Welcome fellow Recovering Traditionalists to Episode 63.  Today I am Admitting When I’m Wrong. 

Last week over on my vlog TheRecoveringTraditionalist.com, I talked about Teaching After The Coronavirus Shutdown.  One of the things I recommended in that video was not using your textbook when you start teaching next year.  Anytime I say things about not using a textbook I always get pushback.  Yes there is research to show that fidelity to textbooks breeds good test scores, but it also breeds kids who hate math and whole list of things that I could go on and on about.  

However, I need to admit that I am wrong because it really isn’t the textbook that I don’t like and that is causing all those things….it’s how we use that textbook.  We’ve all seen it.  Maybe you’ve even been that teacher.  I know I was.  I think back to how I taught before I learned about Cognitively Guided Instruction and how kids develop their math understandings.  I approached and used my textbook way differently before that than how I used my textbook after

The textbook didn’t change. My knowledge about how to build students’ understanding did and that impacted how I used the activities that were in my textbook.

Get all the resources mentioned in this episode at buildmathminds.com/63