Teaching Pt. 6

Yet another factor in teaching is textbooks. Different authors explain the concepts in different ways that different students may or may not understand. One way to develop a good textbook is to continually test the book with focus groups. To help aid the initial construction of the book it may be worthwhile to research books that a large representative group of student consider to be easy to learn from, yet satisfy the teacher's requirements.

It is a good idea to test every aspect of the book with a representational cross section of the target student base. Everything from wording, to phrases, figures, to notation should be finely tuned for maximum student understanding, while at the same time satisfying the goals of the teacher.

John G.