Why Teachers Should Blog: An Example

by Clay Burell

categories: Education and Technology, Teachers Ideas and Resources

Published May 01, 2009 @ 05:50AM PT

Just a quick share about an exchange with a couple of readers on an earlier post, "Calling Bullsh!t on Textbooks," that is a great example of how blogging can help teachers develop ideas for teaching - through the conversations that happen in the comment threads. I closed that post with this:

Nothing turns students on to a textbook like a teacher who starts the year by saying, “As we learn the material in this thing, we’re also going to talk back to it, criticize it, ask why it left these facts out while including those, and what sort of person it’s trying to mold you into. We’re going to reward anybody who comes up with a good case for calling bullsh*t on the textbook.”

Calling BS on any authoritatively packaged knowledge is mere slang for “critical thinking.” It keeps students awake, makes the knowledge more interesting, and the future less ripe for demagogues.

Then Claus von Zastrow, who writes on the excellent Public School Insights blog, commented:

Of course, Calling bulls**t on a textbook requires you to know more than is in the textbook itself.

I replied:

True enough, Claus, but don't you think the resources for supplementing textbook knowledge abound now more than ever?

I've already got a unit in mind for Singapore next year that involves students making an online supplement/critique of whatever textbooks we read. Should be fun.

To expand a bit more, I'd just say that:

a) a 21st C Skills response might be that students may, instead of already knowing more, need to know how to learn more through smart search and website evaluation skills; and

b) a critical thinking response might say they can criticize textbooks with no extra knowledge of facts, by simply knowing how to ask critical questions (e.g., "To what degree, and in what ways, are women/minorities/other nations or cultures/working classes, etc covered in this text?" "Are characters and events overwhelmingly painted in positive lights, with little or no acknowledgment of mistakes, shortcomings, weaknesses?").

Know what I mean?

Reader Alan Cooper chimed in:

It is quite possible to disprove one claim in a text without knowing everything else in the book.
You could say that "Calling bulls**t on a textbook requires you to know better about at least one item." But knowing more has nothing to do with it.

Then Claus returned with a comment that articulated both the process and the benefits of the project idea better than I did (emphasis added):

I do agree with you that we can equip students to approach textbooks critically even when they don't have extra knowledge. We should all be sensitive to propaganda--even in areas we know little or nothing about.

You describe a wonderful learning process: Read a textbook for what it is worth; Call bulls**t when it seems facile or exclusionary; Do research online or elsewhere to verify/challenge the textbook's assumptions, or to discover a fuller account. At the end of this process, you know enough about the textbook to render a critique, you know about ideas/facts/perspectives not presented in the textbook, you know a bit more about how and where to find information, and you have a more fully refined bulls**t sensor. And you've broadened your body of knowledge considerably.

This goes well beyond the argument (or perhaps straw man?) that we don't need to know facts because we can look them up online.

Your approach, it seems to me, values both knowledge and skills. Yes, it's a truism, but neither can survive without the other. The Singapore unit sounds great.

Without this conversation, it's possible I would have entertained the idea one idle day, but forgotten it the next, and never brought it into the classroom. But Claus' comment has cemented the idea for me. I'm going to apply it when I re-enter the classroom teaching Western Civ and Chinese history in the fall.

So thanks, Claus and Alan, for helping me evolve as a teacher. I'd already done what I thought was a pretty cool wiki-based, student-created history textbook a couple of years ago. But all that class did was re-write the content in their own words, focus on accurate reading while neglecting critical reading - on knowing more than thinking (yeah, they reflected on it on a group blog, but that made it seem, it occurs to me now, an extra step instead of an essential one). Now I see how that can be taken further.

propaganda of the weak mind by martha madness