Implementing Textbooks and Creating and Community of Learners (D&Z Ch. 6 and 7)

Chapter 6 invites teachers to implement the classroom textbook in a more beneficial way that is better aligned with the Common Core Standards.  The beauty of this chapter is that it includes a number of textbook activities to acquaint students with the textbook or to show students how to use them more effectively.  First, as an aspiring ELA teacher, I have this strange attitude towards textbooks because the premise of an English class is to read texts, and the majority of ELA textbooks are composed of literature pieces that we must teach the students.  In some ways, textbooks are essential in an ELA course; yet again there is never a perfect textbook, even for the subject of English.  I would rather just select the literature/nonfiction pieces to be read in my classroom, and by doing so I can pick excerpts that I think are more interesting and relatable while corroborating it to the common core.  Lets face it; most of the ELA textbooks in schools are predated anyways.

            One thing that Daniels and Zemelman (2014) concludes is that, “students don’t need more time with their noses in the textbook—they need tons and tons of practice time reading, talking, and writing about important subject-matter content” (182).  This stood out to me because I feel like many teachers fall prey to thinking that the textbook is the “bible” to their courses, which is obviously not the case.  Sometimes, we can be wrapped up into plowing through the pages of textbook while forgetting that the whole point of reading it is to strengthen our readers in the classroom.  I know from my own experiences that my high school English teachers would assign a lengthen piece of reading from the course textbook, just assuming that every student in the class knew how to access the textbook.  Not to mention, that most teachers would also assign the typical response questions at the end of each chapter, and almost always there would be some connect to personal experiences question.  I thought whether or not any of these teachers proofread some of these connection questions in the back because many of them used outmoded examples that were not as relatable to students in the new millennium.

            However, this chapter offers some activities that will benefit the teachers and the students in regards to using the textbook. My favorite is Activity #1, Textbook Feature Analysis (Daniels and Zemelman, 2014, 184-185), which has the students explore 11 different facets of the textbook.  It has students exploring the type of texts they are included, as well as if the use of color plays an important role in the textbook.  Not only should students be completing this activity, but I think the teacher teaching the course should as well.  By having a teacher complete this activity alongside his/her students, will allow that teacher to identify any problematic areas that exist in the textbook. Also, the teacher should also be willing to do this activity to model to his/her students on how to do it.

            Chapter 7 focuses on building a community of learners, which is, I believe, to be one of the most important parts of teacher.  As future teachers, we need to foster a positive community for all of our students, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.  The only way to do this is to teach our students strategies on how to best work together.  Daniels and Zemelman (2014), mention that a attribute that works well in the creation of a community of learners is humor, which made me extremely excited (204). I think humor solves a lot of problems, and I think to think of myself as a very humorous person.  I firmly believe that everybody should laugh at least once a day.  So, hopefully I can incorporate humor in my classroom to help to take the edge off.  However, I won’t be too humorous to the point where my students don’t respect me. 

            In the subheading entitled Taking Action, Daniels and Zemelman (2014), states, “[students need to] truly believe their teachers care intensely about them and their learning” (208).  For me, this is extremely important because teachers need to care, and if you don’t care about your students then you have no business being a teacher in the first place.  I did better in classes where the teachers were passionate about their teaching, and you could sense that every student mattered to them.  I had some teachers that just did not care and that resulted in me not caring.  When I am a teacher, I am going to make sure that I never stop caring for my students because if that happens then I have lost my vision of what teaching should be.