Texts without Textbooks: Reappraising the Basis of Students’ Knowledge

Two years ago, I set out teaching a new cohort of Year 12 students by advising them not to buy the approved textbook for their History course (Russia and the USSR, 1855-1964). All the information they needed, I told them, would be in ten course booklets I had written and would provide them with.

Several colleagues and friends thought I was mad.

This summer, the same cohort completed their final A-Level exams. They achieved a pass rate of 100%, including over 95% A*-C grades and almost 50% A*-A grades, busting the national averages and performing notably better than on the unit for which they had been instructed to buy textbooks.

This is not to say that deciding against textbooks is the only reason for their success. But I think it indicates something that I felt very strongly from the outset – that students do not need their own copy of textbooks to succeed, and that textbooks can in certain instances hold students’ development back.

Here, I’ll set out the case against students using textbooks as the basis for their own historical knowledge.

I should make clear that this is not an argument against textbooks per se – in fact, as I’ll explain below, I would suggest that A-Level (just like GCSE) textbooks are absolutely indispensable tools for teachers’ planning. I am certainly not arguing that we replace textbooks with our own, personal or inherited knowledge – in short, we as teachers need to rely on a much wider academic source base, even though textbooks might be our first starting point when reading and planning.

I will argue, however, that textbooks are not necessarily suitable for students as study tools, either inside or outside lessons.

 

1. Textbooks are rigid

By necessity, a textbook written for a specific exam course will rigidly stick to the exam board’s specification. This might be reassuring if we need to cover the content, but it does mean that we are limited only to the specific bullet points given in the specification.

What about when things are missing (or inaccurate – see below)?

I found that our textbooks failed to cover numerous key issues, from popular resistance to dictatorships to portrayals of gender and homosexuality, the role of ethnic minorities to genocide in the Holocaust.

When this is the case (and if we really believe a rounded telling of the past is worthwhile), what option do we have but to move beyond the textbook in our planning?

 

2. Textbooks are narrow

In almost all senses, textbooks are narrow and partial accounts of the past. I asked students, instead of investing in their own textbook, to consider buying one of four suggested academic texts that covered the period in greater breadth and depth, and which they could read at home alongside our lessons.

This, along with lessons I had planned to deliberately go beyond the exam board’s specification (and hence the textbooks), was intended to give students a much more rounded, subtle, and complex picture of the past.

When I made this case to one colleague two years ago, I felt I was making a rather radical argument – they pointed out that, if students referred to something that wasn’t in the textbook in an exam, they might well not be credited. At the time, I took their point.

I no longer think asking students to set aside the textbook in favour of a real piece of historical scholarship is a radical argument. If we were to flip the contention, and ask students to stick doggedly and dogmatically to the information in the textbook even when that fails to give an accurate or full picture of the past, it would effectively mean were deciding to shield them from more current historical research for fear of the examiner’s red pen.

Even if we struggle to see beyond our own final exams, there’s a bigger question to address here, too. Namely, what dependence on textbooks at A-Level does to students when they leave our schools and colleges.

A few years ago, I asked a conference of Russian and Soviet historians what problems they found when beginning to teach incoming undergraduate students. Two of the most common gripes was students not being able to read academic texts and students harbouring outdated assumptions about the history they were preparing the study. Both, in fact, are exacerbated by student dependence on textbooks.

Firstly, by avoiding academic conventions including referencing and debate dialogue with other historical texts, A-Level textbooks are simply miles away in terms of formatting, composition, and methodology from academic books and journal articles.

Secondly, by sometimes repeating commonplace but often disproven or disputed assumptions about periods of history, textbooks can perpetuate convenient myths about the past we try to teach (a bugbear is the idea of the USSR as a “totalitarian” state – but there are, of course, many others).

We need to think about the bigger picture and ask ourselves whether dependence on textbooks really does help students in the long run.

 

3. Textbooks are inaccessible

For texts written specifically for students and schools, textbooks tend to be rather dense, wordy, and (dare I say it) boring.

Information is set out in tiny font, with no space to annotate, in unforgiving language that often lacks sufficient additional explanation.

The variety of text types is limited almost exclusively to informational and analytical writing – there are very few engaging narratives or deep personal stories to be found.

Key details tend to be skipped over, while raw statistics and figures are often packed in so tightly they lose any real meaning.

Writing course booklets (or, if you prefer, individual worksheets) – although an extremely time consuming and demanding exercise – gives teachers the scope to create much more engaging texts, formatted in a much more accessible way.

A caveat is needed here. Writing course booklets and worksheets is basically impossible without reference to textbooks themselves. In this case, certainly, textbooks are indispensable resources for teachers when it comes to planning, even if they are not for students when it comes to studying. Yet textbooks used in this way do absolutely need to be appraised critically, in the light of current research and scholarship, not least given their frequent inaccuracies and outdated information.

 

4. Textbooks are (often) inaccurate

Textbooks are often taken as a fount of knowledge in the classroom – but we should not abandon our own critical reading approach when considering what information they contain.

The reality is that textbooks are, perhaps by necessity, not typically written by academics in the field, but by teachers current and former. Not only did I find that our approved textbooks did not reflect current scholarship accurately, but they were also hampered by considerable inaccuracies, from mistaken dates and names to simply incorrect information.

This was driven home shortly before our cohort’s final exam this summer, when one of our highest-performing students came to me to ask why I had so grossly miscalculated Russian losses at the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914. After reviewing both my booklets, the textbook, and other sources, I had to rather bashfully admit that I had taken a textbook figure (300,000 losses) which had inflated casualty figures by up to six times their actual number.

This of course highlights a limitation of my argument against textbooks – given the limitations of time, teachers cannot (and should not be expected to) fact-check everything in textbooks they use for their own planning. This, however, strikes me more as an issue for exam boards and textbook publishers to address, rather than an argument for giving students textbooks. In this instance, it’s really not our failing!

 

5. Textbooks are slow

It might seem convenient for each student to pull out a textbook on command, but in an age when teaching time is squeezed so much, do we have the time?

Not just in terms of finding pages, but also locating relevant paragraphs (typically written in tiny font) or boxes on a page, using textbooks can turn into an absolute faff. This is exacerbated by the fact that textbooks often do not present historical information in either a clear chronological or thematic manner, instead combining, splicing, and mixing up the two until it becomes extremely difficult to follow the big picture.

By comparison, it takes hardly any teaching time at all to direct students to a booklet page in which everything is formatted precisely and tailored to the lesson you have planned.

 

6. Textbooks are expensive

Even before Covid and the cost of living crisis, cost was an issue. Now, it is even more so. The cost of textbooks is sky-high, especially compared to the cost of a good-quality second-hand copy of a reputable history book.

The books I suggested students consider buying instead of the textbook could all be bought for £5 or less. In many cases, that’s around a quarter of the cost or less of a textbook (new or second hand).

Some colleagues and heads of departments avoided this issue by buying every student in their A-Level cohort a copy of the textbook. One has told me recently that the squeeze on departmental budgets has put paid to that idea for good.

 

A Verdict

Textbooks, I would argue, are vital planning tools for teachers (how could they not be?).

But I am increasingly convinced that, compared to carefully teacher-planned texts and booklets, they serve little – and sometimes negative – use to students’ in their own studying.

I’m sure many people may may disagree.

And many people will certainly know how to use textbooks much more effectively than I do, or have indicated in this post.

But I hope, at least, this post might stimulate some thought and discussion as to what the role of a textbook actually is in our teaching. It’s well overdue.