Cultivating a Beginner’s Mind: How Textbook Writing Improves Our Undergraduate Teaching

As coauthors of the eighth edition of a widely used textbook on California politics that was first published in 2008 (Anagnoson et al. 2021), we have learned valuable lessons about how best to approach writing an introductory textbook and how best to work with a relatively large (and shifting) team of coauthors. For those scholars who are considering dipping their toes into thesemurky waters, this article describes our lessons learned on these two topics.