- Brush up on everything. Like any world history class it's about breadth more than depth, but you gotta know a lot. The students will have questions, you'll need to have answers
- Get ahead when you can. Like any class you'll find that you have some lulls, and even though they are very rare and few and far between, use them to plan ahead. If you can get the unit planned out before it starts (at least get all of the big things down on paper or a calendar) you'll have that guide to keep you focused and on point.
- The AP handbook is great, use it. Wish I had gotten it before Oct like I did. All the info is online, but it's nice to have it all in one place.
- Use other people's stuff. There are plenty of great AP teachers out there that have created websites. Use them for help, notes, lesson ideas, anything and everything. I would not have survived if not for the websites of Mr. Freeman and Ms. Osborn (Thank you if you ever read this)
- Give the kids as many examples of test questions and essay writings, and DBQs as you can. This might be the most important. Twice a week, we'll do a question of the day, where we'll take a question and break it down as a class, working backwards to eliminate wrong answers and explaining why they're wrong. I know that's helped my students a lot as we've gone through the year.
- Same with the writing essays/DBQs. Give them lots of examples, work together as a class to break them down. It's more training than teaching them. For me with AP World, I'm their first AP class for nearly all of them (or one of the first). Most need to be trained and taught how to write for Social Studies and that it is vastly different than writing for English. It's been a battle that last part, but a necessary evil you'll need to fight if you want your students to do well come May.
- Be upfront and explain with your students why you're doing things the way you are. The collegeboard has its own way of viewing its content and asking their questions. Hopefully you'd do this no matter what level you're teaching, but it really helps with the buy-in.
- Make it a team atmosphere, or at least it's us working together mentality. We do lots of groupwork, we rely on one another, we vent when we get ambiguous questions from the collegeboard. Don't allow the students to think that they need to do this all on their own. Be a cohesive unit
- And lastly, and this might be the most important actually: do whatever it takes to show that history is more than just memorizing the who, what, where, when. For most of their Social Studies classes, AP students have been able to rely on their strong memories, or strong study habits to go through and remember all of the key "vital" stats of all things history and allows them to coast through. Well, that no longer is good enough. Everything is about the how and why. Why did these events happen? How do they compare to other parts of the world? Why did an event have the impact that it did? How did these events/people/whatever effect the global landscape? What were the political, economical, cultural impacts? Not so easy to simply give one to two word answers for those huh. My students really struggled with this, and it took me a month or so to really grasp where the disconnect was when my students struggled (and since most had never ever struggled with any class, this caused freak outs from students and parents). Part of me wishes I had started Day 1 to try and push this change in thinking, but I am glad to have seen my students (and for some it is the first time they've ever faced this) face through adversity and rather than be frustrated, fight through it and improve. It is never easy to relearn (or learn for the first time) how to take notes, how to study, how to ask for help, and how to ask the right questions. You'll need to be this guide and cheerleader as much as the content master.
Well that is just a few things, hopefully if anyone is in my shoes, this will help. It is overwhelming, but it can be done. Even by a still neophyte teacher like myself. Thanks for reading along
