Earning a perfect score on the Advanced Placement calculus exam is extremely rare — only 12 students did it last year.
One of those test-takers was teen Cedrick Argueta, a student at Lincoln High School in Los Angeles. All of Argueta’s classmates passed the test too — an impressive feat — and something his teacher Anthony Yom has achieved for three years, the Los Angeles Times reported this month.
But Yom is not alone. Steve Kuninsky, an AP Biology teacher at the Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science and Technology in Lawrenceville, Georgia, also had all of his students taking the test pass last year. It’s the first year it’s happened in his 12 years of teaching the course, he says.
“I know part of it is their responsibility, but I really look at those scores as an assessment of how I taught the class,” he says. “I think that adds just a little bit of intensity and pressure to the teaching because you really want the kids to get it.”
AP teachers really need to know their subject, because of the depth of information covered in the course, he says, which requires a lot of preparation.
High school AP teachers can use the following tips from other educators this spring to prepare their students for exams.
— Keep students motivated: Getting students through the course is a challenge for Kuninsky because there is so much to learn.
[Get tips for high school teachers to keep second-term seniors motivated.]
“It’s a fine line between preparing the kids and overwhelming the kids,” he says. His goal isn’t to cover 100 percent of the content — that would be impossible — but to get through as much as he can, and teach what he does teach well. His goal is to challenge his students without overwhelming them.
The nature of how he teaches the course helps with this, he says, as the content he teaches in the second semester is a little less intense. He also gives lots of pep talks that keep students’ eyes on the prize, including the potential for college credit, and gives them feedback so they know they are doing well.
“A lot of time in the spring I spend time making connections to what we’ve learned in the fall,” Kuninsky says. He may incorporate content on genetics, for example, that was taught in the fall, in a spring lesson about evolution to show students how it all ties together.
— Practice test prep: Throughout the course Kuninsky also incorporates test-prep strategies, like writing, note-taking and summarizing.
And he works to familiarize his students with the exam and how it is scored, he says. He may use questions from previous AP exams on tests he gives during the year.
Teachers can find course descriptions, standards, released free-response questions and more on the College Board website.
— Leave several weeks for in-class review: Kuninsky tries to leave the last two to three weeks of the course before the test for review, including administering at least one in-class full-length practice test. To have the time to review, he needs to make a plan for what he is going to teach for the entire year in August.
Sticking to her yearlong plan to teach the course can be challenging, especially when unexpected closures occur, says Kathy Palma, who teaches AP World History at Staten Island Technical High School in New York.
Find out [how teachers make up for lost time after snow days.]
She adds extra days into her teaching plans as a buffer when mapping out the year. Usually she’ll use these days for a quiz, movie or something else supplemental, but if needed she can teach new material.
Kuninsky likes to tell his students they don’t need to worry about getting all the points possible. They just need at least 70 percent to be in good shape to earn a passing score.
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3 Spring To-Do’s for High School AP Teachers originally appeared on usnews.com
