Advantages And Disadvantages Of Teaching Without Textbooks

Teaching young children is possibly one of the most challenging and difficult professions. No matter the subject, an educator must plan, prepare, organize, set up, and review everything that they are going to teach. “Students use mathematics textbooks to study and to do homework questions, while professors and teachers may use them to prepare classes and to teach” (Kajander & Lovric, 2009, p.173). Using textbooks can be a quicker and effective way to help ease the way some educators lesson plan; while teaching without textbooks may be a more difficult task but can be just as rewarding. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but in the end both can be used in the classroom resulting in similar outcomes. Some of the best educators are

Not everything in the textbook may pertain to the subject the teacher is trying to teach. Teaching without textbooks allows teachers to have full creativity and composing lesson plans. While it may be difficult task at times, they can give out any information they want to be taught and leave out any information that may not pertain directly to their plan. Another fans to teaching without textbooks is that raises the standards that which unit you cater composes a lesson plan. “A textbook is only as good as the teacher who uses it” (Frederick, 2005,). Without a textbook, an educator must fully grasp the concepts they will teach in order to effectively teach it to their students. Educators have to work harder to gather information to present to their students, but it ultimately proves how great of an educator they actually can

“They should be able to critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the technologies and resources they use, and to assess how well those two things relate to the mathematics lesson being taught, keeping in mind subject matter, student diversity, and instructional strategies” (Ridener & Fritzer, 2004, p.97). It also allows for teachers to plan more hands on activities, classroom discussions, and open learning. Giving students the time to actually think about what they are learning and how they actually got their answers helps them gain a deeper understanding of what they are learning. “Encourage them to think about their thinking, to conceptualize how they got an answer to a math problem” (Wakefield, 2001, para. 6). While there are quite a few advantages to throwing out textbooks in the classroom, there are also some disadvantages to not using them. Although some teachers may choose to opt of using textbooks because of the overload of information it may contain, other teachers see it as an advantage. At time textbooks can provide the teacher and the student an abundance of information on various subjects. This allows the student to expand their knowledge past the standards they required to