ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the limitations of textbooks, and provides information about how textbooks have changed over the past several years. It offers a parallel discussion of non-textbook sources, including several other types of texts that teachers can use to their advantage as they instruct students and lead them toward independent learning in the disciplines. It explores strategies to help students comprehend all types of texts and use them with purpose and with increasing independence. Teachers and students too often concentrate on the minimum that must be learned for an assessment, and the textbook really does become unnecessary for that goal to be achieved. Textbooks can be used as direct sources of instruction or as learning tools in innovative ways. Attractive and entertaining nonfiction books are tantalizing and motivational; they bring curricular topics to life in a way that textbooks cannot.
