Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 10
This is the 10th and last blog entry from my article on EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION. © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
When to Consider Not Using a Textbook
Courses without textbooks are a mixed bag. For example, courses bent onindoctrination tend to rely on doctrinal literature rather than a textbook, andinstructors bent on epistemological control may seek to serve as the sole providerof course content. Knowledge is power, and all that. On the other hand, coursesintended to stimulate critical thinking, creative problem solving, and intellectual resynthesis may well rely on primary sources and critical material rather thanstandard textbook fare. Many upper-tier and graduate courses are prime candidates for not using a textbook, especially with motivated, independentlearners with good attendance, and especially in interactive seminar courses with small enrollments that rely heavily on discussion.
Some instructors go for definitive works by “dead great white men,” controversialpopularizations by celebrities, or works of notoriously original thinkers. Imagine,teaching sociology with Georg Simmel or C. Wright Mills, for example, or anthropology with Claude LevyStrauss or Richard Dawkins, or history with Jared Diamond or Howard Zinn. If your purpose is to inculcate, to shake up student mindset, or to promote critical thinking, and if your class relies on free discussion or structured discourse, then you probably should use original texts rather than a textbook. Just include more women and minorities in your selections (if you know what’s good for you), and make sure your students understand why a given contributor is regarded as “great,” controversial,” “original,” or “notorious.”
But know your limits. I once tried to teach world history through primary source excerpts alone. By the 14 th century, just when things were really getting interesting, I could no longer afford photocopies, and the students were becoming mentally exhausted from my “thing of shreds and patches.” My experiment ended with the bewildering (even to me) and hardly representative combination of Al Bakri’s observations of Ghana, Pope Urban’s call to arms for the First Crusade, Marco Polo’s description of the Mongol invasion of Japan, a translation of the “Song of Quetzalcoatl,” Boccaccio’s description of the plague, and a slaver’s ship manifest. Did I order a textbook for the second semester? You bet.
Labels: choosing a textbook, Criteria for textbook selection, custom textbooks
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 9
This is the 9th in a series of blog entries from an article I wrote last spring: EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION. This post considers in role of supplements, textbook apparatus, and pedagogy in the selecton process. © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
Supplement Packages
Ancillary material also can be a good reason to adopt. I have sometimes been swayed by outstanding or especially useful supplements, including, for example, courserelated anthologies, web sites, subscriptions, videos, and software. A web site with rotating 3D diagnostic fossils and animations on comparative anatomy, primate evolution, and human haplotypes and migrations sold me on a biological anthropology textbook that was otherwise too difficult for the students. I also once chose a sociology textbook because it came with a reader on expressions and consequences of globalization. As a result of state PIRG pricing protests, ancillaries now come unbundled as well as shrinkwrapped or boxed with the text. So, today I might be able to subscribe to the web site and order the reader without having to order the textbook.
Publisher research shows that textbook adopters most covet acetate and electronic transparencies (despite all the Tufteesque criticism of PowerPoints) and free videos. Many instructors also want a comprehensive Test Bank, perhaps even one that has been validated scientifically and comes with a testing service. Which supplements are most important to you when considering a text for course adoption?
Pedagogy and Apparatus
Something that many instructors do not know is that good textbooks are constructed to match what is known about the way people learn. In choosing a textbook, you probably will have the best luck with one that has been consciously endowed with pedagogy and apparatus. “Pedagogy” refers to instructional methods and teaching devices. “Apparatus” refers to the organization and sequence of elements within a chapter, unit of study, or book. For example, textbook apparatus minimally includes an opening section, the body, and a closing section for every chapter. The opening section may include, for example, the chapter outline, a chapteropening photo, a list of focus questions for the chapter, and an introduction or chapteropening vignette. The closing section may include a summary, a list of key terms, a set of problems or application questions, and a “For Further Reading” list. Chapter pedagogy, on the other hand, may include learning objectives, questions, captions, margin glosses, content recaps, features or boxes set off from text through design, and the like. Textbook pedagogy is supposed to be guided by scientific (more or less) models of teaching and learning.
There are many models of what happens cognitively when learning takes place, but the process of direct instruction generally follows these steps: 1) establish objectives, expectations, and relevance, or otherwise engage and motivate; 2) activate prior knowledge, or review any prerequisite knowledge and skills; 3) present new information, engaging students’ selective attention to acquire and remember the information; 4) use questioning to check for comprehension; 5) give opportunities for independent practice; 6) assess performance and provide feedback; 7) give opportunities to apply learning outcomes. Good textbooks do the same things.
In nondirect instruction, in contrast, students acquire content on their own through active learning and interaction with others. They learn through observation, inquiry, discussion, modeling, progressive skill approximation, critical thinking, problem solving, decision making, and handson experience. This is good too, but rarer. Textbooks exist that favor one model of instruction over the other, and textbooks exist that attempt to combine the best of both worlds.
Does a textbook you’re considering have brief readings in each chapter? If those readings are identified as belonging to specific narrative contexts, then they are meaningful for learning and therefore are examples of pedagogy, the more so if they include an explanatory introduction, annotation, or question. If the readings are followed by questions that test students’ comprehension of the readings, this is an example of the direct instruction model. In this case, students are supposed to master the readings the same as they do the text. There will be questions about the readings on the test. If, however, the readings are followed by questions that ask students how the readings relate to chapter content or to life, then this is nondirect instruction. The students must discover a connection for themselves, and the textbook trusts that they can do so. Classroom discussion can confirm it. Which model better expresses your approach to teaching your course?
Generally, the more apparatus and pedagogy, the lower the level. However, beware the empty antipedagogy that bloats introductory textbooks! Beware the gimmicky, obviously outsourced boxes without context, relevance, interest, sense, or engagement with the reader. But please also avoid the prejudice that boxes are bad. Done right, boxes are paragons of good teaching, facilitating students’ rapid longterm acquisition of chapter content. Rather than interrupting and distracting from text, they are deeply embedded in narrative context and bring textual processing to a higher cognitive level.
Labels: choosing a textbook, Criteria for textbook selection, evaluating textbooks, pedagogy, textbook supplements
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 7
This is the seventh part of a series of posts on how to choose a textbook for a course, from an article I wrote last spring: EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION. This post continues a discussion of criteria for selection with observations on the famous "thumb test." © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
The Thumb Test
Marketing managers in higher education publishing often refer to the “thumb test,” a textbook selection technique even more quick and dirty than the “index text” and the “currency test.” In a thumb test you hold the book’s spine in your left hand and ruffle the pages from the front to the back of the book between thumb and forefinger of your right hand, as if flipping the cels in a homemade animation. Your eye catches the design and format, including fonts, number of columns of text, color palette, design motifs, part or chapter openers, photos and art, tables, captions, type and frequency of headings, and boxes. Out of this visual blur your mind builds an impression: This is (or is not) the textbook for you!
I’ve often been astonished to read professors’ prejudices regarding book design and format, as if they knew anything about book building or were expert in programs such as PageMaker, InDesign, or QuarkXPress, and as if they even understood how font sets work or the role of PMS colors in a book’s palette. I don’t think much of those who choose textbooks on the basis of appearance alone; e.g., you don’t like pink, or you don’t like orange, or you don’t like boxes, or the margins are too crowded, or the pictures are too large (or too small).
That goes for judging a book by its cover too. Publishers expend great sums on cover designs, having learned that professors, not just the masses, will adopt or not adopt on that basis alone. That Introduction to Criminal Justice textbook, for example. Should the cover be art or photos? One photo or a montage? Should the American flag appear somewhere on the cover? Or the American colors? If there are police officers, should they be literal or abstract or iconic? Should care be taken to include female and minority officers? Should they appear armed? What
about the border patrol and tribal police? If police officers are shown, will it appear to skew the survey course in favor of law enforcement over the courts and corrections? Or should the cover show a courthouse (all those nice pillars) or a prison (all those nice bars) instead? Or all three? Or maybe just a symbol of justice—the statue of the lady with her blindfold and scales? Is there one where her breasts are not too revealed or suggestive? Or is the statue idea too trite or too focused on law per se. Would a statue look too highlevel? Is there something we could have on the cover instead that would suggest terrorism or Homeland Security? And so on ad nauseam. Book designers and all those who work with them strive for beautiful books, and often succeed, but we nevertheless must refrain, I think, from selecting textbooks solely on that basis.
Format is an exceptionfor example, the delivery of content as a book or an e book and, if a book, the type of binding and trim size. Your course may beg for a hardcover textbook with a sewn binding, a perfectbound paperback, or a spiralbound layflat flipbook. The 7 X 10, 8 X 10, and 8.5 X 11 trim sizes are fairly standard for undergraduate textbooks. The larger the trim size the lower the level, as a rule, although there are exceptions. Smaller trim sizes, especially the 6 X 9, are more typical of trade booktype texts such as may be assigned in higherlevel courses.
Labels: choosing a textbook, Criteria for textbook selection, evaluating textbooks, thumb test
Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 6
This is the sixth part of a series of posts on how to choose a textbook for a course, from an article I wrote last spring: EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION. This post includes a discussion of criteria for selection, beginning with four key tests: the index, the table of contents, the sources, and the dates. © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
The Index and Outline Tests
As a college instructor I often chose textbooks indignantly and by default after subjecting them to the “index test.” This is where you quickly check the index for a half dozen theorists and researchers or terms and concepts that are dear to your heart. If those particular names, words, or phrases are not there, then the textbook is unacceptably flawed. Off with its head!
This is quick, but hardly scientific. For one thing, indexes are notoriously flawed. Publishers or their packagers (i.e., production houses) outsource indexing to lowest bidders, who may not have professional experience with collegelevel textbooks in your field. From the other side of the desk, I have often fumed over the inadequate indexes appended to textbooks I helped to develop. Whatever you are looking for, in other words, very likely is in the book, if not in the index. If this is really an overriding concern for you, request access to an electronic version of the textbook from the publisher and conduct “Find” searches for the terms you require your textbook to contain.
Tables of contents (TOCs) also may mislead, though they certainly sketch the parameters. The main reason is that it is standard practice to include in a TOC only the A and Bheads (that is, the first and second levels of heading), omitting the details given in C and Dheads. (The purpose is to contain the length of the front matter.) Depending on the construction of text headings, therefore, a lot of information may be missing from the TOC. Nevertheless, publishers go to great lengths to craft the TOC, because it is the most visible and most common basis for decisions to adopt.
Chapter sequence also probably should not matter much. I once rejected a textbook because the sequence of chapters did not match the way I taught the course. Most of us know by now, however, that assigning chapters out of sequence usually is not a problem. In fact, the trend toward delivering textbooks electronically has led to evergreater modularization. The exception to the “ease of resequencing” principle is a textbook with functionally interrelated chapters—a rare find that may even be reason enough for changing the way you teach the course. Some of the best upperlevel or secondtier textbooks begin as functionally integrated narratives that an editor then chops up with headings to give them a textbook, rather than a trade book, format.
The Citations and Currency Tests
My second test for textbooks has always been the references. After ascertaining that most everyone is cited who should be, I conduct what I call my “currency test.” This consists of running my finger down the dates of publication in the References section to count informally the numbers of works cited for the current and preceding years. I used to reject any textbook that did not have two or three current cites per chapter. For example, in 2006, a textbook with no citations after 2004 was hopelessly outdated, or so I thought. Now I know that by the time students buy them in the college store, textbooks necessarily are about two years out of date, although with electronic publishing this gap is narrowing.
How can this be? Well, textbooks are 1 to 3 years in development, when the manuscript is drafted, reviewed, and revised (and rerevised); 6 to 9 months in production (down from a year), when the manuscript is copyedited and indexed and the book is designed and laid out; and another 3 to 6 months in manufacturing and fulfillment, when the book is printed, bound, warehoused, and shipped. Then, the textbooks must be available for you and other prospective adopters to sample early enough so you can order them for your future course (usually a full semester before your course is scheduled to begin), and early enough for your bookstore to obtain and shelve the books for your students to buy before your course starts.
You can imagine, then, how textbooks appear out of date. A text with a 2008 copyright date that you sample and order in 2007 may have only a scattering of 2006 cites as its most current references. As a developmental editor, knowing how important currency is to instructors, I got a lot of pleasure out of infusing it into a book during the production phase. (For this, one needs to cultivate the friendship of production editors, because content is not supposed to be changed during production.) If I could swing it, my updates included one ultracurrent source citation per chapter and a few “ripped from the headlines” examples or cases, nimbly substituted into captions, chapter opening vignettes, or chapter closers (with the author’s knowledge, of course). I was exceptional in this,
however, so as a rule don’t let your currency test be the deciding factor.
An exception is grandfathered references, which can weigh heavy cumulatively. I reject textbooks in any subject with a preponderance of references that are more than ten years out of date. Even in fields that rely on archaic texts, historic documents, or foundational research, current interpretations and critical studies of those materials must be current and cutting edge or otherwise reflect contemporary syntheses. No subject is safe from the need to be current in this sense.
Labels: choosing a textbook, Criteria for textbook selection, evaluating textbooks, textbook adoption
