We recently chatted with Stephanie Stone (interview here) who is an AP® Environmental Science teacher in Maryland. While she’s taught science for 20+ years, she just recently started teaching an AP® class.  She found Albert to be an incredibly helpful resource in her first few years teaching AP, so we thought it might be a good idea to put together a guide for others in the same position. 

Teaching an AP® course for the first time can be intimidating. The curriculum is dense, the expectations are high, and doing well on the end of year exam can mean a lot for students (boosting their college applications, saving money on general education credits). For educators new to the AP® program, Albert can be used as a tool to build familiarity with the curriculum and help teachers feel confident and prepared in front of the class.

Our content team has pored over the College Board curriculum and released exams to ensure that our content is both aligned and rigorous. Below are a few tips on how to make the most out of Albert as you become familiar with the curriculum yourself. 

1. Use The Subject Guide as a… Guide

Our AP® subject guides are organized to reflect the AP® curriculum. And while the College Board course descriptions are very thorough, they can be quite dense.  A quick glance at the subject guide can help you understand, at a high level, what content is covered throughout the year.

Themes are broken down into topics and subtopics, making it easy to tailor the level of specificity. If you’re feeling uneasy about a specific topic or theme, a quick look through some questions will help you to familiarize yourself with the content. Doing practice questions yourself can help you understand how the content is assessed on the exam. Many teachers who use Albert have said that looking through questions and explanations before teaching a specific unit/ topic has been really beneficial. You can find our AP® courses in our course library here.

2. Assign Albert Consistently

We’ve heard it from teachers over and over again —  students do better on AP® exams when they have consistent practice with rigorous questions all throughout the year.

The easiest way for them to gain exposure is to assign a batch of Albert questions weekly, even if you can’t go over every question in class. Using our assignments feature, you can set up several weekly assignments at a time, making each due a week or so apart. You can also choose when the assignment becomes available to the students, preventing them from working too far ahead.

Teachers love that they can make assignments in batches, so they don’t have have to do the same task every week. Once an assignment is made, you can always change the due date/ time and whether you will accept late submissions.

If you use assignment templates, it’s easy to add/ remove questions from a given assignment before it’s pushed out to students. Additionally, you can always re-publish an assignment to individual students or groups of students. This is a great opportunity for them to demonstrate growth after further instruction/ intervention.

If you wanted to be really ambitious, you could pre-make all your assignments for a given unit, set the dates and forget about it! Think about all of the time you could save — time that could be better spent planning meaningful lessons, creating and grading qualitative work, or analyzing student performance.

3. Plan out Free Response Questions for Each Unit

Nearly every AP® course on Albert has several Free Response Questions published for each theme. They include the prompt, sample responses, and a rubric. Towards the end of a unit or before a test, perhaps spend some time in class analyzing the question and how the sample response is crafted.

Or, replicate the FRQ for your students to complete on paper (we don’t yet have a way for students to submit responses on the site). If you use this approach, you might not want to announce to the students that answers are on the site 😉 . These questions can also be used as a jumping off point for a Socratic Seminar to culminate the end of topic or subtopic.

A lot of teachers say that FRQs, DBQs, and SRQs are the most difficult for students on the real exam. Like with multiple choice questions, exposure throughout the course of the year can make a significant impact on student performance.

4. Use Checklists to Backwards Plan

We have checklists published for AP® Biology, AP® Calculus, and AP® World History (more subjects coming soon!). You can use these to backwards plan your units or turn them into short answer responses to be used in class, as homework, or as weekly assessments. The checklists break down every standard that is published in the College Board curriculum into an actionable question.

For example,  the AP® Biology standard Essential knowledge 1.A.4: Biological evolution is supported by scientific evidence from many disciplines, including mathematics is turned into several different questions in the checklist like: Can you explain how an analogous structure is different from a homologous structure?

If you students can answer every question on the checklist, they will be more than prepared for the exam, especially the FRQs.

5. Use FAQs to answer high level, generic questions

Can I use a calculator? How long is the exam? How many questions are in each section? The FAQ section in each AP® course answers these questions and more. These can be especially helpful if you teach several different AP® course since it can be hard to remember the small differences in the format of each exam. Also, direct your students here so you don’t have to answer the same questions over and over! #teacherpetpeeve

We hope you find these resources helpful  — best of luck to all of the new AP® teachers out there!