A biology textbook for the freshman course was approved by the MUSD Board of Education and the Curriculum Policy Council (CPC) on Dec. 13, 2022, according to science teacher Rita Burmanroy.
The new textbook, “Miller and Levine (2020), Experience Biology,” was carefully evaluated and selected by the science department’s professional learning community (PLC) with student involvement, Burmanroy said. Burmanroy expects the new textbook to provide students with more modern and accurate information than the previous one in place, she said.
“What we did as the PLC is that the teachers came together and we all decided, ‘what is a priority for us?’ What are the things that we want in this new textbook?” Burmanroy said.
While evaluating textbook options, the PLC prioritized relevance to the students as well as representation of people of color, while also ensuring that the textbook highlighted content specific to California, Burmanroy said. The old textbook, published in 2007, did not align with the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), which sets standards for K-12 science education in California, which were released in 2012, she said.
“We really wanted to make sure our students were moving forward and not moving back because we were already aware that the middle school has a new curriculum, and we did not,” Burmanroy said.
The previous textbook had inaccurate information regarding genetic engineering and evolution and this was the main reason a new book was necessary, biology teacher April Hong said.
Since 2012, there have been at least two initiatives made by the PLC to implement a new textbook,Burmanroy said. In 2019, multiple teachers evaluated biology textbooks at a book fair, but the adoption of the textbooks was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Burmanroy said.
“October of 2021 was the beginning of our piloting process (to replace the textbook) at that point,” Burmanroy said. ”The piloting involved having students actually interact with a book. And we had at least three teachers, other than me, that helped pilot the textbooks, meaning the students in our classes got experience with both textbooks,” she added.
The old textbook was essentially missing a lot of important information and was published in 2007, biology teacher Kieu Pham said.
“The old textbook we have is 15 years old — in fact, it’s the textbook I used when I was in high school,” Burmanroy said at the Dec. 13 school board meeting. “One of the biggest things that the old textbook was missing was information on genetic engineering. There’s this one particular method called clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) that is not mentioned in the old biology textbook. That is our current and future when it comes to scientific research,” she added.
Ideally, students will receive individual copies of the new textbook along with a digital version within the next two months, but as of now, teachers have been given a class set to use, Burmanroy said.
“We are hoping to get an interactive website to access the digital textbook, which will be super useful,” Pham said. “It’d be nice to have a digital backup since everyone’s carrying Chromebooks now.”
Google forms were filled out by students regarding their perspectives and opinions on the textbooks, Burmanroy said. The forms came from the CPC and through the data that was collected, it was concluded that the “Experience Biology” textbook was preferred among students.
“We had to compare the old textbook with the textbook we were planning to adopt along with receiving student input on them,” Hong said.
The new biology textbook has a well-organized table of contents, assessments for each chapter, real-world application, a vocabulary bank, open-ended questions, and colorfully detailed diagrams, freshman Anisakhon Gafurova said at the board meeting.
“If a future teacher would come into biology and be like, ‘Oh, this is my first year teaching biology,’ they have so many options here,” Burmanroy said. “I think both teachers and students are going to benefit from the new textbook.”