The World Global

2009 On Reflection--AP World History Practices: What's Worked II

II. Straight Talk

This argument will also likely prove contentious. But I have found that with an AP class, avoiding eduspeak euphemism is essential.

When I first took over one of the AP courses at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, my first cohort of students had been selected through the simple process of teacher recommendations. They had not been vetted in any way, had not been required to take any entrance examination and had not been required to sign a commitment form of any kind.

You can imagine how overjoyed I was.

Regardless, the majority of the students were quite good (with some notable exceptions--there were failures and students had to be dropped from the course) but they exhibited varied talents and tendencies depending on who their freshman Global History instructor was.

One of those instructors is a cherished colleague and a good friend of mine, and we have talked about my thesis today on a number of occasions: I think he has moved a bit my way and I a bit his, but both of us remain firmly rooted in our beliefs in this issue. (Which is too bad for him, because he's wrong.)

TBC...

2009 On Reflection--AP World History Practices: What's Worked I

Tell me and I forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand.

--Chinese Proverb

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I actually started drafting this post months ago in January, now that the AP World Exam is over, I finally have time to address it. And that can be my first observation: obvious to those of us who teach AP courses, the time commitment involved is sometimes extraordinary. The rewards in terms of watching AP students grow over a year are phenomenal and well worth the price, but the commitment should not be underestimated.

My goal is to list successes and failures--things that have worked and those that have not--from the current year, draw conclusions based on those lists and then suggest adjustments for myself (and perhaps others) for the upcoming year, and subsequent ones. 

For the sake of sanity and brevity, I am going to only list what I consider to be the top 3 successes and failures of the year. I am quite sure that if I let myself go with the "failures", I would jump out my window halfw--.

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What's Worked

1. Multiple Mock AP Exams Test-Prep Sessions

Let's start off with a contentious issue: mock AP Exams and test-prep. I know many teachers who insist that it "isn't our job to teach the kids to take tests" but I maintain that your stance on the issue has to derive from the context in which you teach. There is no moral absolute on test-prep.

I teach in a high-performing, high-needs high school in East Harlem. My students have no access to the many opportunities the economic backgrounds of the kids right across the island on the Upper West Side grant them. Nor do they come from home or school environments which have nurtured a culture of achievement and a familiarity with high stakes testing and study skills. They want to achieve. Their parents want them to achieve. Even our school wants them to achieve, but no one is showing them how to achieve. 

In my view, the buck stops at AP.

Throughout the year I have weekly afternoon sessions during which my APWH students and I focus on multiple choice problem construction and strategies, essay writing strategies and use a test-prep text to drill on both essays and multiple choice problems. As few of my students' families have the resources or know-how to send their children to Kaplan or the Princeton Review, I feel it is essential to provide that service to them. Not only because they are, however much to our chagrin, necessary skills in today's competitive academic world, but also because AP exams are graded against each other, and if my students have to compete with kids from "Josh Lyman's district," I'm going to make sure they are trained in the Connecticut School of going forward.

I'll support my argument with the collected results of the last 3 mock AP exams of the year, which can be found here, here and here. From the second to the fourth and final mock exam, the class average increased from a 3.12 to a 3.96. Because I was the only grader of the exam, I was careful to evaluate my grading based on the predictive tables provided by the Collegeboard that show how multiple-choice scores correlate to eventual AP scores (this is outlined carefully on the final mock page). The students in my class matched the predictive percentages with an almost eerie accuracy, so I was reassured that my grading was close to what my students can expect at from the readers in Colorado this year. I am also reasonably sure that final average of 3.96 will carry over to the real exam. (We'll see. What with the controversy over this year's Comparative question, we may be lucky to average 2.0.)

I wish I had kept the data from the first mock of the year, but more than scores, the completed nature of the students' exams from the first mock to the final one are enough to convince me that practice exams are both necessary and effective in the context of our school.  On the first mock, only about 1/3 of the students in this year's APWH class finished all three essays and approximately 9 (out of 33) failed to write more than one essay. By the 3rd mock, there were only 4 students who did not finish all 3 essays and all students finished all 3 essays by the final mock exam. Obviously, finishing all three essays will improve a student's chance of earning a good score on the exam, but more importantly, all of my students are now prepared for a rigorous college-level examination, the likes of which they will be taking regularly in 3 years.

 Now that they've done it, there's no turning back: they know what they are capable of and can never reasonably deny having the ability to do so. Moreover, they would no longer want to.