The use of booklets in classes seems to be growing in popularity. They have been a phenomenon in secondary schools for some time and I have recently started seeing them in primary schools as well.
A booklet is a cross between a textbook and a workbook. They contain the key information that pupils need for a lesson along with the room to complete the planned and prepared related tasks. It is a seductive idea. The quality of textbooks is often not great or doesn’t quite fit the curriculum you want to build, whereas this gives you the chance to put together the information that you feel is important for your classes. They may take a while to put together but once they are done you have all your resources ready to go year after year and it saves on the sporadic photocopying of worksheets that inevitably fall out of exercise books and get lost in the bottom of bags. I can see the appeal.
However, despite the temptation, I have some concerns about the use of booklets that have prevented me from adopting them as an approach. My concern, along with what looks like eye-watering photocopying costs, comes down to the need to be a responsive teacher.
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The problem with relying on booklets
At the moment, when I teach a lesson, I am constantly chopping and changing it. I might discover partway through a lesson that pupils are not as secure at doing something as I thought they were and so I decide to change the planned activity to give them another chance to practise. It could be that a class discussion reveals a new line of thinking about the topic and I want to adapt an upcoming task so that pupils refer to and build on these ideas.
In my subject of geography, we might change a scheme of work to reflect new examples as they occur. I am currently teaching tectonics in Year 8 and had no plan when I started to include volcanic eruptions in La Palma but certainly will now. As I continue to read around my subject, or watch a documentary or hear something on the radio, I adapt what I am teaching.
My concern is that if everything is prepared in a booklet, months in advance, how locked in will I be to these plans? Will there be a reticence to update schemes of work, or change lesson plans, due to the amount of work and money that has gone into producing these booklets? Will these booklets not end up becoming, rather than supporting, the curriculum I want to teach?
Over-crammed curricula can already leave us with a culture of coverage where our goal is to get to the end of a topic or course in time for an assessment. There is a certain comfort in coverage, of knowing something has been taught. But what about learning? Just because the booklet has been taught and completed doesn’t mean that the learning has occurred. We need to be able to respond to what we are seeing in front of us and adapt as we go. This ability to respond and adapt is what makes teachers highly skilled professionals. We can’t, or at least shouldn’t, simply be working through our plans regardless.
Occasionally I’ll go into a school where people are using booklets and I’ll see the teacher hand them out, all beautifully organised and presented, and I’ll feel like I am missing out on something. But until I can see how they’ll allow me to respond in the classroom or in my curriculum plans I think I’ll have to keep letting them pass me by. Or perhaps someone can now tell me that I am wrong, that they use booklets in a way that allows them to still be flexible about what is taught and how. And if that happens, I’ll respond and adapt.
Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College. His latest book, The CPD Curriculum, is out now. He tweets @EnserMark
