We spent today's class period exploring the resources that are available in Newfoundland and Labrador for teachers in the primary and elementary grades. How would I describe this experience? Surprising. Informative. Interesting. Somewhat relieving. As well as many other things which I can't seem to come up with a word for right now.
I appreciated having the time to take to explore these various resources that we will have in our classrooms, including everything from curriculum guides to textbooks to student workbooks and picture books (which I was very surprised to see!), before we are actually out there as teachers and begin to use some of these. It was relieving in the sense for me in that it was good to see how many supports are out there for us and we are not just thrown into it, somewhat blindly. This will be especially important, I think, as substitute teachers when notes and lessons left for us may not be as detailed as we would like.
While, yes, having all these resources is wonderful, I think we need to remember that they are only suggested - we can achieve our curriculum outcomes in any way we see appropriate. As they discuss in our text book, consider your students and develop your lessons that will best suit their interests and abilities in the classroom. This opposes the view of using a text book as your main source of teaching, which many teachers do, and it's not that they're doing anything wrong, I feel they may have just been a little mislead. It was always my impression, both as a student and future teacher, that we had to use the text books provided to us and I'm sure I'm not the only one who held this view. For me, half the excitement of teaching is having the freedom to be creative and plan our own lessons and activities for our students. So, why not leave the text book on the shelf sometimes and bring in something different that you know will excite your students to learn!
Imagine a world without textbooks - what do you think it would look like?
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