Blogg-Ed Indetermination

This is the last in a series of posts about the major factors that constrain innovation in education. Let me say from the get go that I love reading, I love books, and have found textbooks to be an invaluable teaching tool. A well-written textbook can be a great support to students by providing a mental scaffolding for acquiring and assimilating new information. Teachers new to the profession can find textbooks and their accompanying teacher’s editions to be a necessary if not sufficient support as they make their way through their initial years of teaching. Textbooks provide school district authorities with some assurance of a common curriculum across many different schools and teaches.

But the textbook system is broken. There are too few publishers and those that exist are behaving badly:

• textbooks cost too much.
• teachers are often forced into adopting costly new versions with little additional benefit over the previous version.
• the physical weight of textbooks is contributing to back problems among the students who must schlep them from class to class.
• textbooks consume huge amount of natural resources in their production. Disposal of textbooks is not as easy as one may think.

Fortunately, their are alternatives.

Some publishers are starting to release electronic versions of texts. This helps to address the production and disposal issues, but despite the fact that the cost of goods is now close to zero, most e-text prices are still very high, and the texts may have onerous digital rights management policies attached to them that make it inconvenient for a student to access the text when needed.

A more promising alternative (and one I wager may take publishers off-guard) are open textbooks. Inspired by the open-source software movement, open textbooks are created by scholars and teachers who believe that high quality textbooks should be free, in electronic format, and customizable by teachers and students alike.

There are a number of open textbook projects in operation. One close to home is the California Open Source Textbook Project. There are many more. A good source for information about the state of American textbooks and the open source textbook movement is the Campaign to Reduce College Textbook Costs.

But the above criticism is more about the form of textbooks. There is also a problem with the concept of textbooks themselves.

Like AP courses and “teacher-proof curriculum (discussed in previous posts), textbooks can constraint teacher creativity, discourage the exploration of the “teachable moment,” and serve as a nagging back-seat driver that second-guesses the judgment of the teacher as to what it or is not important. The textbook is what one is supposed to “cover” in a given course, and if you don’t make it all the way through, you have somehow failed yourself and your class. Who’s in charge here? You, or your textbook?

The term “textbook case” is used to describe events that are typical or classic example of something. I submit that textbooks are a textbook case of what’s wrong with American education.

In a previous post, I wrote about the agrarian school year, and how it serves as an artificial constraint to school innovation in general, and time for professional development, curriculum writing, and project-based learning in particular. But the school year is just one of several constraints that should be examined – and I suspect eliminated entirely – if schools are going to truly become 21st century learning and teaching institutions. Here are eight other constraints that need to be examined.

1. Academic departments.
2. Grading and assessment systems.
3. Grade levels.
4. AP courses.
5. Teacher-proof curricula.
6. One-size-fits-all school models.
7. Teacher education programs, teacher licensure departments, and teacher unions.
8. Current school architectural models.
9. Textbooks and textbook publishers.

Over the next few weeks I will write more about each of these items and my take on how each of them constrains the true innovation required to become a 21st century school. I hope that you will engage in the discussion.