Writing FOR Learning

If written before about wanting to take advantage of the hyperlinking brain of the digital native.  It took me a long time, but I finally found that ability in writing my own 8th-grade science textbook.  You can read about that here and here.  This year, I decided it was time to do the same for my other prep, Physics.

I put writing the book for Physics off longer for a couple of reasons.  First, it is more difficult material.  If I had been learning to use the app and writing for the first time with the most complex material I teach, it might have taken longer to finish the first book than it did.  Also, I wanted to see how the 8th-grade book worked for a few years before I jumped in.  The timing of this worked out well because the students who first used my book in 8th-grade will also be the first to use the physics book.  They know the deal and responded to it well, so they seemed like a nice group to start this book with.

In my posts about the other book, I told you some of the benefits of writing your own.  Among them were arranging it in the order you like, using examples and analogies that work in your classroom, and the increased likelihood the kids will read it.  I also talked a lot about the use of hyperlinks as that was the motivating factor in my effort to teach the digital native.  Now that I have worked with my book for three years and am writing again, I want to discuss other benefits.

1.  Do you have a chapter you struggle with in your teaching?  You try to explain things and find it difficult to get through to students with clarity?  I do.  Teaching electricity has always been difficult for me.  I like teaching circuits, but the explanation of voltage is difficult for me.  My understanding of it is so tenuous that it can be rattled by a student asking a question.  (By the way, to help with that, I show a Khan Academy video that day - Don't feel bad if you need the help of another explainer than you.  It's humility, not weakness.)  Sorry, back to the point of this paragraph - Writing about that topic helps you.  It helps you think through your explanation on a deeper level than you have before.  You read what you have written and realize it needs something.   That forces you to google the topic and find an explanation you haven't read before.  With clarity for yourself, you write a better explanation and include the link to the site that helped you on the page with your explanation.

 2. You will learn things you did not know.  I was writing about color blindness.  I don't spend a lot of time talking about this topic in my class, but I felt I needed a little more than a few sentences if I was going to include it.  I looked it up and learned the causes of 7 different kinds of color vision deficiency and found a great resource in the National Eye Institute portion of the NIH website.  It's well written, interesting, and includes video animations.  I will be using this website in a project assignment next year.  Not only that, I can answer more questions and explain more things to my students.  This happened a two or three dozen times during the writing of this book.  I have more knowledge and more resources for my students.

3.  I wrote about the hyperlinks before, but this morning I had more clarity about them.  I was doing my summer homework in which we respond to a professional development book we all read.  This summer we read The Innovator's Mindset by George Curos.  One of the questions we were supposed to answer in our discussion board was "What do you want students to do with technology?"  This is an important question that EVERY teacher should ask themselves.  You don't want to use tech for tech's sake.  You want to figure out what is important that tech makes possible.  For 18 years, I have hoped to inspire my students to love learning.  I don't believe they will all be scientists, but I hope they will all continue to be learners for their entire lives.  As I wrote about that this morning, I realized the value that the hyperlinks were giving my students.  They saw that I was interested in something outside my curriculum enough to find and provide a link to it.  Perhaps that will inspire them to participate in some self-guided learning.  Here are a couple of examples:

When discussing the trajectory of projectiles, it is fun to talk about food fights.  The greatest food fight happens in Spain every year, so why not include a link that a student might want to follow.  Perhaps, that leads them to learn about Spain or tomatoes.

If you are teaching friction or rotation, it just makes sense to add a link to the science of a thing they like.  Right now, that's fidget spinners.

I wanted some real data to write a problem with.   I knew the information for copper, so I used the Statue of Liberty.  I included the link to her Wikipedia page in the hopes that students would explore the statue, the sculptor, our former relationship with France, etc.

I'm not sure that writing a textbook is for everyone, but I am going to recommend it to anyone who is struggling to teach a specific concept well or wants a good way to model their own curiosity of their students.  You might not want to go as far as writing an entire book.  Perhaps you want to write one concept that you need help with.  Perhaps, you want to write one chapter because the book you are using doesn't handle that as well as you would like.  Writing for your own learning is helpful in a way I don't think I could acheive any other way.