APSI Reflection- #SummerLS Challenge 4

It's the last day of our summer AP Institute, learning about the changes for APUSH that we need to take into account for next year.  It's been an exhausting week and we're all ready to be done, especially those of us in FCPS as this extended our already long school year by an extra 4 days.  We're also sitting in a classroom on a Saturday from 8-5, and we'll be here until 5.  No getting out at 4:30 like we all hope!

I'm also blogging this for the #SummerLS or summer learning series that is taking place through the twitter hashtag.  If any fellow educators want to join in, look up Todd Nesloney on twitter and ask to join!

The changes for APUSH seem to be good.  The biggest thing is the change in the DBQ and what students need to do with the documents within the essay.  Rather than just using an analysis of 55% of the documents as in the past, students now need to use ALL of the documents (or at least all minus one) and either discuss the historical context, intended audience, purpose or point of view for each document.  The rubric is going to change, but join the APUSH facebook group or the #APUSH chat on twitter and you should find some resources.  There's also apparently lots on the Teacher Community on AP Central.  So big change for this year is going to be paring down how much lecture we do, to add more time analyzing documents in class and discussing them.

Another big change to the test are the short answer questions.  Students have to answer all of these, and the focus is on answering the prompt, either based on a picture (so a question would be "discuss the point of view of the artist in regards to (historical context)"), a text excerpt, or no stimulus.  2-3 sentences shouldn't be a problem, the real issue in teaching them how to write these is that they're not mini essays.  Maybe start these as warm-ups on index cards to limit their space.

Instead of 2 FRQs, students now write one long essay (the new name) that also mentions historical thinking skills, so we're going to have to specifically name and teach those with our kids so they understand what the questions are asking.

There's definitely going to be some changes in the classroom, but it will be good changes going into more depth with the kids.