The reaction to the textbook finding in American Lesson Plan has been mixed: Many academics, suspicious of textbooks and the singular (and possibly biased) narrative that they advance, celebrated their disappearance from classroom shelves. Others, possibly remembering their own high school history education, were glad to learn that most current teachers privilege the reading of primary sources over lengthy pages of secondary texts.

History teachers, however, lament the disappearance of a coherent narrative for student use. Without such a narrative available, they find it hard to get students to interpret primary source material. As reading levels drop every year, teachers worry that by not assigning longer student-appropriate texts, their students will be ill-prepared for a college classroom that relies on secondary reading materials. Indeed, American Lesson Plan concludes with a note of concern regarding the decline of narrative synthesis:

"...if the 'big story' is left out or left blurry in classrooms—because the textbook is gone, the political climate is too touchy, or the teacher isn’t sure what the plot points should be—students’ appetite for narrative might plausibly be filled later in life by well-produced stories whose accountability to historical evidence is less scrupulous. Historical thinking requires historical knowledge."

What to do? This roundtable will explore the use of textbooks in current high school and college classrooms. How can textbooks support instruction? Where do they fall short? What does an ideal textbook look like? And how might textbooks become more accessible to instructors and students at all levels?