Teaching History with Mrs. Byars

This. Course. Is. Insane. That was what I thought a year ago sitting in APSI with Aaron Marsh as he explained, very eloquently, how he managed to teach a critical analysis of 10,000 years of human history, 3 massive writing rubrics, and still managed to give his kids minimal homework. But then again, every AP class is borderline insane. In AP classes and on AP Exams we often ask very young people to do the extraordinary and this year I was excited/scared/terrified/thrilled/pumped to take on that challenge of helping students meet those goals. AP World History is often the first AP course students at my school take. To be honest, I am not the biggest fan of the AP model but I LOVE the content and skills that an AP course has to offer. When given the chance to teach this course, I jumped at it but, as I usually do I went in with some crazy ideas. I approached the class with three clear goals: Goal #1 : I wanted to give minimal homework and outside reading to ensure my athletes and...

I've talked a lot about the challenges of reforming your grading practices but I want to give you a chance to see what those challenges really look like. I am currently rewriting and revising all of my AP World History Course with more specific objectives. A mistake I made last year with that course was making the objectives too broad and not having students reflect often enough, s o now I am taking a totally different approach and you are invited to visit my in progress planning document and leave questions and comments on the document as I work on it! One common question I get is about skills based objectives. The Common Core standards put literacy in every classroom (which I love) but the standards also ask teachers to assess skills and the skills are typically not one and done, they build throughout units or throughout the year. They are a part of multiple lessons and it is hard to determine the best way to approach reoccurring skills when Standards Based Grading. This i...

Next year will be my first year teaching AP World History. The course covers all of human history and asks students to complete a test in May in which they must complete a multiple choice section and write three different types of responses, two of which are long essays, while consistently asking students to contextualize and analyze a variety of historical primary and secondary sources. To be honest, I wasn't entirely thrilled about a 4 day AP World History summer institute. I was worried it would be dry, content heavy, and would lack specific concepts and tools I could use in my class. I am incredibly happy to be proven totally wrong.  The speaker at APSI San Gabriel this year is Aaron Marsh and he has done an excellent job giving us a general view of the course while breaking up the day with activities we can use in our classroom right away that support the historical thinking skills we will need to develop in our students.  But what really struck me and wha...