I think that all subjects that include a substantial body of content – which means all or almost all discrete subjects taught in secondary school – should be taught using textbooks for much of the time.
At some point in the last twenty years or so, textbooks took a hammering and they went out of fashion. Arguments advanced against their use included that they undermined teachers’ ability to plan instruction for the specific students in front of them, and in the new digital world, why on Earth would anyone want to use a paper textbook when they could choose from the vast array of resources available online?
It’s true that online resources are easily updated and they make the sharing of materials, and collaborative working, easy – if I’m looking for resources to teach fractions or surds, I may easily find they have already been created by a teacher in India or New Zealand or Newcastle – so why not use those? I might even improve them, and then everyone benefits, including their originator.
And textbooks are expensive, whereas online resources are often free, or cheap, or certainly cheaper than paper ones: if we buy a new set of maths books for a typical year group of 300 students at our school – even buying one between two to save money – at £25 each they will cost us a total of £3,750. With discounting, we might still have to pay around £2,500-£3000 – big money; and that’s just for one year group.
So, for a variety of reasons, the last twenty years has seen an explosion in the creation of digital resources, some of which are very good.
But I think there are some compelling reasons for using textbooks. Tim Oates published a paper in 2014 entitled ‘Why textbooks count’ and made these key points:
- Research has shown that scrolling and navigating online uses up valuable brain capacity, so comprehension suffers (in their 2018 article, ‘Evidence shows students still learn more effectively from print textbooks than screens’, Alexander and Singer also described ‘the disruptive effect’ that scrolling has on comprehension)
- It’s easier to refer back to old material with a book than online
- The physical experience of using a book may be better for developing long-term memory
Oates pointed to countries and states that typically perform highly in Maths, such as Singapore, where the use of textbooks is far greater than it is in the UK, and concluded that in order to improve our teaching of Maths – and, logically, other subjects – we need to be using high-quality textbooks for a lot of the time.
In his article, ‘Why are English schools not using textbooks?’, Professor Barnaby Lenon reports that in England 10% of 10-year olds are issued textbooks, whilst in South Korea the figure is 99%; and in secondary science 8% of pupils in England are issued with textbooks, compared with 88% in South Korea and 92% in Taiwan – this difference in typical teaching practice is striking. In the 2018 PISA Mathematics tests, the UK came 17th, whilst South Korea was 7th and Taiwan was 5th – causation is almost impossible to prove but the use of textbooks is likely to play a part in students’ performance.
Why I like textbooks
1. They come ready-made; no hours and hours of individual teacher time spent reinventing the teaching-resources wheel. Teacher workload is a big issue in education, and using textbooks significantly reduces it. Teacher time freed up from creating basic teaching resources can be spent in other ways, including resting – well-rested teachers are very likely to perform better in the classroom
2. They’ve been prepared by experts who have dedicated a huge amount of time to their creation. This is perhaps the key point: the use of high-quality textbooks should reduce within-school variation in teaching quality, and so raise standards
3. They should cover the whole course, and include built-in revision and assessment materials – with a good textbook, it’s all there for you at your finger-tips, and it’s all joined-up
4. They include a lot of text, which means a lot of reading – and daily reading is the beating heart of learning (absence of detailed text is one issue with ubiquitous PowerPoint slides)
5. They are easy to refer back to, both during teaching – ‘We covered this point on Page 23. Let’s go back to it…’ – and afterwards
6. If students have their own copy of the textbook, they can go back over things for themselves, and do homework from it, too. In this way, the textbook becomes a well-understood, shared resource for teacher and students, that they can rely on
7. They are easy to issue and store, as opposed to a hundred worksheets that can get crumpled up and misplaced
8. They don’t rely on technology – they don’t ‘drop out’; you are always connected
9. If students can take them home, not only are they are a valuable resource for revision, but parents can get involved with using them, too
10. You see the shape of the whole course in the textbook: you get the broad overview (contents page); you get the detailed information you need to know, carefully sequenced; you get the revision materials and the assessment materials – you can see your progression through the course – it’s often harder to see that big picture online.
The question of standards is the crucial one: using a high-quality textbook is like having an expert teacher beside you in the room, who has thought really carefully about how to teach the same things – and textbooks often probe beyond the specification, into what Christine Counsell has called ‘the hinterland’ of the subject. High-quality textbooks don’t just support the curriculum – they are the curriculum.
Some FAQs
- Why should I be a slave to a textbook? You shouldn’t be. A textbook is a tool, and there may be occasions when you can explain a thing better, or differently. But the textbook can still be the go-to resource for the majority of the time
- Why should I just use a textbook when there are high-quality resources available online? You shouldn’t – it’s not either-or: the textbook can be the base resource, and other resources can be used to augment it and provide something different
- How can I differentiate for my class using a textbook? You differentiate every time you explain or exemplify a point that has been made in the book; every time you prompt discussion on it; every time you ask a question based on it; every time you provide your own example or explain something differently. Anyway, online resources need adapting too. Why wouldn’t they?
- Don’t textbooks go out of date quickly? Well, not that quickly. They should last several years, at least, and there’s nothing to stop you from supplementing the textbook when that is needed – this will obviously be more important in some subjects than others (History, Politics and International Relations some to mind immediately). But fractions are fractions, an endothermic reaction is an endothermic reaction; and All Cows Eat Grass
- Aren’t textbooks just too expensive? They ARE expensive, but they are a very good use of scarce funding – I find it hard to think of better
- What if the textbook is rubbish? There are bound to be some low-quality textbooks out there, and there are bound to be high-quality ones, too. Choosing the right textbook is clearly important – for one thing, at KS4 and KS5 it needs to cover all of the important things in the exam board specification – but saying that not all textbooks are great is not offering much of a case against textbooks in general. Why would they be any worse, in the main, than online resources? I would argue that they are better than many online resources, because of the huge time and thought that have been devoted to their creation, by experts. Online resources that may have been created by one person to suit their own circumstances can vary in quality and be less suitable for others
Perhaps you aren’t convinced? Then try Tom Sherrington’s TeacherHead blog entitled ‘The next edu-revolution: Textbooks’. If you think I’m arguing too strongly in favour of textbooks, wait ’till you read what Tom says in his blog, including his very entertaining – and to my mind, spot-on – video rant!
