The Anti-Workbook Classroom

From the desk of Alice…

I recently had a conversation with someone about instruction in the elementary school. In that particular school system, a program is in place that requires reading workbooks for Kindergarten students.

If this happens to be the case in your school or system, I am so sorry.  Having our youngest learners (or any learners) sit and work in workbooks is far from an authentic reading and writing experience.  In this era of Common Core standards, we want students to be immersed in authentic learning tasks across the day so they will not only fall in love with learning, but they will be able to mirror the processes of critical thinking in the real world.  A workbook just won’t do.

I am not sure how we got so far off track, but it’s time to stop the maddness. If you are married to your workbooks, then you may want to stop reading here.  I am in favor of the anti-workbook classroom for several reasons.

First of all, I believe teachers are capable of much better instruction without workbooks.  In fact, a workbook isn’t instruction at all…it’s an assessment.  To use a worn-out metaphor, if I weigh myself all day long, I won’t necessarily lose any weight.  Workbooks=weighing in the worst sense of the word and in some cases, the scale is broken.

Secondly, when we have workbooks driving our instructional decisions, who is the professional in the classroom?  Again, I believe in the abilities of our teachers to plan, execute, and analyze the instruction in their classrooms.  I work with hundreds of teachers across the year who are devoted to their students and want nothing more than for them to develop into lifelong learners.  Why in the world do we need a workbook created by a stranger to learn about the children in our classes?  We don’t.  I will say it again.  We DO NOT need workbooks in order for learning to take place.  We have teachers that can do just fine without them.  If you agree, you may need to say this outloud to people who have forgotten.

Finally, (and this list could be much longer), this is not the “olden days” as I used to tell my Grandma.  We are no longer a society that is driven by a manufacturing stronghold in the economy.  Those jobs are now in other countries (that may or may not be putting workbooks in front of their students).  We do not need compliant students who sit in rows, follow directions without deviating, and repeat tasks in preparation for a life of work on an assembly line or manufacturing plant.  Those days are gone.  Those jobs are gone. In its place is 2013.  Look around.  People can effectively work from their house, talk via computer, edit documents in real-time with people half way around the world, and send information in an instant.  We are in an era of intellectual property.  A workbook scenario is a far cry from the real world and falls far short of helping students create intellectual property.

In Pathways to the Common Core, the authors write, “the low- level literacy work of sound-letter correspondence and so on—work that dominated the National Reading Panel report (2000) that has undergirded NCLB for years—has been, thankfully, marginalized in its own separate section of the CCSS. That work doesn’t even qualify as part of the reading and writing standards. Reading, in the Common Core, is making meaning.”

In the conversation with my friend about the workbooks, she shared one more thing.  The teacher had stacked the workbooks in the corner and her classroom was full of students learning in an authentic way.  Her classroom was an anti-workbook classroom, because she was thoughtful about instruction and assessment. She trusted her own abilities to have students reading and writing across the day/class in a variety of ways.  She had real books in the hands of students.  She encouraged students to generate their own thinking and talking and writing about what they are reading, learning, and thinking.

I applaud this teacher for being grounded in best literacy practices and utilizing instruction that is anti-workbook.  Classroom by classroom, we can do this.  This generation will thank us!