Dare we say, exciting?

“Reading everything you can feeds curiosity” is the theme Daniels and Zimmerman worked off of when developing this chapter. Before I go off on a tangent of how critical the implementation of a variety of sources will be in our future classrooms, I do think that there is always a time and a place for a textbook in certain fields, as it is where teachers can provide their students with some of that “raw material” D & Z talk about when describing primary sources. However, as the rest of the chapter focuses on, we must mix the textbook and provide a balance of many different sources for our students to engage in. EVERY SINGLE teacher needs to understand that a textbook is not a Bible, nor should it be used as the only source of information in a classroom. Daniels and Zimmerman are telling teachers the reality of the situation, that there is no way to develop an intrinsic curiosity, nor feed it, through a textbook-driven course.  There is a natural intimidation factor between students and the textbook, and by structuring a classroom in this way will in NO WAY lead to an enduring understanding of concepts, but rather a simple remembering and regurgitation of facts on a test. Simple as that.

                Let us all look at our own lives. Not one of us receives  all of their information from one source. I myself use books, magazines, newspapers, music, TV shows, and movies to feed my hunger for knowledge. THAT’S RIGHT I SAID IT! Music and TV can be a great source of knowledge, if we know how to read these sources. What D+Z are essentially saying is that we should not limit ourselves or our students to what we learn from and how we learn from it, as they state on page 62, “As we move away from dependence on a single textbook, one of the wonderful possibilities is to show students the range of views, the variety of theories, the different schools of thought that make intellectual life in our subject interesting, controversial—dare we say, exciting.” The more we open our students up to where they get their information from, the greater the spectrum of ideas and theories they will perceive. Plus, we as teachers can develop more engaging lessons with a higher return rate if we expand our creativity and utilize as many sources as possible.

                Of course, this all sounds great. I just have to remember to not get ahead of myself here. Yes, I want to keep this in mind when designing my lesson plans, but after learning about backwards design and believing more and more in it, all this will come only after I have firmly established my essential questions and from them set clear objectives as to why I will use a particular source to demonstrate a concept, skill, or theme. I am very glad to have read this chapter though, as it does provide some relief for the third step of lesson planning. There seems to be a large amount of instructional methods to choose from, and openness for choice on both the teacher AND the students part.