Read your textbook options, noting a few things about each. Note the various teaching methods that each textbook provides, such as visual images that demonstrate your lessons, background information that helps students reinforce their foundation and numerous sample problems for your students to solve.
Make a note of which textbooks offer additional learning tools, such as online labs or multimedia tools. Review these materials and evaluate their effectiveness. Ask yourself if the information is presented in simple, easy to understand terms. Ask yourself if the information reinforces the printed information in the textbook. Solve a few of the questions to make sure that the resources are user-friendly and easy to work with. Also, note whether the additional resources require your students to pay for access.
Write a few sample lesson plans and try to incorporate the information from the textbook. Decide whether you can efficiently add the information to your lesson plans and actually add something to your lesson.
Read the teacher's guides for each textbook. These guides should offer you a comprehensive teaching perspective to use with the textbook, as well as solutions to the problems presented in the book. Work through some of the problems yourself, making sure that the methods the book uses and the solutions they present correspond to your teaching style.
Log on to the Internet and visit the websites for each textbook. Search the forums for information from other teachers who already use the book. Review their opinions of the text and determine if their opinions are significant to your teaching style. For instance, if someone suggests that the book offers too few word problems and you decide that you need more word problems in your textbook, you may decide to move on to another text.
Select the book that best meets your teaching needs and then use it for a semester. Watch how your students interact with the book and whether it seems to help them from lesson to lesson. After the semester, ask your students if the book was helpful and if they were able to use the book successfully.