention your insight into student’s study skills and “authority”: I don’t think that is just specific to Japanese students. There is a certain degree of “officialness” or correctness associated with using course books: you use em, and you’re considered professional and for real. But most important of all, is what students do with your photocopied hand outs or printed out articles and notes.
Few of my students successfully maintain a binder where they store all our class work. Most of it floats about, and I imagine is rarely reviewed outside of class.
On the other hand, I’ve had several “course book” students tell me that they have tried reviewing their stuff out of class…so books are good for that too I suppose. All the content is right there in one safe and secure place.
I really liked your idea about sitting down with teachers to help them draw up an opening syllabus. That makes good sense, and will help shape each lesson toward the student…and not so much around a course book.
So…for practicality and being teacher friendly, I think I will need to explore some course book usage. I don’t want to have teachers or students getting lost - roaming around direction-less in the name of being student centered. That happens pretty easily I think.
Instead, I think a middle ground can be found don’t you think? A class that follows a book, but is wide open, or even required, to offer additional content that helps keep the path close to each student’s needs and interests.
Just out of curiosity, do you have any business English books that you’d suggest? Thanks again for your wonderful comments, you’ve really helped me think differently about this.
Comment by Aaron Nelson — November 4, 2007 @ 11:20 pm
Jo’s suggestion for course packs can indeed produce the best middle way between course books and nothing. The only problem is that doing them well can take an awful lot of time and effort, and it’s very difficult not to get disappointed when the teacher you give it to has something even better on that point and so skips something you spent hours putting together. That’s why we’ve switched to a system of files by topic, area of business, skills, function etc. instead. The same files can then be used to supplement textbook classes, plan a course from scratch etc, and any stuff we actually write can also be stuck in there. If we do use stuff from those files to plan a tailored course for particular clients, we then give it a more general label like “25 hour Technical English course” and stick it on the shelves to be recommended by us or picked up by the teachers later.
Despite all the good things I said about textbooks, I’m in a complete write “all my own materials phase” at the moment and so for myself all that I ask is that a textbook doesn’t have too much stuff to get through or can be left mainly for homework, so suddenly Language to Go, up till now one of my most hated textbooks, is working well in my classes…
We’ve started using Intelligent Business, and it’s probably the best Business book I’ve used in a while. It also has a whole seperate book of skills stuff, which helps for flexibility. The new editions of Market Leader are an improvement on the old (one thing that works well is the fact that they’ve recorded the authentic recordings with actors, perhaps surprisingly), as are the new “International” editions of Business Basics and Business Ops etc. For one kind of ESP class, Tech Talk has gone down very well, although inexperienced and non-technical teachers might need some help spicing it up.
If you, or anyone else reading, ever want any freebie books, I can get you review copies if you can write me a short review for the TEFL.net review pages. Details on www.tefl.net/reviews/reviewers-guide
Comment by Alex Case — November 5, 2007 @ 7:17 am
Aaron, I’m speaking of course from the student’s perspective here and don’t really know what goes on behind the scenes in developing the materials, but from what I gather, each course has been developed by at least two teachers working together, likely during the summer months when there’s no school. I don’t know how often a course is revised, but it seems like minor revisions occur each year, since students who don’t move on to the next level need to get a new course pack because of changes. The packs have included newspaper articles, for example, that are from the current year and from the local paper.
Near the end of the course I took last spring, my teacher asked us students if we had suggestions for themes to use, since they were going to be writing a new course pack for our next level. I did offer a suggestion but perhaps they chose not to develop it. I suppose it’s hard to collect good student input on this for a general language course, but I think in an ESP course, learners would have a better idea of what they really need and want to know.
Comment by Jo — November 5, 2007 @ 12:34 pm
Textbooks can be viewed as a tool in a teacher’s “toolbag” of techniques for delivering instruction, but they’re not just “simple” tools. They’re tools that have been developed over a long period of time by a professional staff of writers and developers to perform a specific function and meet certain needs. Not all tools are appropriate for every job and the most professional tool users not only know how to choose the correct tool for a particular job, they can also adapt a tool they have to a new or different task. Likewise, we don’t expect most carpenters to build a house using hand tools anymore just because doing so might provide a more aesthetic or personally satisfying result. We want them to use power tools so they can accomplish a satisfactory job, be able to move on to the next house, and keep costs at a minimum. (Remember that the time spent developing lessons is a cost that you pay if you’re doing it out of class.)
For teachers who like to use some of the new techniques involved with “bookless” classrooms such as Internet-based projects, or email exchanges, or wiki-creation, one of the uses of the “textbook” tool is to provide a meaningful assignment that students can work on independently while the teacher devotes some time to developing a “bookless” activity, correcting online work, and sending email messages to students.
In regards to your final question, there’s no need to make that choice. Having a flexible environment and using a textbook in a classroom or not mutually incompatible. A professional teacher will be able to have use a textbook and have a flexible environment.
Comment by Barry Bakin — November 5, 2007 @ 2:02 pm
I was going to add my opinion in here but your previous commenters have covered all that I was going to write and more. I would just say that in my education system and setting (Australian primary school), teachers almost never use textbooks for students but will often use one as a guide for their own curriculum design, so that they are not “re-inventing the wheel” so to speak. We can get caught up in the purity of where we want things to be that we can make a rod for our own back in rejecting the expertise that can be found in well designed resources. A textbook doesn’t have to a script, but a guide to ensure gaps in learning don’t occur for your students. Maybe it doesn’t have to one or the other!
Comment by Graham Wegner — November 6, 2007 @ 5:08 am