Category Archives: AP

My Fully Self Paced Unit Was So Successful That Now I Question My Existence As a Teacher

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After Christmas break I surveyed my AP Psych class to find out what they wanted to do more of  in the upcoming quarter. I am sure that none of you are surprised to see that they wanted less “live” class and more self paced work. 

So to honor where they were and to also to give myself a challenge I created a 2 week self paced unit on Human Development. I thought a human development unit would make a  perfect self paced unit because the content is completely relatable when compared to other units on brain anatomy or statistics. 

Here is what I came up with  – Developmental Psychology Learning Menu. The learning menu consisted of:

  • 1 – Entire unit to read and outline

  • 3 –  formative multiple choice tests assessments 

  • 2 – 30+ minute podcasts with Flipgrids 

  • 5 – Crash Course Type Videos (some in Edpuzzle) 

  • A Jamboard 

  • A Schoology Discussion Board 

What did I learn?

  • Creating a self paced unit is a LOT of work on the front end. In order for this to be fully self paced all of the work needed to be ready at once. Instead of pacing out the work I chose to give it all at once so that students could choose the way they wanted to tackle the unit. Some did all the reading first and then did the learning menu, some went through the human development chronologically doing the readings and assignments accordingly. I like the way that each student got to choose how to pace out their own unit and I loved that some chose to do it in small groups. But to pull it off meant hours of preparing on the front end. I know I do not always have the time to plan lessons like this. I was more of a pace car than a coach. 

  • Students scored nearly the same on the unit exam as they did for units taught more synchronously. This is a Catch 22 for me – one one hand it makes me question if my entire existence as a teacher matters, and on the other hand I am proud of the way I was able to customize this unit in order to give them more control over their experience. 

  • Students engaged more with each other when I backed off of their discussion boards. The biggest sign for me that this lesson worked was not their test scores but they way they used the discussion boards and flip girds to give each other real feedback and encouragement. Granted I made them leave comments, I found their comments to me much better then when they knew that I was also commenting and monitoring, I am not sure what that’s about but I liked it. 

Where am I going from here?

  • Plot twist – our next unit will be almost fully synchronous. I am NOT abandoning the self paced unit forever but part of the reason why i think it worked was that it was novel. I think that if I did this for the rest of the year the engagement would slowly wane. After this next unit I will survey them to find out how they have the best of both worlds (synchronous and asynchronous) in the following units.

Where are you all with balancing these two types of units?


How Do Students Think About History?

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Once or twice a year the Social Studies Department gets together for some professional development to help us teach our students to think like professional historians.

Background: about three years ago the Social Studies Department shifted the focus to a more skills-based curriculum. Writing and using discipline-specific skills are now emphasized as opposed to old-school rote memorization of names, dates, and events. The cognitive skills we want our students to master include cause and effect, change and continuity over time, etc., and are included in our department writing rubrics. If students effectively practice these historical thinking skills, they will learn all the necessary content in a more meaningful way while becoming coherent thinkers and stronger writers.
What does this sort of thinking actually look like? How do we know our students are demonstrating these cognitive skills in a fluent and meaningful way? How can we hold each other accountable to properly teach these skills?

Here is what we do: once every semester (or two) the Social Studies Department does the following PD:

  1. One teacher is selected in advance to bring 3 previously graded student essays to our department meeting. The teacher pulls one high scored essay, one medium, one low, and then scrambles the order. Each essay was scored by the teacher as per our department writing rubric.
  2. We blind-score the essays.
  3. Each teacher shares out while the rubric is projected on the LCD projector. Here is what the rubric looks like at the end of the process.

The benefits of doing this are:

  1. Our grading is calibrated so our students get a fair grade regardless of which teacher they have.
  2. The process facilitates deep and enriching discussion in our department meeting. Some of us will disagree on one particular category, or we might comment on a passage in one of the essays. The rubric guides our discussion of student work. By the end of the meeting, we have gained more clarity on how we want our students to think about historical events and how to plan future units accordingly.
In general, this is the same methodology used by the College Board to train AP Readers to score AP exams. However, in our department meetings, we take it a step further with in-depth discussions of student work and our subsequent changes in the units we teach. Ask some of our history teachers what they think about this process and the value it brings to their instructional planning. You may want to try this as well…