Friday, March 24, 2017
AP Class Troubles
I was wondering if anyone has had any experience with making AP classes more accessible to more students. This year we have opened up our AP courses to more students than usual, in the hopes that the students would rise to the occasion and work harder to excel with the curriculum. Instead, I am finding that many of my students are failing these courses and I am not sure what to do about this. I have frequently observed the classes, and the content is very high level to prepare the students to pass the AP exam. However, the teaching is exemplary and the students appear engaged, they just seem to be struggling to "get" the material being taught. Many of them seem overwhelmed, and while they are doing well in their other courses, they continue to have problems with the AP ones. I am hoping that someone has strategies that they have seen used to help AP students succeed with such difficult content. Help!
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Preparation for AP classes should start early. When we had similar problems years ago when I taught AP calculus, I requested that students be placed in Calculus and AP calculus simultaneously taking two math courses. It worked since students had more time to work to that level of rigor. However, the district removed the calculus course and wanted students to move from pre-cal to AP calculus. In such a case, you might want to have the same teacher teach pre-cal and AP calculus. The AP calculus teacher can bring in some of the rigor in the pre-cal class and make them ready for the next year.
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