Textbooks: a Resource or a Curriculum?

¡Hooooooola!

As many of you know, I am not a fan of textbooks, and I never use the textbook in my classroom. If you asked my 6th graders, I bet they wouldn't even know there is a textbook (although I do use a few of them to block the cold air coming from my vent in the winter, so they might know). 

What I HAVEN'T really ever written about, though, is how I have used the textbook as a resource. 

Why a textbook shouldn't be the curriculum: 

Most textbooks are not designed with language research in mind; they are designed for what the public wants. Sadly, most language teachers still want the traditional textbook, so that's what is published. 

However, there are textbooks that have communicative tasks in them like "Sol y viento" and I STILL believe that those textbooks should not be the curriculum. 

For one, textbooks do not necessarily meet the demands of the students. How can a textbook published in 1995 still be relevant? I mean those textbooks are still teaching the word "chalk" in the classroom unit, for crying out loud. 

The other issue that I have with textbooks is that they start with a preliminary unit that usually involves the alphabet, numbers, colors, stating their names (this one's good), dates, days of the week, etc. This is treating a first-year language class like a kindergarten class, BUT IT IS NOT. My students are at a much higher cognitive ability than that, and I can teach them all of those things in much better contexts. Also, kindergartners go to kindergarten with LOTS of language, believe it or not. My students are coming to me with none, so I need to give them much more useful language than just an alphabet, numbers, and dates. 

How are textbooks useful, then? 

I know all of this bashing of textbooks on blogs can be really overwhelming for teachers, and it probably pisses you off. To be honest, it pisses me off too! Not because I think that textbooks are the greatest resources but because I believe that districts should be doing a better job of giving teachers time to re-write the curriculum CONSTANTLY. A good curriculum needs to be forever changing. This is hard for a lot of teachers. I have a beloved unit that I have done for five years now. I worked so hard on it, but in my eyes, it's time for it to go so that bigger and better things can come along. However, it's really hard to do that when you're not a department of one. If teachers are required to maintain our licenses (and pay for it ourselves), then why are schools not being held accountable for rich, well developed curricula?

Anyway, when I started teaching at my current school, I asked for a curriculum, and there was just a textbook. Now that's not a stab at anyone because my department head gave me that textbook and explicitly said that I had all the freedom in the world to do what I wanted with it. So, essentially, the textbook is being used as a stepping stone for teachers who are new to the district to have something to follow, but it is not a requirement. Do I think that's better than a written curriculum of thematic units hitting on hot topics like social justice issues? Absolutely not, but it's a start, and I was able to roll with it. 

My first year there, I basically taught the textbook using as many communicative strategies as I could. The problem, though, was that I was using that textbook like a curriculum. It just can't be that way. As BVP always says, teaching communicatively is not to be seen as a method to teach the same old things in a different way. It is an approach, not a method. That's to say, if I am trying to teach textbook rules and my units are based solely around grammar points, then I am not teaching communicatively. 

After that, I started doing workshops on thematic units, and I realized VERY quickly that my units were not good. The thing is, though, there are 8 middle school Spanish teachers in my district, and I wanted to still be in line with at least the grammar that we all expose the students to. So, I couldn't just throw the book out the window like I wanted to. I had to get creative. 

One thing that textbooks are somewhat good at is picking contexts for each unit. For example, there are units on school, housing, family, food, sports, parties, clothing, etc. These units are not strong enough by themselves, in my opinion, but they are a great place to start. I took those units and made units around them; that way, I was teaching the same grammar in the textbook but in a much more interesting context, and I was also teaching the same grammar as the other Spanish teachers who have their own creative ways of facilitating language acquisition. 

So, every year, for example, my unit on "school" gets muuuuuch stronger. It is now a unit on equal access to education. The unit on parties is now a unit on quinceañeras and gender performativity and heteronormativity. The unit on food and emotions is now a unit on how sugar consumption affects our emotions. Etc. 

However, in Avancemos at least, there are a few units that have no topic and are really just focused on a grammatical structure. Sometimes, those units have to be thrown out. For example, I will never ever do a unit on stem-change verbs ever again. I am trusting that stem-change verbs show up naturally throughout my curriculum (and they do). Other units, for example, can be worked with. Our textbook has a unit on prepositional phrases (in front of, behind, next to, etc.). Right now, I have that as a unit on teen technology use and focus on statistics about how much time we spend in front of screens, the percentage of us who sleep next to our cellphones, etc. This is one of my weaker units, so I have cut it down to a two-week mini-unit, but I still think it's stronger than just teaching the vocabulary out of context. Hopefully, I can get rid of this unit soon and fill it with something stronger. Like I said, our curricula in EVERY subject should be constantly changing. 

I am at the point in my career where I am ready to throw that textbook completely out. I would never replace it with a new one, but I thought it was time to be transparent that the textbook was useful to me in getting me started on rewriting the curriculum. It's okay to use a textbook as a resource, but when we are spending three months on learning to tell the date, numbers, days of the week, etc. just because the textbook demands it is when it gets a little problematic. I believe that we can get our students to much higher proficiency levels when our curricula are more designed to meet our students at their cognitive AND language level. 

Thanks for reading!!

Timothy

Social Justice, Global Warming, and Human Impact in the Classroom

Hello, world:

A lot of amazing stuff has happened to me since my last post! I have been thinking a lot about social justice in the classroom ever since I developed that unit on heteronormativity in quinceañeras.

So, I attended Cassandra Glynn and Beth Wassell's workshop on teaching culture through the lens of social justice at this years MaFLA conference. If you have not read their book, Words and Actions: Teaching Languages Through the Lens of Social Justice, it's a MUST buy. I am in the middle of reading it right now, and it's so unbelievably helpful!!
I also attended a session on the UN's Global Goals, and that really supplemented what I learned from Cassandra and Beth. There are social justice standards that are just a non-negotiable at this point. We have to be teaching this stuff because it's a necessity for the safety of our students, planet, etc.

This can be done with novice learners! 

I had to put this in bold and underline it because it was a huge misconception that I had in my mind before. I was always under the impression that when we talked about the 3 Ps (Products, Practices, and Perspectives), that the "perspectives" part were more for upper-level students. I was so wrong. Perspectives need to be in every unit that we teach.

This summer, I did a training at Middlebury, and a professor said that the 3 Ps were antiquated because they don't teach students how to really interact with people from other countries. However, what I think was missing in this discussion was the social justice aspect of culture. These DO help students learn to criticize, admire, and interact with their culture and the culture of others.

My units:

I had a lot of thematic units designed that touched on some of the topics from the UN's Global Goals, but I was not going deep enough. What I realized was that all of my units contained content knowledge/factual information and tools for personal reflection, but what I was missing were the tools for critical analysis and the tools for action and social change. I was not having my students come up with/learn about any solutions to the problems that we were discussing. What a missed opportunity for social change!

I started new digital portfolios with my students *this will have to be a post of its own someday*. However, in part of the portfolio, students have to write things that they are passionate about. This was the suggestion of my department head, Jorge Allen, because many students in Andover have to do this for their capstone projects. My students are not doing their own capstones per se, but I figured I could start to develop units around their passions while incorporating a social justice lens.

MY STUDENTS' ANSWERS HAVE BEEN OFF THE HOOK! I thought they were going to write things like "I like videogames," which would've been totally acceptable, but they went so much deeper (even if they did say their passion was videogames). They were giving reasons why, adding statistics, thinking about others, etc. My heart was soaring!

The first one that stood out to me was from a 7th grader. He wrote that he was passionate about the environment but added that he is specifically passionate about tree conservation. He pointed out that our society is trying to move away from plastic straws by using paper straws...buuuuuut...we have to cut down trees to make those paper straws. *MIND BLOWN* Sometimes we think we are being environmentally friendly without thinking of other possible consequences of our actions.

BUT IS THAT NOT PERFECT FOR A SOCIAL JUSTICE UNIT?!?!

I sat down with two incredible science teachers at my school, Catie and Kayley, and they helped me begin the process of writing TWO units based off of this student's interest in trees. I had already had a unit on Puerto Rico and a particular bird in danger of extinction, so we zeroed in on that and made it a unit on human impact!

The other unit that we began to develop is a unit on global warming for 6th grade. The wonderful French teacher at my school and I were talking last week about how we hate teaching the "weather" unit. It just doesn't seem to move students up much in proficiency, and it's just not fun. So, I talked with her and another Spanish teacher at my school (the third Spanish teacher is away and we miss her!), and we are going to work on developing this unit on global warming together to add some value to our weather unit.

These two units really incorporate social justice in my opinion and cultural perspectives because they say a lot about human values. We often value our own needs over the needs of our planet or over the needs of others around us, but these problems can be solved.

The solutions! I cannot stress how important it is to not only discuss social justice issues, but to also discuss solutions with the students. When we discuss greenhouse gases, we will talk about solutions like eating less meat to produce less methane, etc. When we talk about human impact, we will talk about light pollution, the use of fossil fuels, pollution, etc., but then we will also discuss the solutions. I already bought my first silicone and metal straws in preparation for discussing the solution to plastic/paper straws brilliantly brought up by my student.

Also in the works is going to be a unit on animal cruelty; A LOT of students wrote about cruelty free products, pounds that kill dogs after 14 days of not finding a home, etc. But one step at a time, Timothy! 😉🤣

Conclusion: 

These units are making me (and hopefully my students) a better person, and I am learning a lot in my research as I develop each unit. It feels so good to be excited about teaching a new unit! Thematic units are a lot of work and require a lot of research and time, but I really love the idea of not teaching the same old stuff year after year. As the world changes, my curricula will continue to change with it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this! I'm a happy camper!

Timothy