The Value of a Good History textbook
I just listened to the Textbooks episode of The Staff Room , a podcast by two Ontario middle school teachers. Seriously, check it out, it is worth a half-hour of your time! I love that Pav and Chey get into some real talk about textbooks! They hit the nail on the head when they say that "textbook" has become a bit of a bad word; that you're not a good teacher if you're still using a textbook. There are whole educational movements encouraging teachers to stop using textbooks, and you can get some glares if you try to defend them. I think they really got the reality of it right, though. A textbook is only one tool in the teacher's toolkit. We are well-educated, smart people who can use a number of tools at our disposal to launch inquiries, to lay the foundations and to inspire learning. A textbook can be one of those tools, and need not be discarded like the proverbial baby with the bathwater. They explained how textbooks can have really well-constructed lesson