Reading Beyond Traditional Textbooks

Preparing students to read in the 21st century cannot be based solely on course textbooks. The young minds entering our classrooms today have been raised in an age of information that values communication, speed, and technology. Many of the children in this Digital Age will come into a school setting with more technological savviness than some of their teachers, and we must be prepared to cater to this learning style.

Textbooks are frequently used tools by many teachers and still act as helpful references in learning; however, research supports that students are more motivated in classrooms when they have opportunities to work with manipulatives or to engage in multimodal platforms. Overuse of a textbook nowadays is seen as a limitation in a student's learning; though the strength of a textbook is its source of information, the undeniable weakness is its inability to provide the depth to pique a student's curiosity about new concepts. The days of reading a textbook chapter and answering questions at the end are outdated; teachers must be prepared to provide students with resource multiplicity in all content areas. Along with textbooks, resources such as trade books, magazines, newspapers, internet sources, websites, video clips, computer programs, etc must be used in classroom today to truly expand a students method for learning.

Teachers need plans of action for incorporating more diverse methods of literature, beyond the textbook, in lesson framework. Read-alongs and read-alouds are student and teacher based tools for stimulating attention and enhancing content understanding. When a teacher adapts their classroom for a particular type of learner, they are improving the classroom climate for learning. For example, a student may ask the teacher to read aloud a portion of the day's reading assignment to the class before independently reading themselves so they have a deeper understanding of the inflection or pronunciation of words. Teachers cannot abandon these practices in the class if it is beneficial to the students.

A teacher must be prepared to set the learning environment in a way that supports all facets of learning media. When providing bookshelves, teachers can include all types of folders, newspaper clippings, baskets of books, etc, that a student will browse as if in a bookstore. This provides a supported learning environment that includes much more than a wordy textbook, and effectively engages all types of students in literature content.