Powerful Position Paper for ELE 603 at MSU

1. By Mary K. Milgate
MSU Student

2. 
Foundation for a teacher?

Numerous challenges for today’s
teachers

3. For new teachers:

Material is neatly organized and
chronologically arranged

Pre-made lesson plans

Convenient

4. 
Teachers, parents, and students use
textbooks as reference for insight

Great supplementary aides included with
textbooks

Textbooks written and designed by
experts in the topics

5. 
Costs is the biggest disadvantage

Outdated textbooks don’t meet new
standards

Classroom sets instead of individual
books

6. 
A textbook driven curriculum is unfair

Inconvenient

Boring to our digitally minded students

7. 
Do current textbooks meet standards?

Do you think everyone should have a
textbook driven curriculum?

Would you rather purchase e-textbooks
for your classrooms?

8. 
Internet contains
websites, activities, blogs, etc.

Hands-on activities and Manipulatives

Educational CD’s & DVD’s

9. 
Use textbook as a resource only.

Digitally minded students need to be
engaged and take advantage of
technology.

Think outside the box.

#1 Priority is the student!!!

10. I loved these quotes:

“Textbooks are only as good as the teachers
that use them.” Fredericks, A. (copyright 2005). Textbooks: Advantages and
Disadvantages. Teachervision (excerpted from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Success as a
Teacher. Retrieved on November 1, 2013, from http://www.teachervision.fen.com/curriculumplanning/new-teacher/48347.html

“We are driven by what textbooks say, test
scores show, and schedules allow. In our
pursuit of the basics, we have lost sight of
the single most basic ingredient within our
mathematics classrooms, the student.”
Walker, Vicki. (October 1999). The Real Basics Are Children. Mathematics Education
Dialogues, Volume 3, Issue 1, Retrieved November 5, 2013 from
http://www.nctm.org/uploadedFiles/Lessons_and_Resources/dialogues/October_1999/199910.pdf