Why We Flipped the Reproductive Story

Rethinking the traditional male-first organization of A&P.

In my earlier post, The A&P Textbook You May Have Overlooked, I mentioned that in our revised 12th Edition of Anatomy & Physiology, we turned our story of the human reproductive systems inside out, upside down, and flipped around.

Here's what I meant.

In the 11th Edition of Anatomy & Physiology, our organization probably looked very familiar:

Chapter 45: Male Reproductive System
Chapter 46: Female Reproductive System
Chapter 47: Growth, Development, & Aging

That's also the traditional organization in many A&P textbooks and curriculum documents. The currently posted HAPS A&P Learning Outcomes, for example, list male reproductive anatomy before female reproductive anatomy, followed by spermatogenesis before oogenesis. Of course, the HAPS Learning Outcomes are not intended to prescribe a teaching sequence.

The same male-first convention remains in the other major A&P textbooks we examined. Current examples from Saladin, Tortora, and OpenStax all begin their reproductive-system coverage with the male system before moving to the female system.

So why did we decide to change it?

We didn’t simply reverse the old chapters. We changed the way the reproductive story is organized.

The old story made sense

We had a legitimate pedagogical reason for our traditional organization.

We regarded the typical male genital system as the structurally simpler of the two systems. Starting there allowed students to establish some basic structural principles before moving to the more complex typical female system.

And because the story then moved toward fertilization, gestation, and birth, having the female system immediately precede that content also seemed logical.

I still think those are reasonable arguments.

But we eventually had to ask ourselves how much of our reasoning came from pedagogy and how much came from that very powerful force in education:

That's the way we've always done it.

We were also hearing concerns from professors, students, and others that routinely starting with the male system can carry an unintended message. It can suggest that male anatomy is the starting point or standard, with female anatomy following as a variation on that story.

That certainly wasn't the message we intended.

But intent isn't the only thing that matters in telling a story.

We weren't the only ones thinking about this

Once we began looking into the issue, we found that scholars had been raising related concerns for decades.

In 1992, Susan Lawrence and Kae Bendixen examined 31 anatomy textbooks used by U.S. medical students from 1890 through 1989. They found that illustrations, vocabulary, and syntax commonly presented male anatomy as the norm or standard against which female anatomy was compared.

Susan Morgan and colleagues later examined contemporary anatomy textbooks. They likewise found problems with equal representation of female and male anatomy. Interestingly, their research with medical students suggested that many students did not recognize some of these issues themselves.

Then, in 2021, Katherine Ray King, Linda Fuselier, and Harshini Sirvisetty analyzed four widely adopted undergraduate nursing A&P textbooks. They specifically described a "male-first" perspective in which males occupy the central position and female and nonbinary identities become the "other."

Elizabeth Whitaker and Raffaella Baccolini looked at a different setting—Italian middle-school science resources—but found the same ordering convention. All the books they examined followed a male-first sequence when presenting reproductive topics.

These studies don't all examine the same learners, the same kinds of textbooks, or the same issue in exactly the same way. So I don't want to stretch their findings beyond what they actually show.

But they did reassure us that we hadn't rocketed off to an entirely new planet by questioning the traditional sequence.

There really is something worth thinking about here.

Just flipping the chapters wasn't enough

The obvious solution would be easy:

Chapter 45: Female Reproductive System
Chapter 46: Male Reproductive System

Done!

Except we didn't like that solution very much.

It would still make one system the starting point and the other the follow-up. It wouldn't really rethink the story. It would simply reverse it.

We wanted to organize these topics around something other than male versus female.

And we had another important consideration.

As I've explained previously [Chunking Chapters—By The Numbers], we've deliberately divided our A&P story into relatively small chapters. In our comparisons, our chapters average about half the size of those in many other undergraduate A&P textbooks.

We think that kind of chunking makes a huge body of unfamiliar information more manageable for beginning learners.

So we wanted to keep three relatively small chapters. We didn't want to solve one problem by creating one or two monster chapters on reproduction.

Yeah, it took us a while to figure this out.

The Patton Team discussed and debated the reorganization for several years. A change this large unravels all kinds of other things in a textbook—figures, tables, review questions, online resources, cross-references, and much more. And the limited amount of time between editions is a very real factor in deciding whether a major change can actually be accomplished.

We also weren't yet sure where our A&P colleagues and students wanted this story to go.

Eventually, two familiar ideas came together and gave us our solution.

Structure first, then function

When we've divided larger chapters into smaller chunks in previous editions, one approach that has often worked well is a structure/function split.

We aren't alone in finding that sequence useful. Even within the larger chapters of other A&P textbooks, it's common to establish important anatomical structures before moving more deeply into the physiological processes involving them. You can see versions of that pattern throughout A&P—for example, respiratory anatomy before pulmonary ventilation, or kidney anatomy and histology before renal physiology.

Of course, anatomy and physiology ultimately belong together. Many of us quite rightly say that we integrate structure and function in our teaching.

But to integrate things, students first need some things to integrate.

At some point, a beginning learner needs a reasonably clear picture of the structures involved and a reasonably clear picture of the processes involving those structures. Then the connections between them can become richer and more useful.

That familiar structure/function approach gave us one part of our solution.

The other part came from terminology.

Genital or reproductive?

We had been noticing increasing use of genital system, especially when the emphasis is on anatomy.

And that term has a solid anatomical pedigree.

Terminologia Anatomica, the international standard for human anatomical terminology, calls its Chapter 9 Genital Systems. It lists the Female Genital System first, followed by the Male Genital System. It also recognizes female reproductive system and male reproductive system as synonymous terminology.

Now, Terminologia Anatomica is a terminology standard, not an A&P curriculum guide. Its ordering doesn't tell us how to teach.

But the terminology helped us see an elegant way forward.

We didn't want to abandon reproductive system, either. That's the familiar term that our students will continue to encounter in courses, learning outcomes, clinical settings, and other textbooks.

So we explain that the terms can be used interchangeably. But in our own narrative, we tend to use genital when we're emphasizing the structures and their basic functional anatomy. We tend to use reproductive when we're emphasizing the physiological processes involved in producing offspring.

And there it was.

Instead of dividing our chapters into male and female, we could divide them largely into structure and reproductive function.

And within each part of the story, we could use a female-first sequence.

It’s not just a claim: the new chapter actually begins the anatomical story with the typical female system.

The goal wasn't to declare female anatomy the new "default." The more important change was getting rid of sex as the dividing line between the chapters.

Act 1: Genital Systems

Our new Chapter 45: Genital Systems establishes the structures and their basic functional anatomy.

And yes, we flip the traditional sequence. We begin with the typical female genital system.

Here's the first half of the program:

Chapter 45: Genital Systems—Typical Female Genital System

• Overview of the Genital Systems

• Overview of the Typical Female Genital System

• Ovaries

• Uterine Tubes

• Uterus

• Vagina

• Vulva

• Breasts

Within those sections, students explore location, structure, microscopic anatomy where appropriate, and basic functions.

Then we move to:

Chapter 45: Genital Systems—Typical Male Genital System

• Overview of the Typical Male Genital System

• Testes

• Epididymis

• Vas Deferens

• Ejaculatory Ducts

• Urethra

• Accessory Genital Glands

• Supporting Structures

• Composition and Course of Seminal Fluid

• Differentiation and Development of Genital Organs

Notice that we haven't simply reversed two chapter titles.

We've brought the anatomy of both genital systems together into one chapter.

That lets students encounter them as related variations on the same basic biological story. It also makes their similarities, differences, and developmental relationships easier to connect.

Act 2: Reproduction

Once students know the structures and their basic functions, Chapter 46: Reproduction moves more deeply into reproductive physiology.

Again, we begin with female functions.

Here's that program:

Chapter 46: Reproduction

• Overview of Reproductive Physiology

• Female Reproductive Physiology

• Female Reproductive Cycles

  • Recurring Cycles

  • Control of Female Reproductive Cycles

  • Importance of Female Reproductive Cycles

  • Menarche and Menopause

• Male Reproductive Physiology

  • Hormonal Regulation

  • Male Fertility

• Sex Cell Production and Fertilization

  • Production of Sex Cells

  • Fertilization

  • Infertility

I really like the way this story now unfolds.

We first explore female reproductive physiology and its recurring cycles. Then we explore male reproductive physiology.

Finally, those two threads come together as we explore sex-cell production, fertilization, and infertility.

Instead of telling two mostly separate stories called Male and Female, we are telling one reproductive story involving both systems.

Act 3: The whole life cycle

After fertilization, the story flows naturally into Chapter 47: Growth, Development, & Aging.

Here's the program:

Chapter 47: Growth, Development, & Aging

• Prenatal Period

  • Cleavage and Implantation

  • Placenta

  • Periods of Development

  • Stem Cells

  • Formation of Primary Germ Layers

  • Histogenesis and Organogenesis

• Birth

  • Stages of Labor

  • Multiple Births

• Postnatal Period

  • Growth, Development, and Aging

  • Infancy

  • Childhood

  • Adolescence and Adulthood

  • Older Adulthood

• Aging

  • Mechanisms of Aging

  • Effects of Aging

• Causes of Death

So our three-chapter story now has a pretty simple logic:

Chapter 45: What are the genital structures, and what do they do?

Chapter 46: How do the two systems function in reproduction?

Chapter 47: How do offspring develop, grow, and age?

To us, that turned out to be a cleaner and more logical story than the one we started with.

It preserves our short-chapter approach. It uses a familiar structure/function progression. It keeps all the traditional reproductive content that A&P instructors expect. And it no longer requires maleness to be the automatic starting point for telling the story.

But do I have to reorganize my course?

Nope.

We believe this new organization responds to perspectives we're increasingly hearing from our colleagues and students while retaining the familiar content expected in an undergraduate A&P course.

If you're moving from our 11th Edition to the 12th Edition of Anatomy & Physiology, I think you'll find it relatively straightforward to rearrange your course content to follow the new sequence.

But you don't have to.

All the familiar content is still there.

You may decide that your own course works best with topics in another sequence. There's nothing wrong with students encountering material in one order during class and another order in their textbook. Seeing relationships from more than one direction may even help students develop a more flexible conceptual framework.

The same is true if you're moving to our book from another A&P textbook.

We didn't reorganize these chapters to tell you how you must teach reproduction.

We reorganized them because, after several years of thinking, researching, discussing, arguing, rearranging, and rearranging again, this is the clearest and most coherent way we found to tell the story.

There's more to the reproductive story

Reorganizing three chapters wasn't the only thing we changed.

We also took a fresh look at some of the most challenging reproductive concepts to explain and illustrate clearly for beginning A&P students.

One of the biggest examples is the ovary. How do we portray ovarian follicles simply enough for a beginning learner, realistically enough to avoid teaching something that isn't really there, and dynamically enough to convey that ovarian function is cyclical?

Yeah. We spent some time on that one.

I'll show you what we came up with in my next post.

If you haven't already requested a free instructor review copy of the new edition, click here and do that now.

The Human Microbiome Belongs in A&P

Why this essential story shouldn’t be left entirely to other biology courses.

In my previous post, The Human Microbiome Was There All Along, I briefly outlined the story of how we developed the new Chapter 49: Human Microbiome for the 12th Editon of Anatomy & Physiology. But the more important story, I think, is WHY we added this chapter. 

Is your microbiome missing?

Conversations with my colleagues tell me that a lot of A&P faculty haven't given much thought to teaching their students about the human microbiome. 

In the A&P textbooks and curriculum documents we examined, microbiome coverage was often limited, scattered, or absent. That absence can easily be interpreted as a signal that the topic belongs somewhere other than the undergraduate A&P course. That makes perfect sense, right?

Other courses?

Some of our students may encounter the human microbiome in introductory biology, microbiology, pathophysiology, nutrition, or another course. That’s great. Important concepts should not appear once and then disappear.

We already revisit basic concepts from chemistry, cell biology, genetics, homeostasis, and other foundational areas in several courses. Each encounter lets students add new connections and consider the concept in a different context. Over time, those connections can become stronger and more complex, making the knowledge easier to retrieve and apply.

The A&P course brings its own perspective to the microbiome. Our task is to help students connect microbial communities with body structures, physiological functions, homeostatic mechanisms, health, and disease. Another biology course may approach the same concept from a different direction—and that is exactly as it should be. The courses complement one another rather than compete for ownership of the concept.

Big-picture thinking

The microbiome is also a wonderfully integrative A&P concept. Its connections across body systems help students develop the big-picture, whole-body thinking we want them to build.

That fits naturally with a long-standing theme of our textbook. Every chapter ends with a Big Picture section that asks students to step back from the details and see how structures and functions connect across the whole body. The microbiome practically demands that kind of thinking.

The microbiome also has known—and still-emerging—clinical applications that many of our health professions students are likely to encounter. Giving students a basic framework now helps prepare them to understand and apply those connections when they encounter them later in their education and careers.

Adding the microbiome doesn't have to mean adding much

We know that A&P evolves, and when there's something new that has proven its importance to our understanding of A&P, somebody has to take a step in that direction. 

Adding the human microbiome to A&P does not mean carving out a week of lectures or piling another large block of content onto an already crowded course. Our textbook's coverage is more substantial than it was in earlier editions—and more substantial than what we found in the other A&P textbooks we examined—but it is still concise.

Brief mentions throughout the book help students connect the microbiome with the structures and functions they are already studying. For many courses, assigning the short Chapter 49 as reading, rather than devoting an entire lecture to it, may be entirely sufficient.

The goal is not to turn A&P into a microbiology course. It is to give students enough of a framework to understand that microbial communities are part of the human biological story. Later—or earlier—encounters in introductory biology, microbiology, pathophysiology, nutrition, and other courses can add new layers. And as the clinical importance of the microbiome continues to develop, that framework gives students something sturdy on which to build.

Our textbook has been nudging instructors toward the microbiome with small steps starting in the early 1990s, culminating in the big step I've been describing here—a whole new microbiome chapter. You can wait if you want to, but I think my students are better prepared knowing the basics of the microbiome than if I'd never mentioned it in my course. They'll be applying it in their later courses and clinical settings, and I want to get my students ready by giving them a small, easy-to-grasp introduction in their A&P course. Maybe you already do that, too.

We don’t have to teach students everything currently known about the human microbiome. We do need to give them enough of the story to recognize its connections with human structure and function—and enough of a framework to keep learning as they encounter the microbiome again.

That’s why we believe the human microbiome belongs in A&P.

Doesn't hurt to take a look!

I strongly suggest that you take a look at the new Chapter 49: Human Microbiome.

If you haven't already requested a free instructor review copy of the new edition, click here and do that now. Then you'll receive it as soon as it becomes available on or about September 15, 2026

The Human Microbiome Was There All Along

How decades of scattered coverage became a new chapter in Anatomy & Physiology.

As I mentioned in my previous post, the new 12th Edition of Anatomy & Physiology has a new chapter devoted entirely to the human microbiome. I also mentioned that we'd been covering the human microbiome for decades—but in small pieces placed strategically throughout the textbook. 

Our explanation of essential concepts related to the human microbiome goes back at least to our 1993 edition, when we talked about the roles of microorganisms living on the surfaces of our skin, intestines, and other membranes—each in the chapter where it naturally belonged. We didn't call the concept the "human microbiome" because that term was not in common use back then.

Google Ngram Viewer Showing Book Usage of "Human Microbiome"

(click here if the chart is not visible)

The chart above suggests that use of the term “human microbiome” in published books rose sharply after 2012. 

Something else happened during those years. In 2007, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) launched the Human Microbiome Project. Its researchers began the ambitious task of characterizing the microbial communities associated with different regions of the healthy human body. A coordinated collection of major findings appeared in 2012, helping push the human microbiome into the scientific spotlight.

In our 2013 edition, we introduced the term as our discussion of the microbiome concept evolved and expanded to reflect its growing importance in anatomy and physiology (and its clinical applications).

The 2016 edition of Anatomy & Physiology saw the introduction of our Connect It! (formerly A&P Connect) library of online "special interest" articles, including one about the human microbiome. 

As I've previously explained, many of these articles are intended to help students draw together core concepts that play roles in many different regions and processes of human biology. Because this approach helps our readers gradually build their conceptual frameworks, that microbiome article remains in our Connect It! library. Of course, we revised it to reflect the addition of our new Human Microbiome chapter.

After much research and discussion among the Patton Team of authors and editors, we recognized that the human microbiome deserves its own chapter. We saw how well giving homeostasis its own chapter worked for student understanding and we wanted to give similar emphasis and coherence to the increasingly important microbiome concept. 

In 2022, the final year shown in the Google Ngram chart, with use of the term still climbing, we began our work for this new edition.

Behind the scenes: how did we do it?

It sounds simple. And it may even sound easy. But it wasn't, of course. Such things never are, right?

First, we asked for a volunteer from among our author team to be the designated wrangler of this new chapter. Author Terry Thompson stepped up and is largely responsible for what you see in the new chapter. 

But hey, we're the Patton Team, so we all pitched in to help Terry. Anything you don't like in the new chapter? That's probably because we talked Terry out of something that we shouldn't have. We went back and forth on the new chapter for several years. Despite its brief length and straightforward storyline, there was a lot of research, debate, and hard work that went into producing the version you see.

As alluded to earlier, Terry scanned the entire previous edition to assess our existing microbiome content. Then, using her new research on current scientific thinking, she developed a storyline that we wanted to tell our readers. 

From Patton (2027) Anatomy & Physiology 12e. Elsevier. Contents p. xxxv

Our goal was to give your students the basic concepts they need to build and expand their conceptual frameworks, improve their understanding of A&P, and prepare for later clinical courses and health careers.

Terry wove the previously scattered microbiome content into the new chapter, leaving brief mentions in its previous locations to help students map out where the microbiome applies in their studies. For example, the human microbiome is still mentioned when discussing the skin, the gut, the respiratory tract, and other body regions.

She moved content about what microorganisms are and their roles in the body from Chapter 2's Mechanisms of Disease section and adapted it to the new Chapter 49 on the microbiome. Throughout the process, she added current content based on what microbiome experts are telling us—and what we believe our students really ought to know about.

This is a good spot to give a shout-out to HAPS member Brian Elliott at Saint Louis University, who has been introducing his A&P students to the microbiome concept. He graciously gave us feedback that helped guide us in developing our new chapter. When I participated in the HAPS Book Club discussions of the book, I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life, I gained greater insight into how microbiome concepts intersect with the mainstream A&P curriculum. Thanks, bookclub friends!

Where to put the new chapter?

One issue that we really wrestled with was this: "Where do we put this new chapter in the book?" 

There are good arguments for putting it among the very earliest chapters. Microbial communities occupy many body sites, and the microbiome influences structures and functions throughout the body. We decided against that for at least two reasons. 

One reason is practical. It's not a small thing to renumber all the subsequent chapters and each of their numbered figures, boxes, and tables—not only in the book itself, but also in all the many, many supporting resources organized by the numbering in the textbook's table of contents. 

The other reason is pedagogical. We didn't want to overwhelm the beginning A&P learner, whose head is already spinning with all those anatomical, chemical, cellular, and metabolic terms by adding another new introductory topic with its own hard-to-pronounce terminology. So we mention it broadly, starting early in the book, but we put the microbiome chapter at the very end.

We could not find an ideal location later in the book, either. It really "goes with" nearly every chapter, so it wasn't clear to us where the "best" placement might be.

Setting all that aside, putting the new chapter at the end of the book gives both readers and instructors some real agency in deciding when they want to dive a bit more deeply into the human microbiome. Early on, we suggest that readers "peek ahead" to the last chapter. They have the option to do that, or to wait. 

Instructors likewise have the option to assign it early or late in the course—or at any point in between. 

Placing it at the end makes it easier to assign the chapter wherever it fits best—or to use only selected parts—without disrupting the book’s traditional sequence.

There's much more to this story.

I think this blog post is getting to be longer than the new chapter is! But now you know part of the story behind our new Chapter 49: Human Microbiome.

In my next post, I’ll get to the most important part of this story by explaining why we believe the human microbiome belongs in A&P—even when students may also encounter it in introductory biology, microbiology, pathophysiology, or other courses.

I strongly suggest that you take a look at the new chapter.

If you haven't already requested a free instructor review copy of the new edition, click here and do that now.

The A&P Textbook You May Have Overlooked

A new edition of my popular two-semester A&P textbook is coming—and I’d like to show you what makes it different. Who knows? Perhaps it’ll be a better fit for your students.

It's Anatomy & Physiology 12th edition by Patton, Bell, Thompson, and Williamson. Published by Elsevier, it's scheduled for release on or about September 15, 2026. If you're an A&P instructor and would like a free examination copy to explore as soon as it becomes available, click this link:

Reserve a Review Copy

I know that you are wondering: What ARE the big upgrades to the new Anatomy & Physiology 12th edition? Too many to describe in one blog post, that's for sure. So I'll simply list a few here and then follow up with a series of additional posts with more details about the revisions, why we made them, and how they will help your students learn A&P.

One thing we did was add a new chapter! But wait, these A&P textbooks are already too big, right? Right. So we also made this edition 40 pages shorter. 

The new chapter is titled Human Microbiome and draws together existing coverage of this increasingly important A&P concept from previous editions. It then updates and expands microbiome coverage into a concise, accessible, illustrated narrative of its important role in human structure and function. To our knowledge, this textbook was the first major two-semester undergrad A&P textbook to offer a distinct Homeostasis chapter. Now we believe it's the first to offer a Human Microbiome chapter.

Throughout the book, we made our explanations and layout more concise and either removed bits of content not needed for an essential understanding of A&P or moved it to our online resources. For example, our large, comprehensive Glossary—a student favorite—has now been moved to the online Evolve Student Resources. That alone has reduced the amount of pain caused by carrying a huge A&P textbook around!

We turned the story of the human reproductive systems inside out, upside down, and flipped around. Our flipped narrative puts the female system first. I think that's another notable "first" among major textbooks. But there's a lot more. We upended and improved the traditional coverage of the genital organs and reproductive functions—which I'll explain in a subsequent post. 

We've added to our already groundbreaking coverage of fascia, added some cool videos from the Complete Anatomy suite of resources, replaced the content of all of our Career Choices sidebars with new stories about current health professionals, improved our representation of variations of the human body, and a whole lot more!

The whole "Patton Team" of authors, editors, and designers has been working long hours over many months to update, upgrade, and upend our story of human anatomy and physiology. Our previous revisions have made the narrative clearer while incorporating the latest scientific thinking about the topics we cover. This revision steps that work up a couple of notches—so much so that we took extra time to get it right.

The Patton Team met virtually nearly every week to discuss and debate every aspect of this revision. I think the extensive research, lively discussions, coworking, and great care we took have made this a truly remarkable revision.

Since inviting my awesome coauthors to the Anatomy & Physiology project, I've been meaning to introduce them in this blog. So I'm taking this opportunity.

You may already know Frank Bell, Terry Thompson, and Peggie Williamson from their years of active participation in the Human Anatomy & Physiology Society (HAPS). Terry Thompson is a President Emeritus of HAPS. All three have earned several relevant degrees, including the Master of Science in Human Anatomy & Physiology Instruction (HAPI), in which I served as their faculty mentor. Frank Bell and Peggie Williamson currently serve on the faculty of the HAPI program. 

Besides having worked with them in these capacities, I have enjoyed their contributions to previous editions of this and other textbook revision projects. Working on this revision—and observing their keen awareness of how our students read and learn A&P—has solidified my view that they are exactly the right A&P educators for this team.

Be sure to subscribe to the Patton Anatomy & Physiology blog to stay up to date on upcoming posts introducing specific revisions in our new edition!

Active Concept Maps Help Students Make Connections

 

We all know that concept maps help students learn anatomy and physiology in at least two ways.

One way is when we use concept maps to teach principles in a visual manner that clearly shows relationships among several ideas. Students thus clearly see how to organize their thoughts about connected ideas as they construct their own conceptual frameworks as they learn.

Another way concept maps help students learn is when they build their own concept maps from what they already know about anatomy and physiology. Concept-map-making can thus be a powerful study tool. However, students without prior experience with concept maps often have a difficult time getting started. A few good examples of concept maps that relate to the ideas they are learning in your course are all they need to get a good start in making their own.

Starting with this edition of Patton Anatomy & Physiology we are providing Active Concept Maps in the Student Resources in Evolve. 

Each Active Concept Map is an animated video of a concept map presented in a similar style to the concept maps used throughout the text of Patton Anatomy & Physiology. However, these concept maps are "active" in the sense that they build from a single block as the narrator walks the viewer through each related concept that appears as the concept map branches and grows.

The block-by-block guided walk-through of a major concept will help students understand what they have read and heard in class more deeply. It will also model for students how they can build their own concept maps for other sets of related ideas that they encounter in your course.

Perhaps most importantly, the Active Concept Maps will provide a template for how to think in a "connected" way about the major concepts of the anatomy and physiology course. For many of our challenged students, this is an especially important skill they must develop to succeed.

Here's a brief video walk-through that shows where to find Active Concept Maps in Evolve and how they work:

Tips and Shortcuts for Surviving and Succeeding in A&P

A feature of Patton Anatomy & Physiology that is often overlooked by faculty, but loved by beginning anatomy and physiology students is called 

Tips and Shortcuts for Surviving and Succeeding in A&P.

As soon as an A&P student unwraps and opens their new textbook, they flip over that endpaper and find this one-page guide on how to get started on the path to success. That one page is loaded with great study tips and how-to-read-a-textbook guidance organized in an intuitive, graphic manner. 

From metacognition to tackling new terminology to retrieval practice, this guide uses simple language to quickly outline the key strategies needed to succeed in A&P.

This guide also give faculty a place to quickly send students asking for study advice. And it gives faculty a place to find quick and easy tips for them to share in class or in a syllabus or course website.

Embedded throughout each chapter are brief Hints that remind students to use these strategies just at the moment they need them. Read more about these Hints at Embedded Hints Improve Reading Comprehension.

Patton Anatomy & Physiology is a textbook that is truly focused on helping students succeed!

Netter 3D Anatomy—Now Better Than Ever!

We've been offering Netter 3D Anatomy as a supplement to Patton Anatomy & Physiology at no added cost through the past few editions. Faculty and students alike have enjoyed the adventures they've undertaken as they explore the various regions of the human body using three-dimensional, dissectible images. That won't change in the new 11the edition. Or will it?!

The availability of Netter 3D Anatomy will still be there. And it will continue to be offered at no added cost to students. But it will be better in several ways. 

You probably already know the name of Frank Netter, the brilliant and widely respected anatomy and medical illustrator.  Dubbed "the Michelangelo of medicine" by the Saturday Evening Post, Netter revolutionized how anatomy is learned and taught through visual depictions. His work is realistic, yet clear and uncluttered.  And it is beautiful.

Netter 3D Anatomy adapts Netter's vast library of anatomical art to a gamification environment to make the study of Netter's "virtual" anatomy highly engaging.  The environment does this by melding 3D versions of anatomical structures with the ability to manipulate them in real time—thus adding the fourth dimension of time.  

Netter 3D Anatomy uses advanced gaming technology and interactive 3D anatomy models to learn, review, and teach anatomy. That's still true, but many improvements have been made to the ease-of-access and functionality of the platform. 

Students using Patton Anatomy & Physiology will no longer have to create a separate account and login through a separate system. It'll all be contained within the Evolve Student Resources that students already use—and have logged into—for all their other textbook tools and resources. As instructors, we know how important a single-login system can be for our students.

Students and instructors will find that the ease of use of Netter 3D Anatomy has improved tremendously. We worked closely with the developer, wearing our teacher hats, then wearing our student hats, to make sure that any obstacles to easy use are eliminated. And we're very happy with the results!

Because each user is "in control" as they zoom, twist, pull apart, unwrap, peel away, and pan, this program also adds the kinesthetic dimension characteristic of the best "virtual reality" experiences. Users can add or remove labels at will. This multimodal approach implements principles of brain-based learning a a way that gives the user the enjoyment of playing an exploratory game.

Professors can also use this tool in the classroom or lab to demonstrate anatomical relationships in a way that 2D illustrations, plastic models, and even dissection specimens cannot.  For example, layers of the GI wall can be easily peeled away to demonstrate each coat.  The skull bones can be pulled apart—then put back together—to help students quickly learn this tricky part of the skeleton. 

Something new in Patton Anatomy & Physiology is that we've added guided explorations to the Netter 3D Anatomy platform. These are developed in key areas with our own students in mind. They walk users through a specific set of concepts. This not only guides learning, it also gives students practice in using the platform so that they can be more confident about striking out on their own to explore other areas of the body.

The really cool thing about using Netter 3D Anatomy as a teaching tool is that each student can recreate—and extend—this experience on their own during individual or group time! This is a perfect tool to use in remote learning. If you suddenly have to shift to fully remote, you students will already have an interactive tool they can use independently!

Oh—did I mention?—Netter 3D Anatomy is provided at no additional cost to students!

Enough of me jabbering away about it—why not have your Elsevier Educational Solutions Consultant give you a free, personalized demonstration.

The Lymphatic System Deserves Its Own Chapter

 A social media thread I ran across recently laments that the lymphatic system is an undervalued and undertaught topic in the anatomy and physiology curriculum. That puzzles me.

Admittedly, I don't bring up the lymphatic system a lot in my day-to-day conversations. Not even in chats with other A&P enthusiasts. But it does come up sometimes in conversations about teaching or learning A&P. And when it does, I think the usual reaction involves some variety of love for the lymphatic system. So I'm puzzled.

In our Patton Anatomy & Physiology textbook, the lymphatic system certainly gets the love and attention it deserves. In fact, we feel that it deserves its own chapter! Unlike most A&P textbooks, Patton Anatomy & Physiology has a separate Lymphatic System chapter that follows Blood, Heart, Blood Vessels, and Circulation of Blood chapters and precedes the chapters Innate Immunity, Adaptive Immunity, and Stress.

That placement of the chapter puts it in exactly that spot in the story where we want it. That is, our story of the lymphatic system picks up the story of circulation begun in the Circulation of Blood chapter by explaining where the excess fluid left out of venous return goes. It goes back to the bloodstream via an elegant lymphatic drainage system. 

But wait! There's more! That fluid being returned to the bloodstream from the tissues is filtered in the lymph nodes before joining the blood supply. Which then allows us to introduce the concept of immunity and the lymphatic system's key role as a partner in the immune system. 

The next chapters Innate Immunity and Adaptive Immunity then pick up that part of the story after the Lymphatic System chapter. Then, after all those parts of the story set the final pieces needed, the Stress chapter integrates diverse concepts learned in previous chapters into a big picture of how our body deals with the world.

Although that social media thread lamenting that the lymphatic system is undervalued and undertaught puzzles me on one level, I wholeheartedly agree that the lymphatic system deserves any love we do give it. In the eleventh edition of Patton Anatomy & Physiology, available November 2021, we've added a bit more love by adding a brief description of the emerging concept of the glymphatic system. And, in our usual style, we generally refined and clarified our story of the amazing lymphatic system.

Check out the heavily illustrated story of the lymphatic system in Patton Anatomy & Physiology. I think you'll agree that we really do show this system some love.

Diverse Representation in Anatomy & Physiology

From the earliest days of my involvement with the Anatomy & Physiology textbook, I've strived to ensure that the representation of people in the illustration program, the chapter narratives, the examples and cases presented, reflects the diversity of humanity. 

My publisher has fully supported my (rather expensive) requests for creating new artwork and shooting new photographs. They have also supported my chapter revisions and have helped me find and revise passages that need improvement.

Why is this important? 

Our students—my readers and users of the textbook—must see themselves and their lived experiences reflected in this textbook and other learning materials. If they cannot, then it's difficult for them to see themselves fully accepted as part of the humanity that we explore in the anatomy and physiology course. This perceived lack of acceptance is a very real barrier to learning. When they cannot easily see themselves as part of the world of A&P, then it's also a barrier for students as they pursue their career path. 

Diverse representation in Anatomy & Physiology is also important because students must develop an understanding, acceptance, and appreciation of the normal variation and diversity among the human population if they are to be successful as healthcare and athletic professionals. 

The seventh edition of Anatomy & Physiology marked the moment when diverse and inclusive representation became a goal of every revision cycle. In the tenth edition, we were able to significantly diversify our photo collection and anatomical illustrations. 

For example, in the tenth edition, we were among the first to use Black female subjects for the key illustrations of human musculature—overturning centuries of white males serving that role.

Diversity and inclusion has been a primary goal of the upcoming eleventh edition of Anatomy & Physiology, as well. As we review our page proofs and make our final tweaks, we continue our strong effort to make our textbook one of the most inclusive science textbooks on the market.

However, as much as we have made admirable progress and maintained our lead in this area, we still have a long way to go. It's a daunting task. And the path is not always clear. The resources are not always available. Our awareness is still expanding. Nonetheless, I think you'll be pleased with the new edition when it is published later this year. 

And I hope you'll join us in pointing out where we've made good progress and where we still need to improve. We're in this together.

Stress Deserves Its Own Chapter

One of the advantages of organizing anatomy and physiology concepts into short, modular chapters is that it gives us more flexibility in teaching. It also permits us to focus on important topics that are often buried within a large chapter that covers many subtopics.  Taking this advantage, Anatomy & Physiology puts the clinically important concepts of stress into a single, independent chapter.

The concepts of stress interconnect with concepts of neuroscience, endocrinology, immunology, and many others—covered in diverse chapters of a textbook and diverse modules of an A&P course. Putting the core concepts of stress into its own independent chapter means that the instructor has more flexibility in where they place in their own course structure—into their own unique telling of the story of the human body.

Our book was the first A&P textbook to have an independent stress chapter. Since its introduction, we've been keeping the content up to date and relevant to student learning—and to the clinical applications of stress they'll be making in their professional courses and careers. 

More recently, we enlisted the advice of the late Dr. Bruce McEwen, an icon of the modern concepts of human stress and it's real-life implications. Contributing author Dr. Peggie Williamson and I used Bruce's advice and his generous stack of resources to give our stress chapter a major refresh and update. You will find that the engaging story-of-stress approach remains, but with the more recent parts of that story reflected with greater clarity and relevance.

We need not let the concepts of stress be stressors themselves in our teaching and learning. Using the stress chapter in Anatomy & Physiology—a reader favorite—can help us all better understand the pivotal role stress can have in wellness and disease.

Your Modular Anatomy & Physiology Textbook

Ever dreamed of rearranging the order of topics in your course. That is, have you ever wanted to shift the order of topics as they are presented in your textbook to fit the way you tell your story of the human body? Without the obstacles of assigning a half-chapter here and the other half-chapter there—and possibly causing some students to get a bit lost?

Yeah, me too. That's why I've worked hard to move away from the gigantic-chapter model we see in most A&P textbooks to the modular model in our Anatomy & Physiology textbook. Instead of the usual 20-something large chapters commonly seen, our textbook has 48 chapters—but about the same number of pages as all the others. That is, those gigantic chapters have been broken down into smaller bits.

Besides the advantage of making our reading assignments less intimidating for students, the arrangement of concepts in smaller chapters also means that it is far easier for any instructor to move things around a bit to better suit their particular telling of the A&P story. 

For example, because the introduction to homeostasis is its own short chapter, faculty have the choice to move it's place in the course to the very beginning—before all those directional terms and cavities, and so forth Or one could move it a bit later in the course, after the foundational chemistry, cell, and tissue coverage to just prior to beginning covering the first body system. 

The short stress chapter could be moved earlier or later in the course, without having to separate it out of another larger chapter that covers other topics as well. 

One could even decide to have students learn the appendicular skeleton first, before getting to that intimidating skull and vertebral column. 

If you've not looked at the Patton Anatomy & Physiology text in a while, this might be a good time to check it out and think about it's modular structure may be a better fit for your A&P course.

You may want to learn more about the story of our smaller chapters by reading these brief posts:

• Chunking Content Provides Flexibility
• Reducing Text Anxiety
• Chunking Chapters - By the Numbers
• Homeostasis Deserves Its Own Chapter

Pandemic Scramble: Keeping It Simple

In my opinion, the big mistake that professors commonly make when moving an on-campus course to remote teaching is to make things more complicated than they need to be. That unnecessary complexity stems from the idea that one must take their entire course, including every element and detail, and move it more or less "as is" to an online environment. I think we get much better outcomes if we strive to keep it simple.

First, "remote" need not always be "online." There are a lot of learning opportunities to be had with reading and retrieval practice assignments from the Patton Anatomy & Physiology textbook. Students have invested a lot in acquiring this resource and a large team has worked together to make it an effective learning tool. Now's a great time to do better by our students by helping them engage fully in both reading and raiding their textbook. 

Second, now is a great time to revisit our learning outcomes and compare those to our course design. Most of us keep adding more expected outcomes, and therefore more content, to our courses over the years. As we consider various learning activities, we often add them rather than replace existing activities. Our course becomes bloated, complex, and heavier than it needs to be. So my advice is to prune, prune, prune to the main outcomes—the truly essential concepts—of our A&P course. Then, and only then, are we ready to move to remote teaching.

Third, rather than simply digitize our course components—recording lectures, converting tests and quizzes to online formats, etc.—we should rethink our course design. I suggest trimming back on what we are telling and showing showing students and rely more on their own discovery. And resisting the urge to use every last one of the cool toys that our instructional designers are helping us to discover.

What I mean by that is focusing our recorded lectures on the hard-to-understand "pain points" of A&P. And even then, we should consider trimming our narrative down to half or less of that 50-minute time block that we are used to. Then taking those shorter lectures and chunking them into even smaller, bite-sized pieces.

We can also substitute those occasional, mind-bending summative tests with frequent, low-stakes formative tests by using the our learning management system's online quizzing engine. This leverages the learning benefits of retrieval practice by shifting the work of learning to the student—where it belongs. This approach also makes light work of learning, thus avoiding a burdensome load during this time of stress and uncertainty.

To learn more about these suggestions and more, watch my video presentation Simple Ideas for Moving to Remote Learning or listen to an audio version from my podcast.

Don't forget all the tips I have for you at my Pandemic Teaching Resources page.

Pandemic Scramble: Use Netter's 3D Anatomy Included with Your Textbook

A big part of the still-in-progress "pandemic scramble" of trying to get our A&P course from is on-campus venue to a remote or semi-remote format is grappling with finding a good tool to teach the anatomy that we usually teach in a lab.  Many of my colleagues are looking here and there and everywhere for just the right tool. A tool at an affordable price.

Guess what? If you and your students are using the Patton Anatomy & Physiology textbook in your course, you already have a great tool! At no extra cost! Really. No new licenses. No subscriptions. No extra fees. Not only that, there's nothing for you to arrange in order for your students to have it. They already have it!

Open the book and on the page facing the inside front cover, you'll see the scratch-off label for Netter's 3D Anatomy. Use the access code and you'll unlock a beautiful set of anatomy tools based on the famous illustrations by Frank H. Netter and his successors. Rendered in three dimensions, these amazing illustrations of the structures of the human body can be moved and rotated around easily to see them from any angle. Structures can also be pulled apart and put back together, thus making this platform a true virtual dissection tool. 

Now might be a good time to review my post Netter's 3D Interactive Anatomy Provides a Multimodal Learning Experience.

But how does one use Netter's 3D Anatomy in teaching a course—especially when trying to replicate an in-lab learning experience? There are many options, but here are a few to spark your own creative solutions:

• Use your "lab list" of required structures to identify in a dissection—or develop such a list—and assign students to find them, just as they would in a "wet" dissection.
  
  
• Consider having students take screen shots of their work and compile their own "guide to the body."
  
  
• Take your own screen shots—perhaps even a narrated video screen shot—to guide students through each region you'd like to have them "dissect" on their own.
  
  
• Use captured screen shots to produce a virtual dissection quiz.
  
  
• Assign students a set of structures to "teach" the class, and let them share their screens and walk the rest of the class through their assigned structures. 

I use Snagit by TechSmith for my screen captures—both still and video—because I've become comfortable with its many features, such as easy markups of screen captures. However, you can use any screen capture tool—including the one probably already installed in your system.

Have any other ideas for using Netter's 3D Anatomy in your course? Just go to the bottom of this post at the Anatomy & Physiology blog and share your idea!

Don't forget all the tips I have for you at my Pandemic Teaching Resources page.

Pandemic Scramble: Use Your Included Online A and P Course

As we scramble this summer—and possibly through the fall—to shift our A&P course from its usual on-campus venue to remote teaching, let's not forget the tools that we already have at hand. Why go out looking for new tools when we already have all or most of what we need right there in our toolbox?

One such tool that we may already have handy is Anatomy & Physiology Online. This product is packaged at no extra cost with many versions of the Anatomy & Physiology textbook. Check which version has been adopted in your course to see if the online course is included. If it's not included, check with your Elsevier education consultant about your options. But mostly likely, you and your students already have it!

Anatomy & Physiology Online is a ready-to-go online experience for your students! Let me say that again. Ready. To. Go.

There's nothing to prepare, organize, plan—nothing. 

Well, okay, there is one thing you have to do. That is to decide whether you want to import the course into your learning management system and operate it there or instead operate it within Elsevier's learning management system (Evolve).

As I recommend in my free eBook Pandemic Teaching: A Survival Guide for College Faculty, a good strategy is to trim back the "extras" and focus on the core concepts that students really need to take with them into their next courses. Anatomy & Physiology Online does that for you! Yep, it's already aimed at those core principles from the textbook in a manner well-suited for most courses.

Yeah, okay, maybe if you'd created an online course, you'd have done this or that a bit differently. Perhaps added a bit here or left that other thing out. But this is a pandemic scramble, right? We don't have time now to do it perfectly. But if you do have extra time—an amusing concept—nothing is stopping you from adding other course elements alongside Anatomy & Physiology Online.

So why invent a wheel you and your students already have? Anatomy & Physiology Online seems custom-made for this pandemic scramble we're in right now!

If you need help, contact your Elsevier education consultant any time.

Pandemic Scramble: Adapting to Remote Learning, Suddenly

Well, friends, I'll bet most of us didn't see this pandemic coming. Not to the extent of impact it's had on the teaching and learning of anatomy and physiology. But it's here and we're going to roll with the punches and deliver a positive and productive learning experience for our students, right?

To help us all get ourselves organized and on the right track as we adapt to suddenly having to move our face-to-face course homes to a remote venue out there in the vast expanse of space, I've assembled a few "get started" resources to help you adapt.

Quickly Moving to Remote Delivery—The Musical

This is an "emergency" bonus episode of my podcast (The A&P Professor). The brief audio presentation presents nineteen tips on how to get started. And there are three A&P songs from my friend and fellow A&P teacher, Greg Crowther. For a sing-along! We could all use a light-hearted sing-along about sodium ions right now, am I right?

Go to theAPprofessor.org/64b for an audio player plus a lot of links and other resources. Or subscribe in your favorite podcast player and look for Episode 64b.

There is also an earlier episode called Mid-Winter Winterizing of Our Courses meant to help prepare us before this all flooded in upon us. Many of these prep tips are still useful, even as the metaphorical flood waters continue to rise all around us. Go to theAPprofessor.org/63b

TEACH Instructor Resources for Anatomy & Physiology

This little gem has been there all along! Really. In your Evolve (Instructor) Resources for Anatomy & Physiology 10th Edition.  TEACH has all kinds of tips and strategies that can be used to generate ideas for learning activities that can be adapted for remote teaching.

Included in TEACH are:

• Lesson Plans
• Student Handouts
• PowerPoint Slides
• Pretest Questions and Pretest Answers

If you don't have an Evolve account, then just go to evolve.elsevier.com and click on Sign In in the upper right, then click on Create Account near the bottom of the form that pops up. Make sure you apply for a faculty account. It will take a day or so to verify your faculty status. In the search box on the home page, or when you click Catalog at the top, type in Evolve Resources for Anatomy & Physiology 10th Edition, then request access. The TEACH resources will be listed in the Instructor Resources tab.

But wait! There's more...

Teaching Tips

Also found in your  Evolve (Instructor) Resources for Anatomy & Physiology 10th Edition, a separate sheet of advice—simply called Teaching Tips—supplements the TEACH resources to spark ideas for your transition to remote teaching.  

Besides the TEACH resources and Teaching Tips, there are all kinds of other resources in your  Evolve (Instructor) Resources for Anatomy & Physiology 10th Edition:

• Audience Response Questions—meant for "clicker" systems in a classroom, they can be easily adapted for online presentations to spark student thinking during an online "lecture" or demonstration.
• Image Collection—contains (labeled and unlabeled) jpeg and PowerPoint versions of each image from the textbook.
• Test Bank—can be a great resource for quickly constructing online quizzes and reviews. Consider using them for Testing-as-Teaching, a type of retrieval practice mentioned later in this post.

The A&P Professor

I already mentioned The A&P Professor podcast, but there is lot more there for you than those "emergency" bonus episodes. It's worth exploring the whole list for practical tips and advice as you move to remote teaching. The great thing about podcast episodes is that you can listen to them while you are wiping down the surfaces in your home, making your family's meals, and rearranging your stacks of toilet paper. Here are a few selected topics to start with:

• Advice for online teaching
• 50: Connecting in the Distance Course Special (general advice for staying connected to students remotely—especially important at this time)
• 52: The Case for Case Studies (case studies are a great way to teach remotely)
• 19: Caring for Students Helps Them Succeed
• Handling the chaos
• 63: Mistakes in Teaching Anatomy & Physiology (yep, if we're gonna make a lot of mistakes, this will be when—learn how to handle that)
• 51: The Case for Transparency (why being up front and honest with our students about what's happening is important)
• Testing-as-Teaching (retrieval practice)
• 01:Spaced Retrieval Practice
• 02: Testing As a Teaching Strategy

Besides the podcast, The A&P Professor website includes other resources, such as online seminars for teaching anatomy and physiology. Here are a couple that may be helpful as this time:

• Online Lecture Previews (can be adapted for any kind of online presentation)
• Testing as Teaching (randomized testing to allow multiple attempts—using retrieval practice for learning)

Free eText

VitalSource and Elsevier have partnered to provide eText access to students. To assist students at disrupted semester-calendar schools who are losing access to course materials due to COVID-19 campus closures, VitalSource has been joined by Elsevier to offer free access to etexts to students whose classes have moved online from March 16 through May 25, 2020. Students will be able to access the expansive catalog of eTexts from participating publishers through the VitalSource Bookshelf app effective immediately.

• See the announcement
• FAQs for students and educators
• List of publishers and resellers who are supporting this effort
• For students who need assistance accessing free etexts

Besides this being useful to students who are "stuck without" their textbooks, it can offer additional opportunities to connect with students in a remote environment. 

For example, something that I do in an online course I teach is let my students "subscribe" to the highlights and notes in my own copy of the eText version of the textbook. 

I can mark areas of particular importance, add commentary on what they should be looking at in a section or illustration, and clarify concepts that commonly challenge student learning. This could be particularly useful in "holding the hand" of a confused and dazed student who is trying to adapt to a new learning environment.

Coloring Book

I've been seeing a lot of advice to folks in general, telling them to sit around as a family and color in their coloring books. That makes a lot of sense in terms of diffusing stress and connecting in a positive way with those with whom we are house-bound. 

Why not suggest to students to do that, but use Mosby's Anatomy & Physiology Coloring Book as one of their coloring books? 

In a post from my blog The A&P Student, I recommend coloring as a way to study anatomy and physiology in a new and fun way—that also calms the nerves. So their nerves will become calm as they study their nerves! Check out Coloring Books Are Powerful Study Tools (And They Help Manage Stress).

Okay, whew! That's enough for now, eh? Don't hesitate to reach out if I can be of help to you.