Over the past few weeks I’ve had the pleasure of working with fellow photographer Laura Balliet on a book publishing project for a start-up company called Teach The World. Back in the mid-nineties, Laura and I worked together on numerous projects for University Hospitals of Cleveland and it has been far too long since we’ve had the opportunity to collaborate on a new project.

Teach The World is developing a series of publications called Standard Themes for Educational Progress (STEPS). STEPS is a series of educational manuals for teachers in Ohio public schools, grades K—12 which organize the state Academic Content Standards into unifying themes or STEPS. I designed the cover for the first volume, the Ohio K—12 Science Manual, which features one of Laura’s photographs, a still life of a clamshell embedded in beach sand.

The second volume in the series, the Ohio K—12 Social Studies Manual, is being designed now and should be completed next week. Both of these books are planned to be updated soon with more extensive use of photography and other graphics.

Publisher, David Silverberg, with the help of a team of teachers and school administrators from the Ashland City School District in Ashland, Ohio has done a masterful job of organizing and prioritizing the content for each manual which serves as a unique guide to teachers in developing lesson plans and classroom activities to work toward providing students the knowledge they need to excel on the state proficiency tests. As an educator myself, I believe there are serious problems in the proficiency testing as it is currently constituted, however a tool that helps to organize content and show the progression of knowledge along a clear line of development should be welcome in any classroom.