At the begin­ning of Octo­ber, I wrote a post about the “text­book chal­lenge” pro­posed by Scott McLeod.  My post con­cluded by ask­ing edu­ca­tors to take the chal­lenge and then let me know how it went. Okoboji prin­ci­pal Ryan Cun­ning­ham made that a real­ity by ask­ing two of his teach­ers if they were will­ing to take the chal­lenge and write about it.  Their posts were amaz­ing!  I couldn’t have “staged” more com­pelling responses.  Here are some of the com­ments that struck me from the posts by Justin Bouse and Sue Hilsabeck along with my com­ments in red.

Sue’s com­ments:

“I felt com­fort­able with the qual­ity of the sources as being reli­able after com­par­ing the infor­ma­tion pro­vided with not only the text­book, but also other sources of infor­ma­tion on the same topics.”

This com­ment is very true.  As a for­mer Social Stud­ies teacher, it seems that too often we accept any­thing in a book as true.  We need to eval­u­ate our resources whether they are online or in print.

“…I felt like the time spent was com­pa­ra­ble to any unit I would have cre­ated as a new teacher.”

It doesn’t take much time to find online resources, and eval­u­at­ing those resources doesn’t need to be ter­ri­bly time con­sum­ing.  I know that too often I am my own worst enemy spend­ing too much time search­ing for the “per­fect” resource.

“In short, I love teach­ing this way! I am excited and I feel like the stu­dents are excited. Don’t we all learn bet­ter that way?”

Absolutely!

Justin’s com­ments:

 “Over the last few years I have found myself using it (text­book) less and less while find­ing my social stud­ies lessons to be more and more engag­ing for students.”

I think most stu­dents would agree that the text­book isn’t extremely engaging.

“In order to make the learn­ing more student-centered I had each stu­dent select a topic from our unit they wanted to learn more about and com­plete a Per­sonal Les­son Plan.”

This would be extremely dif­fi­cult to do with­out tech­nol­ogy!  Text­books gen­er­ally don’t pro­vide in depth cov­er­age over the wide range of things stu­dents can study.

” It is always so fun to see how engaged the kids are when they have own­er­ship in what they pro­duce and there is always a great amount of pride when they are shar­ing their learn­ing with the class as they truly become the experts on the topic.”

My best mem­o­ries as a teacher were when stu­dents were cre­at­ing and then shar­ing their work!

Nick Sauers