My AP Statistics Plans for Notes and Homework

 I'm teaching AP Statistics for the first time this year. I'm using Math Medic for class activities and notes. Math Medic is my go-to for all of my math classes. I don't have Math Medic's assessment platform for AP Stats, but I felt I needed more practice for students than just the check your understanding questions. We do have a textbook, but it isn't easily organized by topic, so I wanted another source for practice questions.  

I had heard Skew the Script referenced regularly in the AP Stats communities that I'm a part of, so decided that I would use their practice sets. Over the summer, I planned out every day of the year to make sure we would get through all of the content before the AP exam. 

Both Math Medic and Skew the Script provide answer keys to each of their lessons, which is helpful to me as a first year Stats teacher.

In my year-long plans, I include the name and number of the Math Medic lesson and the lesson number of the Skew the Script lesson as well as the topic numbers from the AP Statistics CED. 

Here are my AP Statistics Unit Plans. 

A New Way to Do Test Corrections for AP Environmental Science

Curves on Unit tests in AP classes is always a hot topic in the AP Facebook groups...at least the ones that I'm a part of. For the AP Unit tests that I give, I give the square root curve. Yes, I know it's a big curve, but I am determined to keep these AP classes accessible to any student who would like to take them, and this curve is part of what helps make that happen. The curve doesn't come for free though. Students must complete test corrections to "earn" the curve. I want to do whatever I can to help them actually learn this material. 

I used to have students explain why the right answer was the right answer for the multiple choice questions, but many students struggled with it and tended to just restate the question and answer or would write an incorrect explanation, which isn't helpful.  So now, for each question they get wrong, they write the essential knowledge statement that they feel goes with the question. (And this adds another use to the document I give them with all the LOs and EKs for the unit.) I have decided to expand that to them also using statements from their video notes and review book, so they don't write the same EK more than once. 

To help students narrow down which EK to use, I download the assessment that I've made on AP Classroom and then use adobe acrobat to add which topic each question is from. Students take the MCQ portion of their unit tests in the lockdown browser of AP Classroom, but when they do corrections (in my classroom), I give them the printed copy of MCQs to work with. 

Even though they take their test through AP Classroom, I have them also bubble their answers into a Zipgrade form. After the test, I print out their results from Zipgrade which includes their answers and what the correct answers are. This way, they know exactly which questions they need to do corrections on. They need this since I only allow access to their scores on AP Classroom, no question information. I print a few sets of MCQs, since only a few students come in to do corrections at a time, so there are typically enough copies to share. 

I have been liking this new way of doing test corrections far more than the old way, and at least students are writing true statements on their corrections!

AP Environmental Science LOs and EKs by Unit

In past years I had been using another AP Environmental teacher's documents that outlined the learning objectives and essential knowledge statements for each unit. I had some students who appreciated seeing the list of key concepts that they needed to know for the units as they prepared for tests. When I tried to use the first unit document at the end of the summer, I realized that the link was no longer active. I searched through the AP Environmental teachers Facebook group and found a spreadsheet with all of the information for every unit. I thought I might try to use ChatGPT to help me remake the documents by unit. This turned out to be a bigger challenge than I anticipated. By the beginning of the school year, I had rough drafts of each of the documents, but so far, only the first 6 units are finished as final documents. 

In these documents, the learning objectives have been converted into "I can" statements, organized by topics with essential knowledge statements below. At the end of the document there are tables that include the key enduring understandings and science practices for that unit. 

I've turned out to use the documents far more than I thought I would for this year's class. These documents are the first pages in the packet I hand out to students at the beginning of the unit. As we are reviewing for the unit test, I make note of some of the key essential knowledge statements based on the questions that will be on the test. Students highlight and make notes as well on their copies. I also started using the document for test corrections. This needs a blog post of its own though. 

One other note. I teach at a Christian school and last year, my scores for Biblical integration were not stellar. I was surprised, since for me I think of AP Environmental Science as a way to learn how God expects us to take care of the earth. To me, it's all Biblical. Part of my change to be more explicit this year, was to add a verse to these documents that I felt fit well with the topics of the units. Obviously, this will not work for all classes, but if you want to use these documents, feel free to edit after you make your copy of the document. 

Here are links to the documents that are final draft.

Unit 1 "I can" statements

Unit 2 "I can" statements

Unit 3 "I can" statements

Unit 4 "I can" statements

Unit 5 "I can" statements

Unit 6 "I can" statements

APES Sustainability Lab

Right after Thanksgiving Break, we're doing the Sustainability AP Lab AKA Tragedy of the Commons. 

Last year, we used Kristi Schertz's Happy Fishing Lab that you can find here. The only modification that I made was that our fishing poles were straws with paper clips to catch Fruit Loops instead of mini marshmallows. Well, that and we used way too many fish. I'll be using AP's suggested number of fish this time!

This year, we'll still start with the data tables from the Happy Fishing Lab, but it will be Part 1 of the AP Sustainability Lab. Then we'll move onto the actual AP lab for Part 2. I put together this Google Sheet to help students keep track of their data for part 2. I like to keep all of the class data together so students can see what other groups are doing. I also just add another tab each year by making a copy of the master tab. I have some Sheets from labs in AP Bio that have nearly 10 years of data!

The sheet is set up for four groups of four, but the groupings could always be copied and pasted for more groups, or even multiple tabs made. 

AP Environmental Science Cemetery Demographics

There is a wonderful, large, old cemetery less than a five minute drive from my school. This year I decided that we'd take a trip to the Albany Rural Cemetery to gather data for APES Lab #5. Because the cemetery is so close, I think we can gather lots of data during one of our 80 minute classes.

I want students to be able to focus on the graphs made and what they mean in terms of demographic transition and mortality rates. I started with Kristi Schertz's spreadsheet, and then converted it to work with College Board's math to go with the Cemetery Lab. This way, students just need to enter their raw data and the sheet will do the calculations for them. Then they can focus on what all of the numbers mean, and I don't need to give quite as much class time to calculations since we're taking an entire block class to collect the data.

We haven't used the sheet yet, so there may need to be some corrections made to formulas, but I wanted to share what I have just in case it would be helpful to another class that's about to do this lab. If you are wondering, the initials in cells B1 to L1 are my students' initials so they each know where to enter their data. If you'd like, you could add rows for each of your students, or assign lab groups to each column instead.

Here's the spreadsheet.

I also made a data collection sheet for students to bring to the cemetery. My thought was that each student would collect 25 dates from pre-1900 and 25 from post-1900, which gives us a total of 550 pieces of data. I made a dashed line in the middle-ish of the paper so they could aim to get about half female and half male data as well. 

Year Long Revised Plans for Pre-AP Algebra 2 and My Rational

Last year, I agreed to teach Pre-AP Algebra 2 as an overload about two weeks before the school year began. Although I had taught Algebra 2 before, it had been over 20 years ago. I definitely felt like a first year teacher as I was teaching AP Environmental Science for the first time and was switching from the Precalculus curriculum that I had been teaching to the AP Precalculus course. The order and focus of AP Precalculus was different enough from my class before, that I pretty much needed to scrap my old curriculum and start over...fortunately Math Medic had put a a whole set of lessons together. All of this to say, I was strapped for planning time. As a result, I followed the Pre-AP Algebra 2 lessons as presented by College Board, and just found or created lessons only for the topics that the curriculum said were not addressed.

Here were some of my frustrations: 

1. Although the lessons were described in detail in the teacher materials, not all of the materials needed were compiled for the student facing documents, specifically, the formative assessments. And not all of the parts of the lessons were in a presentation. Some of the questions could be presented verbally, but for many of the lessons, I needed to put together a Google Slides presentation. This was different from Pre-AP Biology, where all parts of the student lessons were provided as well as Google Slides presentations for lessons as needed.

2. The lessons were great at getting the students thinking, but I felt like they were missing consolidation. Students could work through the lesson, but in the end didn't know/realize what they were doing. The Pre-AP units will tell you what percent of the topics are covered and I'd be surprised that the course map would say 40% of instructional time was covered by model lessons in Unit 1 when in the unit outline, there was only one learning objective out of 9 that was not addressed by the model lessons. Maybe the percentage was lower because the lessons were missing consolidation or maybe because students needed more time to practice? I think this is the case, but I'm not sure of what College Board's reason was for the difference in % vs. learning objectives covered.

3. Besides needing consolidation, there was an assumption that students remembered everything they learned in Algebra 1, like completing the square and different forms for the equation of a parabola. My students definitely needed a refresher. I learned this as we went through the year. I needed to remind myself that this was not a complete curriculum, and by unit 3, I was adding lots of refreshers, lessons and practice. 

By Unit 4 (Trigonometry) I decided to take an entirely different approach. I went to Math Medic for most of the lessons. I also figured this would be a good experience for my students as they would be in my AP Precalculus class the next year, where the class is primarily taught through Math Medic lessons. I then tucked the Pre-AP model lessons where I thought they worked best in the progression. Occasionally, the Pre-AP lessons would be used as an introduction, sometimes as additional practice. I was much more purposeful about consolidation. 

This summer, I decided to give Pre-AP Algebra 2 a complete makeover, including refresher lessons, for topics that students needed to recall, just in time for the lesson that would take that topic deeper. I added in Math Medic lessons for each of the learning objectives, and where I decided that using just a Pre-AP model lesson was sufficient, I added in consolidation. My consolidation included a page with a box for quick notes, Math Medic style. Usually, I would have boxes for quick notes for two lessons on a page so as to not waste paper. I kept all of the topics in each of their set Pre-AP units, and mainly in order, since I do love Pre-AP's assessments and wanted to be able to use all of them. These made-over plans also include homework for extra practice. Sometimes I just used the formative assessments from Pre-AP for homework practice, and sometimes from our textbook, which is Big Ideas Algebra 2 by Larson and Boswell. 

Besides Pre-AP's learning checkpoints and performance tasks, I also give my own quizzes and tests. Problem-attic.com is my go to test-building site. Besides using Algebra 2 Regents questions from the site to build assessments (I am in New York), I would often go to Illustrative Math questions. Those questions are great thinking questions and often matched well with the thinking that the Pre-AP Algebra 2 lessons were geared toward. 

Here's my Algebra 2 Plans for the year. I did remove the time for each lesson column from the Pre-AP template. Each of the Tuesday/Thursday classes are 80 minutes and every other Friday when we meet is 60 minutes.

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Reflections on the EFFL Workshop by Math Medic

I've just completed 106 hours of professional development this summer and decided that if I'm truly going to apply what I've learned, I need to reflect on the takeaways before I forget them. The summer began with the AP Biology Read in Kansas City, MO which accounted for 70 hours. Last week, I participated in an online APSI for AP Environmental Science for another 30 hours. Today was the last day of a 6 hour, online workshop by Math Medic on EFFL (Experience First, Formalize Later). Since this workshop is the freshest in my mind, I'll start with this one. 

I love Math Medic. First of all, they write a whole set of lessons that correlate to the AP Precalculus course. And secondly, they teach math the way I have always wanted to teach math...students learn by doing some activity that they can relate to (Experience First), but points them to the main ideas of the lesson. Anyway, by the end of the year last year I was also using Math Medic lessons for Pre-AP Algebra 2, especially for the way they consolidated the lessons (Formalize Later).

So, here are my takeaways: 

1. Project a blank "Experience" page that I direct students to write in certain work that their group has done. Last year, I just left them blank as I gave margin notes and pointed to student work up on the boards (my classes use whiteboards or windows to write their group work), but the work was hard to see.

2. Have students write the margin notes as I do, and they should write those notes in a different colored writing utensil just like I do, to help the notes stand out. 

3. Only focus on the challenging questions from the Experience page and chose different students to explain their thinking before connecting their explanation to the margin notes that are pointing to the main idea.

4. Know the main ideas before the lesson, so that I can better ask focusing questions that point students to the main idea versus just pointing then to how to get the right answer. Connect their thinking to the main idea(s).  Here's a Math Medic blog post about focusing versus funneling questions.

5. Taking this workshop also gave me the idea to share the essential knowledge statement(s) that go with the lesson and work with the students to determine what would be the most helpful information to write in the quick notes section. There are essential knowledge statements for me to use for both AP Precalculus and for Pre-AP Algebra 2.

I'm excited to see how my math classes will go in the coming school year while using these practices.