"Is there a book for your class?"
This question came from a parent of one of my freshmen in one of my biology classes. Her bright young man hasn't been doing that well on my progress checks (the sole purpose of which are to aid students in diagnosing the gaps in their learning and are written at higher than recall level), and he's getting worried and anxious. She seemed to feel that, if her student had a book, he would be doing better. I reassured the parent that yes, we do have a book for Biology--I just don't hand it out because students don't need it. They don't need it because they have netbooks, but they primarily don't need it because I try to have students develop their own understandings rather then memorize the static (and often outdated and oversimplified to the point of inaccuracy) information that comes out of a textbook. This answer brought about some confused looks on all of the parents' faces in the room. I could see them quietly wondering how I could really teach a class effectively without using a textbook.
I understand their voiceless questions. Too many past and present classrooms have revolved/do revolve around marching through a textbook, seen as the alpha and omega of all learning, unfortunately crucial to the parade of stuff we throw before children, asking them to remember it for one, maybe two, fleeting assessments before forgetting it.
I would rather my classroom revolve around how to learn the stuff rather than the stuff itself. I'm not a pro at it by any means; I still get tangled in all the science stuff more times than I care to recall. But then I realize that most of what has traditionally been taught really isn't really necessary for kids to remember, and I try and untangle myself so I can get back to the business of getting kids to learn how to learn.
And teaching my students to harness the power of their own learning means getting rid of the textbook, which has become a crutch for kids; a means by which they can get all A's yet still know--and I mean really know--absolutely nothing. You may think this an exaggeration, but after 16 years of having students tell me a hypothesis is an "educated guess" and how "DNA contains all your traits" and how the nucleus is the "brain of the cell" without being able to explain exactly what those phrases mean, I know that they have merely memorized words from a teacher's mouth or from a book and associated those words with another word, with no real understanding taking place whatsoever.
In other words, they were taught what something means with no real meaning.
I've written before about teaching without a textbook, but Grant Wiggins says it so much better than I can in his most recent post (titled "Thinking about lack of thinking"). Before this passage, Wiggins quotes the physicist Richard Feynman, who talks about how science books limit student thinking because they lead students to try and find the book's answer to the question rather than their own answer. What's quoted below is Wiggins' thoughts on Feynman's ideas:
Have you taught an idea or just a definition? Have you covered a lifeless fact or uncovered a vital insight inside an inert textbook claim that needs exploration? When I see teachers (and textbooks) fixate on technical definitions or authoritative claims to be treated as Gospel I always get a chill up my spine. Because it may be just as Feynman is implying: memorization of technical terms or claims that you just accept is the epitome of thoughtlessness. Yet, in good as well as bad schools, students are expected to learn and recall hundreds of meaningless terms and textbook claims AS IF such short-term drill work ended up as transferable working capital. To assume that learning means learning what is in a textbook, no matter how good the textbook, is to fail to think things through.
More generally, to assume that learning means learning what is in a textbook,no matter how good the textbook, is to fail to think things through at a basic level as a teacher. A thoughtful teacher would fear the power of the textbook to lull thinking into submission, and work extra hard to counteract this tendency. Because Feynman’s point is generalizable to almost every textbook: they present knowledge as unquestionable information. They not only simplify but subtly end discussion on all key points – by design. When have you seen a textbook that asked you to completely reconsider the previous chapter of the textbook? When has a textbook asked you to question the points just made in the textbook? I can think of only 1 or 2 – yet this is how thoughtfulness is engineered by design.
Wiggins has verbalized what I have felt for many years about textbooks--that they do lull thinking into submission. I guess that's the real reason why I don't pass out textbooks anymore--they hinder learning more than they help it.
I think that's why I have been teaching the vocabulary of how science is done without ever giving my students the definitions for the past week. They have all heard the words before: independent and dependent variable, control group, experimental group, hypothesis....but they have associated them with someone else's words. I want them to find their own words to describe them.
So we have been reading (a little Galileo, a little Stephen Jay Gould). We have been mindmapping to make connections, where many students looked at me in panic, not knowing where to begin making their own connections because they had never been asked to do so before. We have predicted and discussed the words. And we will be putting those words and student understandings into action, but having students design their own labs after generating their own questions, going back and revising their understandings as they build their own investigations.
I guess you could say that, rather than direct instruction, I have been doing "oblique instruction." I want students to have ideas and insights, and not have me teach them lifeless facts and definitions. I have to do that obliquely, with me slanting and skewing and indirectly working in the background and most definitely not in the front of the room for 50 minutes. As Wiggins also says in his post,
"But teaching is not about what you will do; I am interested in what the student will be able to do of value as a result of your teaching, because that is all that matters. "