An idea that started in Richmond County to help make textbooks less daunting to pupils is now being spread to classrooms across the country.
It started when Shelly Allen, the Richmond County school system's math coordinator, made a move to change the way pupils interact with learning materials.
"Textbooks, they tend to stop student thinking," Allen said. "I really never liked them very much."
She wanted to create a text that was more user-friendly and interactive, so Allen and a committee of local educators approached publishing company Carnegie Learning to write their own book from scratch.
Carnegie found what they created so effective that the company decided to publish the Richmond County middle school math book in all 50 states to be used next school year.
In June, the company will begin printing 15,000 copies of the text, titled The Carnegie Learning Math Series: Courses 1-3 , and more as demand increases, according to Mary Murrin, Carnegie's vice president of communications, proposals and federal initiatives.
"We helped write it and create it, so to have it printed nationally, we're very proud," Allen said.
Allen's committee of 25 teachers and staff began collaborating with Carnegie in June 2009 and implemented the finished product in local classrooms at the beginning of this school year.
They met in conference rooms and classrooms to decide how concepts should be explained and in what order middle school pupils should learn them.
The key difference in their new product was to make the textbook not seem like a textbook at all. It's more like a workbook.
"The problems that are in the book are problems that appeal to middle school kids," Allen said. "There's problems about cell phones, things like 'What happens when you walk away from a latte? How does it stay cool?' That's very different than the way we had (concepts) addressed in some of the other texts."
Creating a textbook from scratch also gave local educators a chance to shape the lessons around requirements set forth in the upcoming Common Core Standards, which will be implemented nationally next school year.
They were able to include extra lessons on concepts local pupils are known to struggle with, such as proportion and fractions.
Jennifer Fuller, a seventh-grade math teacher at Davidson Fine Arts Magnet School, said the new book helps pupils learn by making it feel like they are not doing math at all.
Instead of reading a block of text to learn a concept, pupils can interact with a problem by thinking of it in real-world scenarios.
To learn the concept of dilation, for example, pupils took rulers and compasses to create shapes and watch the effect on angles and proportions when the shapes shrink or stretch.
From Carnegie's perspective, the textbook was a tool to help improve middle school curricula nationwide.
Murrin said Carnegie has published four or five high school textbooks it developed with individual school districts, but that Richmond County's is the first middle school text to be published across the country.
The Richmond County project was also one of the most intimate and involved texts the company had worked on.
Carnegie authors and specialists worked in classrooms to develop lessons specifically for local pupils.
They took feedback from teachers about which lessons worked and which needed to be changed completely.
"This was a more involved, more ambitious project in that we were working very, very closely with the district beginning to end," Murrin said. "In the past, we would look at a state's needs and modify them. This was one where we worked directly in the classrooms."
The textbook is a whole new approach to learning for Davidson eighth-grader Conor Devaughn.
The county's new book is easier to carry because it is paperback and much lighter than older books, he said. It also helps to be able to write directly in the book and tear pages out instead of always having to carry an extra notebook.
"The old textbooks were always big, old, thick books that would basically be all words," Conor said. "They were just ... just ... ugh. This is just so much better."
Read more about The Carnegie Learning Math Series: Courses 1-3 at mathseries.carnegielearning.com .
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