Teachers and Textbooks: Materials Use in Four Fourth-Grade Classrooms

Studies of 4 fourth-grade teachers in 2 urban schools in a single school district provide the data for this article. Questions about the roles textbooks play in elementary education and how they come to play those roles were addressed using an ecologically based research approach (interviews and classroom observations)-one that considered teachers' thought and action and the relationships between these, teachers' work within and across subjects, and the fuller context of teachers' conditions of work. Using this approach, we found that the influence of textbooks on classroom instruction and teachers' thinking was somewhat less than the literature would have us expect, that patterns of textbook use and thinking about these materials were not necessarily consistent across subjects even for a single teacher, and that the conditions of elementary teachers' work encouraged selective and variable use of textbook materials.