Edmund Taylor
Dr. Napolitano
SED 407:01
March 4, 2014
Response
to Chapters 3, 4, and Newkirk Article
I found both the chapters in the
Daniels text and the Newkirk article valuable. Daniels argues that too often “textbooks
are school.” Districts or departments
tend to assign a text. Some teachers can have students use it as a reference,
while others are forced to cover everything in it. Textbooks try to cram in so
much information that it becomes like a word-soup, and make big ideas and key
concepts a challenge to decipher. They are expected to be read like an
enjoyable narrative, than as the reference they actually are. They are often
poorly designed for student understanding, and much more attention is paid
towards making them eye catching. They are expensive, filled with errors, and
lead students to make inaccurate assumptions about the content. These expensive
texts are also authoritarian, in the sense that only one view is proclaimed as
the definitive truth and inarguable. Daniels is very informative of the
problems with textbooks. It baffles me that in a democratic society, a single,
poorly written, text can be proclaimed as the truth. Daniels suggests things I
can do to deal with the problems of textbooks in my own classroom, which I
found very helpful. He suggests buying 30 copies of a text, which can be shared
among classes, rather than purchase one book per student. This frees up the
price of about 120 textbooks to be used on supplementary materials. He also
suggests to save money by buying the standard version, without expensive extras
like a test bank and videos. Finally, ceasing to use a textbook altogether is a
third option.
Daniels also argues that teachers
are forced to cover too much content in the textbooks in too little time. Readers
need help, and teachers often expect the student to be responsible for learning
the text on their own. When evaluating a
textbook, Daniels suggests 4 filters: does it encompass enduring understanding,
key concepts, uncover material, and engage students? To use textbooks more
effectively, teachers should offer extra help to students and supplement the
text richly. Also group reading, the jigsaw method, reading guides, and
dividing up reading can help. Daniels suggests giving students a list of mostly
new vocabulary to categorize, which primes them to pay closer attention to
these terms when reading. Assigning a role to each member of a reading group
also is a useful strategy. The Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review Method is also helpful. Students look at
headings and illustrations to break what they are learning down into smaller parts,
develop pertinent questions based on that survey, read and annotate, summarize
it in their own words, and review it multiple times to ensure comprehension.
Overall, both chapters were extremely
informative and helpful. I plan to use the reading circles, SQ3R method in my
classroom, as it will help students. I also plan to develop reading guides for
all assigned reading, and maybe develop a brief homemade textbook. The
vocabulary word sorts also seem useful.
In the Newkirk
article, he repudiates the Common Core Standards, as they are debatable.
Teaching is geared towards high stakes testing too often, and state standards
are becoming synonymous with national standards. Required texts are developmentally
inappropriate. Students are taught to not challenge or debate the argument of a
text. The same companies that create the test develop study guides for the
test, profiting from it. Other instructional opportunities cannot be pursued
because of the constraints set by the Common Core Standards and high stakes testing.
I believe Newkirk is right. I think
he would agree with Daniels that education has become authoritarian. A single
view is suggested to be the definitive truth when students read a required
test, and then are forced to answer questions on a standardized high-stakes
test that are based on nearly national standards. The methods Daniels suggests
help to reduce the problem of authoritarian education, but do not resolve the
problem. I am much more critical of high stakes testing, required textbooks,
and the Common Core, than I was before reading these texts. Also, I have gained
some knowledge of what I can do to counterbalance the problems of authoritarian
education.
