Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is not just nostalgia. Children need to be manipulating more objects than just computer mouses. Turning pages is fine motor skills practice. It is also physically grounding in the tangible physical world. It truly does engage different parts of our brains and bodies. And you can’t beat those beautiful color photos, eye-catching graphics, etc. My students really enjoy getting out our old set of gorgeous textbooks.

None of this is true. None.

I disagree. You seem very defensive though. Why, do you think?

Because I've taught children ages 2 to 80, pre K-12, college, continuing education, as well as graduate school, where I mentor teachers in all settings and have done so for almost 40 years. I've written tomes of curriculum for public and private schools, as well as charters for private schools. I am a reading specialist who has worked with every type of learning disability there is, and, within the last ten years, also have been very much involved with the autism community. I've written three books, too many articles to count today, and am a frequent guest on educational podcasts. I've taught Reading, English, English Literature, Humanities, History, Social Sciences, as well as three math disciplines interspersed throughout the years.

That is why I know what I am talking about. I understand what interactive synchronous and asynchronous/ dynamic curricula looks like, how it is used, how collaboration is used, and the role of a teacher. I uunderstand what a textbook is, having edited 20 of them and having used textbooks in entirety for almost 25 years. I've seen the progression of technology as it has developed since I was in the trenches all this time. I understand the uses and possibilities of many materials. I can honestly say that a child today can literally go through school without one textbook (!) and learn more than what was ever available in 1963, 1973, or 1993, or even 2003. Can a textbook have a place? Sure, but now only as a temporary reference. Literature? Sure, the physical book is lovely, all for physical books as ancillaries and motivators, but we can still buy more of those as ebooks if we want to maximize $$. But discipline-based textbooks...not really necessary and I can make a good case for their shortcomings, which are many. Think about how everyone gets their news today. Do you wait for your morning physical newspaper to find out what's going on in the world? No.

My advice- let educators decide how to teach. That's what we do. It's just not that simple or binary..textbooks or not. There's so much open source and commercial material online that you are not aware of or even how to use it.Why not spend some time looking into it before you come up with an opinion not in your purview?

How much did you all get from Google and Microsoft to come to these conclusions? My bet is you are going to find out your entire career was wrong.

Nothing. I have multiple degrees and teach at the graduate level in my field. I think I would know what the field entails.
I hate to break it to you, but this comprises best practices in education today. Of note, if Microsoft and Google is all that you understand, there's quite a bit more to know. You are not trained and are living in the 1970s.

Best Practices = whatever they tell teachers to do at any given time

News Flash- teachers are "they." We know what to do and how to do it. What we aren't going to do is let untrained, out of touch, and uneducated people with zero experience tell us how to do our job, just like anyone, in any job, who has trained and has considerable experience in the field. This isn't a consumer driven field where the public decides how they want their product
delivered. There is a solid swath of practice and expertise here that isn't asking for your advice, nor do we require it! We aren't letting parents write curriculum and cherry pick what is to be taught in the classroom based upon their political and religious beliefs. We are happy to explain what we are doing, how we are doing it, and welcome anyone to come observe. We also welcome people to become trained in various methodologies, which includes technology in order for said people to understand how it all works. But, no, we aren't going back to 1976 because that's what you remember about education.

I'm an educator who taught in DCPS for nearly 20 years.
I have a BA, an MA, and an MAT.
I'm not telling you what or how to teach.
But I am telling you that what DCPS is doing is shortchanging students.
Stop being so defensive. Try listening. There's a lot you could be doing to improve the quality of the academic program.

Pretty sure you aren't teaching now, so, sit down.

Still teaching, but not for DCPS. And I use textbooks, trade books, short videos, some online platforms. I produce my own video lessons. Definitely not anything anybody was doing in the 70s.

What access do parents have to all that material you are using to support the school work at home? When the kid doesn't remember what was in the video and doesn't have time to rewatch the whole thing (times 6 classes) or sort through on line platforms to quickly review the confusing point, is there a book or a piece of paper to reference? I get how these things make it interesting and more dynamic for you as a teacher, but I have seen first hand how it loses the kids who cannot reinforce (or even find) at home what they were supposed to have learned at school -- unless they have a book with an index.

I teach online. Parents have access to all of the content that I post. And I use a downloadable textbook that can be printed so that students can highlight, code, and annotate.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:2 teachers above give lengthy explanations of why textbooks are not necessary from *their* perspectives.

But the complaints here are about what the students need — a single, off-line, print resource that presents the full content of a course in a structured way.

The teachers seem oddly unconcerned with students’ needs.

Why does this have to be in a book? Why can't it be on the LMS? What is the obsession of having something that is in one's hand? If they want that..then download it and print!

There are a couple of reasons for having at least one textbook, that students and parents can use to study and review content.

1. textbooks are edited while a lot of content found on the web is not. There's a lot of junk out there that finds its way onto online resources.
2. textbooks are designed by professional graphic designers. There's a lot of ugly, badly designed content on the net that is not inviting or easy to read.
3. textbooks are great for reference, an efficient tool for students to review content in a coherent, organized form, using an index.

Nobody is suggesting that textbooks should be the only resource, or that they are the best resource. But having access to a textbook, either printed or downloadable, would help a lot of students and the parents who are trying to support them.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:2 teachers above give lengthy explanations of why textbooks are not necessary from *their* perspectives.

But the complaints here are about what the students need — a single, off-line, print resource that presents the full content of a course in a structured way.

The teachers seem oddly unconcerned with students’ needs.

Why does this have to be in a book? Why can't it be on the LMS? What is the obsession of having something that is in one's hand? If they want that..then download it and print!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Dear Ms. "Sit Down":

Nope, not sitting down.

There are at least two of us who said “sit down.” Don’t worry. We know you won’t. Your kids are the ill-raised, entitled ones who won’t behave in class either. We see you.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Some things, like basic maths, don't change. I liked having a text book so I could look ahead to the next week's work or back to older explanations if I was confused. My son has a pile of different-sized worksheets in his room.

My kids get a math textbook. They go through it linearly. Each new concept chapter’s problem set has review problems, and each review problem lists the chapter that that particular concept came from so kids can easily go back and refresh their memory if they don’t remember how the problem is done. Problems from the current concept always start with a few questions drawn directly from the explanation texts so its super easy for the child to make the connection between the direction and the execution.

It’s heaven.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCPS provides some textbooks in hard copy and digital form. The most up-to-date ones are those for AP courses as those have gone through teacher feedback and selection processes over the past 5 years with dedicated funding and support from the DCPS Office of Teaching and Learning. The College Board approves syllabi for AP courses and textbooks are required to be part of the course design, often because the higher-level content requires an in-depth text resource to supplement the use of additional texts used by the teacher. For non-AP courses, it varies.

In ELA, DCPS purchases many books and novels for schools to use in alignment to the curriculum which was created and is revised each year through work by central staff curriculum writers working with DCPS teachers as curriculum writing fellows. With the shifts of the Common Core State Standards, there's a focus on reading more texts aligned to a particular topic or theme (e.g., Rocks and Minerals, People Who Persevere, the Civil Rights Movement) to build students' background knowledge rather than topics scattered across a broader spectrum of different topics. Additionally, text selection tries to provide a better balance of "windows and mirrors," that is, texts that provide windows into the lives of people that are different from students as well as texts that more closely mirror students' own identities, lives, and experiences. Old ELA mainstays like the Norton Anthology are certainly useful, but they tend to skew toward a more traditional Western canon, so the texts are chosen more individually to fit the needs of the unit design. There are tradeoffs to that decision, for sure, but the district has also tried to make things easier for schools by publishing compilations of all the texts needed for each grade level. Funding cuts to central have meant that these are not necessarily provided to every school every year, and some DCPS schools opt out of using the centrally designed ELA curriculum and don't use those resources.

For social studies, there are still hard copy textbooks, but they were last formally adopted in 2007 following the last updating of the DC social studies standards in 2006. Given the adoption being 15 years ago, the hardcover textbooks are not used by many teachers, though they are still available for schools to order from the DCPS warehouse. Given the age of some of these books, social studies teachers also have access to an online textbook tool called the Discovery Education Techbook. In addition to the "core interactive text" (what you'd find in a traditional textbook), the Techbook includes many more images, maps, interactives, and video clips, along with providing features to support students accessing the text more easily (e.g., lowering the reading level of a passage, defining words, reading the text aloud, or translating into Spanish). The Techbook was piloted in 5 schools back in 2013 and given the positive feedback from teachers, gradually expanded to other schools as well. The DCPS social studies curriculum pulls from the Techbook but also a wide variety of primary and secondary source documents freely available online known as OER (Open Educational Resources). As the DC social studies standards are now being updated by OSSE, it's likely there will be an update to textbooks and other class resources sometime in the next few years.

For science, teachers also have access to the Discovery Education Techbook which started being used at the same time as the social studies version. Students can access Techbook via Clever, so that would be a good place to look for more information about social studies and science content. Science teachers also have access to an online curriculum resource called STEMscopes. In math, DCPS has adopted the Eureka curriculum which includes workbooks as others have noted. Like any other resource, there are tradeoffs to using single textbooks vs. a curated curriculum with other sources. Textbooks and curriculum can be used with varying degrees of fidelity and it's possible to use either to positive effect, or for them to not be used well. If you have questions about the materials your kids are bringing home, it's probably best to start with some questions to their teacher and go from there. It's also possible that some teachers aren't necessarily aware of all the resources they are able to take advantage of using.

+1000
This is what all these people DO NOT UNDERSTAND. Their interaction with teaching materials, period, and educational technology is extremely limited and somehow just understand one very didactic way to teach- and then they write things Iike "Why can't we have textbooks like the old days..." They actually think there is a binary situation of paper- or there's a computer screen with videos and games. They've never heard of OERs or open sourced materials. They've never used an LMS or interactive programs.
Pages of informational threads do not dissuade some people who are stuck in time. But, thanks for making a good effort here.

You underestimate the complainants here. I’ve worked for an LMS vendor, and I still strongly believe that a textbook is necessary, if not sufficient.

We get the value of hands on, interactive, digital, whatever lessons, but we are telling you the experience of our children, who don’t grasp the scope of a subject in a coherent way, and who are online wayyyy to much for the health of their eyes and brains.

That's your uneducated and unqualified opinion which has nothing to do with reality. Your term "wayyy too much" explains not a lot. Welcome to the digital world. We all live here now. No, textbooks won't be making a comeback.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCPS provides some textbooks in hard copy and digital form. The most up-to-date ones are those for AP courses as those have gone through teacher feedback and selection processes over the past 5 years with dedicated funding and support from the DCPS Office of Teaching and Learning. The College Board approves syllabi for AP courses and textbooks are required to be part of the course design, often because the higher-level content requires an in-depth text resource to supplement the use of additional texts used by the teacher. For non-AP courses, it varies.

In ELA, DCPS purchases many books and novels for schools to use in alignment to the curriculum which was created and is revised each year through work by central staff curriculum writers working with DCPS teachers as curriculum writing fellows. With the shifts of the Common Core State Standards, there's a focus on reading more texts aligned to a particular topic or theme (e.g., Rocks and Minerals, People Who Persevere, the Civil Rights Movement) to build students' background knowledge rather than topics scattered across a broader spectrum of different topics. Additionally, text selection tries to provide a better balance of "windows and mirrors," that is, texts that provide windows into the lives of people that are different from students as well as texts that more closely mirror students' own identities, lives, and experiences. Old ELA mainstays like the Norton Anthology are certainly useful, but they tend to skew toward a more traditional Western canon, so the texts are chosen more individually to fit the needs of the unit design. There are tradeoffs to that decision, for sure, but the district has also tried to make things easier for schools by publishing compilations of all the texts needed for each grade level. Funding cuts to central have meant that these are not necessarily provided to every school every year, and some DCPS schools opt out of using the centrally designed ELA curriculum and don't use those resources.

For social studies, there are still hard copy textbooks, but they were last formally adopted in 2007 following the last updating of the DC social studies standards in 2006. Given the adoption being 15 years ago, the hardcover textbooks are not used by many teachers, though they are still available for schools to order from the DCPS warehouse. Given the age of some of these books, social studies teachers also have access to an online textbook tool called the Discovery Education Techbook. In addition to the "core interactive text" (what you'd find in a traditional textbook), the Techbook includes many more images, maps, interactives, and video clips, along with providing features to support students accessing the text more easily (e.g., lowering the reading level of a passage, defining words, reading the text aloud, or translating into Spanish). The Techbook was piloted in 5 schools back in 2013 and given the positive feedback from teachers, gradually expanded to other schools as well. The DCPS social studies curriculum pulls from the Techbook but also a wide variety of primary and secondary source documents freely available online known as OER (Open Educational Resources). As the DC social studies standards are now being updated by OSSE, it's likely there will be an update to textbooks and other class resources sometime in the next few years.

For science, teachers also have access to the Discovery Education Techbook which started being used at the same time as the social studies version. Students can access Techbook via Clever, so that would be a good place to look for more information about social studies and science content. Science teachers also have access to an online curriculum resource called STEMscopes. In math, DCPS has adopted the Eureka curriculum which includes workbooks as others have noted. Like any other resource, there are tradeoffs to using single textbooks vs. a curated curriculum with other sources. Textbooks and curriculum can be used with varying degrees of fidelity and it's possible to use either to positive effect, or for them to not be used well. If you have questions about the materials your kids are bringing home, it's probably best to start with some questions to their teacher and go from there. It's also possible that some teachers aren't necessarily aware of all the resources they are able to take advantage of using.

+1000
This is what all these people DO NOT UNDERSTAND. Their interaction with teaching materials, period, and educational technology is extremely limited and somehow just understand one very didactic way to teach- and then they write things Iike "Why can't we have textbooks like the old days..." They actually think there is a binary situation of paper- or there's a computer screen with videos and games. They've never heard of OERs or open sourced materials. They've never used an LMS or interactive programs.
Pages of informational threads do not dissuade some people who are stuck in time. But, thanks for making a good effort here.

You underestimate the complainants here. I’ve worked for an LMS vendor, and I still strongly believe that a textbook is necessary, if not sufficient.

We get the value of hands on, interactive, digital, whatever lessons, but we are telling you the experience of our children, who don’t grasp the scope of a subject in a coherent way, and who are online wayyyy to much for the health of their eyes and brains.

Anonymous wrote:Dear Ms. "Sit Down":

Nope, not sitting down.

Anonymous wrote:Some things, like basic maths, don't change. I liked having a text book so I could look ahead to the next week's work or back to older explanations if I was confused. My son has a pile of different-sized worksheets in his room.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is not just nostalgia. Children need to be manipulating more objects than just computer mouses. Turning pages is fine motor skills practice. It is also physically grounding in the tangible physical world. It truly does engage different parts of our brains and bodies. And you can’t beat those beautiful color photos, eye-catching graphics, etc. My students really enjoy getting out our old set of gorgeous textbooks.

None of this is true. None.

I disagree. You seem very defensive though. Why, do you think?

Because I've taught children ages 2 to 80, pre K-12, college, continuing education, as well as graduate school, where I mentor teachers in all settings and have done so for almost 40 years. I've written tomes of curriculum for public and private schools, as well as charters for private schools. I am a reading specialist who has worked with every type of learning disability there is, and, within the last ten years, also have been very much involved with the autism community. I've written three books, too many articles to count today, and am a frequent guest on educational podcasts. I've taught Reading, English, English Literature, Humanities, History, Social Sciences, as well as three math disciplines interspersed throughout the years.

That is why I know what I am talking about. I understand what interactive synchronous and asynchronous/ dynamic curricula looks like, how it is used, how collaboration is used, and the role of a teacher. I uunderstand what a textbook is, having edited 20 of them and having used textbooks in entirety for almost 25 years. I've seen the progression of technology as it has developed since I was in the trenches all this time. I understand the uses and possibilities of many materials. I can honestly say that a child today can literally go through school without one textbook (!) and learn more than what was ever available in 1963, 1973, or 1993, or even 2003. Can a textbook have a place? Sure, but now only as a temporary reference. Literature? Sure, the physical book is lovely, all for physical books as ancillaries and motivators, but we can still buy more of those as ebooks if we want to maximize $$. But discipline-based textbooks...not really necessary and I can make a good case for their shortcomings, which are many. Think about how everyone gets their news today. Do you wait for your morning physical newspaper to find out what's going on in the world? No.

My advice- let educators decide how to teach. That's what we do. It's just not that simple or binary..textbooks or not. There's so much open source and commercial material online that you are not aware of or even how to use it.Why not spend some time looking into it before you come up with an opinion not in your purview?

How much did you all get from Google and Microsoft to come to these conclusions? My bet is you are going to find out your entire career was wrong.

Nothing. I have multiple degrees and teach at the graduate level in my field. I think I would know what the field entails.
I hate to break it to you, but this comprises best practices in education today. Of note, if Microsoft and Google is all that you understand, there's quite a bit more to know. You are not trained and are living in the 1970s.

Best Practices = whatever they tell teachers to do at any given time

News Flash- teachers are "they." We know what to do and how to do it. What we aren't going to do is let untrained, out of touch, and uneducated people with zero experience tell us how to do our job, just like anyone, in any job, who has trained and has considerable experience in the field. This isn't a consumer driven field where the public decides how they want their product
delivered. There is a solid swath of practice and expertise here that isn't asking for your advice, nor do we require it! We aren't letting parents write curriculum and cherry pick what is to be taught in the classroom based upon their political and religious beliefs. We are happy to explain what we are doing, how we are doing it, and welcome anyone to come observe. We also welcome people to become trained in various methodologies, which includes technology in order for said people to understand how it all works. But, no, we aren't going back to 1976 because that's what you remember about education.

I'm an educator who taught in DCPS for nearly 20 years.
I have a BA, an MA, and an MAT.
I'm not telling you what or how to teach.
But I am telling you that what DCPS is doing is shortchanging students.
Stop being so defensive. Try listening. There's a lot you could be doing to improve the quality of the academic program.

Pretty sure you aren't teaching now, so, sit down.

Still teaching, but not for DCPS. And I use textbooks, trade books, short videos, some online platforms. I produce my own video lessons. Definitely not anything anybody was doing in the 70s.

What access do parents have to all that material you are using to support the school work at home? When the kid doesn't remember what was in the video and doesn't have time to rewatch the whole thing (times 6 classes) or sort through on line platforms to quickly review the confusing point, is there a book or a piece of paper to reference? I get how these things make it interesting and more dynamic for you as a teacher, but I have seen first hand how it loses the kids who cannot reinforce (or even find) at home what they were supposed to have learned at school -- unless they have a book with an index.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DCPS provides some textbooks in hard copy and digital form. The most up-to-date ones are those for AP courses as those have gone through teacher feedback and selection processes over the past 5 years with dedicated funding and support from the DCPS Office of Teaching and Learning. The College Board approves syllabi for AP courses and textbooks are required to be part of the course design, often because the higher-level content requires an in-depth text resource to supplement the use of additional texts used by the teacher. For non-AP courses, it varies.

In ELA, DCPS purchases many books and novels for schools to use in alignment to the curriculum which was created and is revised each year through work by central staff curriculum writers working with DCPS teachers as curriculum writing fellows. With the shifts of the Common Core State Standards, there's a focus on reading more texts aligned to a particular topic or theme (e.g., Rocks and Minerals, People Who Persevere, the Civil Rights Movement) to build students' background knowledge rather than topics scattered across a broader spectrum of different topics. Additionally, text selection tries to provide a better balance of "windows and mirrors," that is, texts that provide windows into the lives of people that are different from students as well as texts that more closely mirror students' own identities, lives, and experiences. Old ELA mainstays like the Norton Anthology are certainly useful, but they tend to skew toward a more traditional Western canon, so the texts are chosen more individually to fit the needs of the unit design. There are tradeoffs to that decision, for sure, but the district has also tried to make things easier for schools by publishing compilations of all the texts needed for each grade level. Funding cuts to central have meant that these are not necessarily provided to every school every year, and some DCPS schools opt out of using the centrally designed ELA curriculum and don't use those resources.

For social studies, there are still hard copy textbooks, but they were last formally adopted in 2007 following the last updating of the DC social studies standards in 2006. Given the adoption being 15 years ago, the hardcover textbooks are not used by many teachers, though they are still available for schools to order from the DCPS warehouse. Given the age of some of these books, social studies teachers also have access to an online textbook tool called the Discovery Education Techbook. In addition to the "core interactive text" (what you'd find in a traditional textbook), the Techbook includes many more images, maps, interactives, and video clips, along with providing features to support students accessing the text more easily (e.g., lowering the reading level of a passage, defining words, reading the text aloud, or translating into Spanish). The Techbook was piloted in 5 schools back in 2013 and given the positive feedback from teachers, gradually expanded to other schools as well. The DCPS social studies curriculum pulls from the Techbook but also a wide variety of primary and secondary source documents freely available online known as OER (Open Educational Resources). As the DC social studies standards are now being updated by OSSE, it's likely there will be an update to textbooks and other class resources sometime in the next few years.

For science, teachers also have access to the Discovery Education Techbook which started being used at the same time as the social studies version. Students can access Techbook via Clever, so that would be a good place to look for more information about social studies and science content. Science teachers also have access to an online curriculum resource called STEMscopes. In math, DCPS has adopted the Eureka curriculum which includes workbooks as others have noted. Like any other resource, there are tradeoffs to using single textbooks vs. a curated curriculum with other sources. Textbooks and curriculum can be used with varying degrees of fidelity and it's possible to use either to positive effect, or for them to not be used well. If you have questions about the materials your kids are bringing home, it's probably best to start with some questions to their teacher and go from there. It's also possible that some teachers aren't necessarily aware of all the resources they are able to take advantage of using.

+1000
This is what all these people DO NOT UNDERSTAND. Their interaction with teaching materials, period, and educational technology is extremely limited and somehow just understand one very didactic way to teach- and then they write things Iike "Why can't we have textbooks like the old days..." They actually think there is a binary situation of paper- or there's a computer screen with videos and games. They've never heard of OERs or open sourced materials. They've never used an LMS or interactive programs.
Pages of informational threads do not dissuade some people who are stuck in time. But, thanks for making a good effort here.

Anonymous wrote:2 teachers above give lengthy explanations of why textbooks are not necessary from *their* perspectives.

But the complaints here are about what the students need — a single, off-line, print resource that presents the full content of a course in a structured way.

The teachers seem oddly unconcerned with students’ needs.

Anonymous wrote:DCPS provides some textbooks in hard copy and digital form. The most up-to-date ones are those for AP courses as those have gone through teacher feedback and selection processes over the past 5 years with dedicated funding and support from the DCPS Office of Teaching and Learning. The College Board approves syllabi for AP courses and textbooks are required to be part of the course design, often because the higher-level content requires an in-depth text resource to supplement the use of additional texts used by the teacher. For non-AP courses, it varies.

In ELA, DCPS purchases many books and novels for schools to use in alignment to the curriculum which was created and is revised each year through work by central staff curriculum writers working with DCPS teachers as curriculum writing fellows. With the shifts of the Common Core State Standards, there's a focus on reading more texts aligned to a particular topic or theme (e.g., Rocks and Minerals, People Who Persevere, the Civil Rights Movement) to build students' background knowledge rather than topics scattered across a broader spectrum of different topics. Additionally, text selection tries to provide a better balance of "windows and mirrors," that is, texts that provide windows into the lives of people that are different from students as well as texts that more closely mirror students' own identities, lives, and experiences. Old ELA mainstays like the Norton Anthology are certainly useful, but they tend to skew toward a more traditional Western canon, so the texts are chosen more individually to fit the needs of the unit design. There are tradeoffs to that decision, for sure, but the district has also tried to make things easier for schools by publishing compilations of all the texts needed for each grade level. Funding cuts to central have meant that these are not necessarily provided to every school every year, and some DCPS schools opt out of using the centrally designed ELA curriculum and don't use those resources.

For social studies, there are still hard copy textbooks, but they were last formally adopted in 2007 following the last updating of the DC social studies standards in 2006. Given the adoption being 15 years ago, the hardcover textbooks are not used by many teachers, though they are still available for schools to order from the DCPS warehouse. Given the age of some of these books, social studies teachers also have access to an online textbook tool called the Discovery Education Techbook. In addition to the "core interactive text" (what you'd find in a traditional textbook), the Techbook includes many more images, maps, interactives, and video clips, along with providing features to support students accessing the text more easily (e.g., lowering the reading level of a passage, defining words, reading the text aloud, or translating into Spanish). The Techbook was piloted in 5 schools back in 2013 and given the positive feedback from teachers, gradually expanded to other schools as well. The DCPS social studies curriculum pulls from the Techbook but also a wide variety of primary and secondary source documents freely available online known as OER (Open Educational Resources). As the DC social studies standards are now being updated by OSSE, it's likely there will be an update to textbooks and other class resources sometime in the next few years.

For science, teachers also have access to the Discovery Education Techbook which started being used at the same time as the social studies version. Students can access Techbook via Clever, so that would be a good place to look for more information about social studies and science content. Science teachers also have access to an online curriculum resource called STEMscopes. In math, DCPS has adopted the Eureka curriculum which includes workbooks as others have noted. Like any other resource, there are tradeoffs to using single textbooks vs. a curated curriculum with other sources. Textbooks and curriculum can be used with varying degrees of fidelity and it's possible to use either to positive effect, or for them to not be used well. If you have questions about the materials your kids are bringing home, it's probably best to start with some questions to their teacher and go from there. It's also possible that some teachers aren't necessarily aware of all the resources they are able to take advantage of using.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m a high school science teacher. Science instruction has moved away from rote memorization of science facts and more into science skills, analysis and critical thinking. I have access to textbooks but choose not to use them (both AP level and freshman level). Instead I give my students diagrams to analyze. Real data to analyze. Labs to complete and analyze. Modeling projects where they need to wrestle with the content and make sense of it as they go. It often takes a while to convince students that the goal is not memorization. No publishers textbook I’ve had access to does any justice to aligning well with the rewritten AP science curriculum or NGSS. They claim to but don’t. Maybe I’ve just never had access to one’s that do. I can say in a heartbeat I’d rather have $8000 dollars in lab equipment as opposed to 80 $100 textbooks for my students to occasionally use.

Re-read what you wrote and realize how ridiculous it is. Unless you memorize some science facts you can’t really analyze. I couldn’t it believe when my 9th grader started bringing home assignments that said - “use a credible internet source to find…” Or has work that is all about the process and it doesn’t matter if it is right it wrong as long as they follow the process. There is basic scientific information everyone should memorize to be an informed citizen. You can memorize first then use real data to analyze.

I have reread what I wrote and stand by it. Please let me know what biology facts must be memorized before a student can start to understand a biology concept. For example it is critically important for students to learn about evolution. But they retain the understanding much better if they start out simulating/modeling the process with a hands on activity. Then look at the data and develop an explanation of what is happening. Then look at real world data and apply the simulation developed understanding to the real world data. They learn the vocabulary and facts in context.

Maybe I’m an outlier as a teacher. I deeply know my content. I enjoy curriculum development. I spend far more hours than I should developing my class materials. I teach students how to keep their work organized and reinforce organization. I teach students how to study from their resources and test them in a way that is aligned to what they are learning. I will say a textbook might be needed for a teacher/class that is less organized or experienced. When I taught AP psych (a memorization heavy test) with less expertise in that field than bio the AP aligned textbook was a lifesaver for me and my students. Each year I relied on the textbook less as I developed a deeper understanding of the content and crafted engaging materials for the students. My textbook based class in the early years wasn’t bad. The class did get better though in later years.

Textbooks aren’t good or bad. There are many ways of learning. But there is a cost trade off that at least for me is definitely not worthwhile for my teaching.

I agree that doing science is critical to understanding. But there are basics of experimental design and the scientific process that are consistent and the protocols and vocabulary associated with those steps and analysis processes is well-captured in textbook format. The mastery of concepts like control group and dependent/ independent variables is limited in elementary school. So there needs to be some baseline established when you have kids coming from all different places at all different levels. This is what textbooks can accomplish really well.

Anonymous wrote:2 teachers above give lengthy explanations of why textbooks are not necessary from *their* perspectives.

But the complaints here are about what the students need — a single, off-line, print resource that presents the full content of a course in a structured way.

The teachers seem oddly unconcerned with students’ needs.