I can only speak for Australia, but here "teaching from the textbook" is highly frowned upon. You're expected to constantly be reviewing and revising content from year to year and teachers are heavily pressured to continually revise course content. This is great to match student needs, but it is overwhelming for teachers.
>Primary school level knowledge is almost static, no?
yes of course, but there are a thousand different ways you can explain and structure any given topic with one approach working for some students and not for others.
Thanks for explaining but I still don't understand. What is there to revise? I assume if there's a new "way of teaching" it'll come from ministry of education or something. And the content is the same so I assume after the first year of teaching I will want to improve what I did, but after a few years, there probably isn't much to change in the approach.
I could assume once every few years a teacher somewhere has a breakthrough on how to teach something better, but it's not like they will try 50 variations of teaching a topic?
Could you maybe give an example on what's being revised, with a specific topic as context? Say I'm learning about animals from the savannah this year and next year I would get held back. What will the teacher modify? Is it redoing all the exercises? Redoing all the main material?
Of course. Every year there is usually a new area of focus for many subjects. This means building up a new library of content for that year's focus. Each year teachers will have a new cohort of students and what worked last year may not work this year. For example, there may be more students with specific learning needs who require content to be simpler, or on the flipside you may have a year of high flyers who need to be extended.
>I could assume once every few years a teacher somewhere has a breakthrough on how to teach something better
Education is it's own beast. It turns out that as a teacher you are constantly, every week learning and developing new and better ways of explaining content. Teaching is as much art as it is science. There is no settled "best way" to teach since we all learn at different pace and in different ways.
Teaching is also not only content. It's pacing and sequencing. As a teacher you're constantly learning what works and what doesn't just by applying your craft.
And finally schools move teachers around constantly. Last year you were teaching Year 8 History and this year you've been moved to Year 7 Social Studies. That requires a huge amount of effort to build up your own bank of activities, slideshows, links, videos etc.
It's a never ending task.
Thanks for the inside baseball, it's interesting how it works over there. Some friends have teachers as parents but in my corner of the woods almost all guidelines are given to them, majority of content is always "from the book", and their outside of work activities were mostly grading homework or tests.
It's interesting to me that teaching from the book is discouraged over there, where my feelings are it should be mandatory. It's weird to think there's places where the teacher has so much individual content that might be personal preference to them but not actually work that well.
In Wales (UK), they've leant fully into "personalised learning plans". Not to mention they've changed the curriculum completely in the past few years.
This essentially means that every lesson taught has to have a learning objective that meets the needs of each student, so there's a ton of overhead in tweaking, even if it is something that has been taught before.
It's incredible how much depth we (I) discount in other professions on knee-jerk reaction. I can see how there's much more than I was thinking in such personalized systems.
> Teaching is also not only content. It's pacing and sequencing. As a teacher you're constantly learning what works and what doesn't just by applying your craft.
I'm surprised you're allowed to do that in the first place. I'm not a teacher, but my impression of school systems in the West (and first-hand experience in Poland), is that standardized testing, standardized everything, and whiny parents, pretty much force the teachers to teach to specific, detailed curriculum, with little room for any experimentation in approaches.
The little teaching I did, was on the private side (courses in computer use, 2D graphics authoring, and similar), so it was up to me to make it work - I didn't have a curriculum I was mandated to follow.
> I can only speak for Australia, but here "teaching from the textbook" is highly frowned upon.
Even more surprised by this. Positively surprised.
Over here, the material changes yearly, too. But it's not the teachers changing it - it's the textbook authors moving some things around, to force parents to buy new books each year instead of reusing the ones they have (or getting them from second-hand sources); the changes are made specifically to make life miserable for a teacher who allows multiple editions of the book in class, and thus using the teacher as proxy to pressure the parents.
Needless to say, this makes me extremely skeptical about any year-on-year curriculum changes, particularly when they involve students/parents paying for the same thing multiple times.
>I'm surprised you're allowed to do that in the first place.
Not just allowed, but expected.
>I didn't have a curriculum I was mandated to follow.
Curriculum documents are not as detailed and prescriptive as you imagine. They absolutely do go into specific detail of what must be covered, but they don't specify the how, when, sequencing etc. The teacher of course has much discretion with regard to how they teach.
>Over here, the material changes yearly, too. But it's not the teachers changing it - it's the textbook authors moving some things around
Every system has its quirks I guess :)