By: Genelle Gogue
Advanced Placement (AP) class curriculum is changing this year, Principal Francis Rojas said. College Board provides updates every year on how they are changing, he said.
In order for teachers to teach AP classes, they must be AP trained, Rojas said. They go through training over the summer or during the school year and MHS covers the process, he said. The updates are built into the training that AP teachers need to get, Rojas said. All department leads as well at the AP lead have to work together to see what teachers are instructing the advanced classes, he said.
“The way that AP teachers are certified to teach AP, they all have to go through the AP training and it’s an update. It’s kind of almost automatically built in. Teachers who want to teach AP or assigned to teach AP, we make sure they’re AP trained,” Rojas said. “When we sign up with College Board that we are offering these AP courses at our school, we actually have to write who the teacher is, when were they trained, they have to go through a certification. It’s actually a process built in by they AP system so what I do is just provide funding for the training,” he added.
The new changes will be more focused, AP United States History Teacher Gregory Ducote said. One way the AP classes have changed is that there are more online tools provided which can really benefit students, Ducote said. The school has also provided his AP US History with Princeton Review books in order to help students, he added.
“They also have introduced online AP classroom, where you can have your students sign in and can do multiple choice and essays and various things. That’s actually something new that’s a very useful tool,” Ducote said.
Students may find that the new curriculum changes may actually benefit them as well. All the work that gets assigned will be more doable, AP World History Teacher Danilo Escobar said.The new guidelines focus on newer material instead of older materials, Escobar said. It is still the same skills you would be using, just with different concepts, he added.
“The easier aspect of this new curriculum is that because of it we can get away with less reading so that’s going to be beneficial, especially for sophomores, because previous years it would be incredibly difficult for them to keep up with the intense amount of reading, but now with the changes we can assign less reading and so I think it’s much more manageable,especially for those at sophomore level,” Escobar said.
The way that the new AP curriculum has changed is that they have new units and new guidelines, Ducote said. Teachers need to adapt to the new curriculum and from there it will benefit students, Ducote said. There are more components and more areas to grade, but it is a lot more like a college prep class, he said.
“Well the new curriculum framework has new units and new guidelines which make if you’re an experienced teacher like I am, you just kind of have to stay focused on what their guidelines are and it’s pretty easy,” Ducote said. “Teachers have to get adapted and get used to it because the rubrics for the writing are definitely much harder. There’s more components, there’s more things to look at and grade. If a teacher gets that down, it’s very college prep,” he added.
