*The following post includes my personal observations and exciting experience bonding with my CED for the first time. These opinions are solely my own, and are not those of the College Board. Please read the CED to make your own judgements. 🙂

Wow!

What a treat when the good old USPS delivered my new AP binder with a spanking new CED (Course & Exam Description) in it. So, I did what most of you did. I opened a bottle of peach sparkling wine and cracked the first page.

…

Oh you didn’t do that?

Errr, ….

…ok, awkward.

We were promised a cleaner and more clearly focused set of targets with this new CED and I couldn’t wait to see that master vocabulary list that I’ve been waiting 13 years for.

Wait a minute…

let me find….

I still don’t see one.

Let me just check the packaging one more…

…

Nope.

Alright, well, I’m starting to feel like a veteran with this material anyway, the vocabulary is all in my head.

Let’s move on and see how they break the content down. Or should I say…scaffolded?

I cracked that bad-boy open and directed myself to the first tab,

Course Framework.

After perusing the new framework, it was clear that I needed to spend a bit more time understanding new teaching terminology and less time reorganizing my content. Actually, that might not be a bad thing since my focus for so many years was solely content and the pedagogy strategy was thin.

I’ve read a few posts on the Facebook group page about the seemingly insurmountable wad of pedological terminology thrown at us. I admit that it also had me cringing with arms ready to shield face. And even though most of the words like Theme, Skills, Big Ideas, Enduring Understandings, Topics, Learning Objectives, and Essential Knowledges bounced off of me like superballs, I did have one or two stick.

I mean, let’s face it, if we aren’t given clear definitions of each of these, they COULD literally be interchangeable and no-one would know the difference (OK, maybe except for “Skills.”).

So let’s break ’em all down.

• Skills
• Content
• Big Ideas
• Units
• Topics
• Enduring Understandings
• Learning Objectives
• Essential Knowledges

The new framework for AP Human Geography comprises of two components:

1. COURSE SKILLS
   • Concepts & Processes
   • Spatial Relationships
   • Data Analysis
   • Source Analysis
   • Scale Analysis
2. COURSE CONTENT
   

Ok, that one is easy enough. In other words, throughout the course, we have students develop and apply geographic skills to the course content (units of study).

But dios mío…did you see the same list of skills that I did?

If you need to be reminded, they are at your left.

So many subcategories, right?

But here is the part that really makes it more clear for us, and the part that we should ❤️.

For each of the topics in every unit of study, they tell you which to focus on!

Praise be!

And it is all summarized on your “Unit at a Glance” page.

In other words, I’m supposed to teach all of topic 1.1 (Introduction of maps) through the skill lens of “identifying the different types of data presented in maps and in quantitative and geospatial data.”

“What? And there are targeted resources that I can click on for each unit topic?! Stop it!!!”What? And there are targeted resources that I can click on for each unit topic?! Stop it!!!

Boom!

Man, I wish I had these when I first started.

Ok, enough with the skills. Moving on to Big Ideas.

What in the Sam’s hell…

BIG IDEAS:

1. Patterns & Spatial Organization (PSO)
2. Impacts & Interactions (IMP)
3. Spatial Processes & Societal Changes (SPS)

I will give you some time to chew on those new acronyms.

…

Ok.

Basically, I understand this as expanding on the courses’ traditional, big question. Why and where? Or is that two questions?

1. Patterns & Spatial Organization (PSO)
   • Answering why and where through political, historical, economic, and cultural factors (PHEC). (OK, that acronym wasn’t great, I made it up-don’t use it).
2. Impacts & Interactions (IMP)
   • People’s relationships, environments, contemporary situations, and history are what help us understand why and where.
3. Spatial Processes & Societal Changes (SPS)
   • Basically, being able to explain how a “why and where” can be related to another “why and where.”

Literally…each of the Big Ideas are checkmarked under every unit. They could have saved themselves printing on this one.The above, by no means, should be your understanding of the Big Ideas. Please, read them to try to make sense of them yourself. To me, these are still the most ambiguous part of the CED, and to the CED’s admission, they are the most “abstract.” I will, however, keep in mind that I should have all three of these “why and where” big ideas dangling over my head throughout the entire school year, judging by the seemingly ridiculous graphic that they provided, reminding use that they are importantly “spiraled”…. everywhere.

Once again, these are labeled quite friendly, right above the skills categories in each “Unit at a Glance” page.

Another cool thing is that they’ve tried to take some guesswork out of their three abstract Big Ideas, by providing guided Big Idea questions to ponder for each unit of study.

UNITS OF STUDY

Easy enough, these are the units for the course;

1. Thinking Geographically
2. Population & Migration Patterns & Processes
3. Cultural Patterns & Processes
4. Political Patterns & Processes
5. Agriculture & Rural Land-Use Patterns & Processes
6. Cities & Urban Land-Use Patterns & Processes
7. Industrial & Economic Development Patterns & Processes

TOPICS

These are what CB calls “teachable segments” under each unit of study. There are anywhere from 7 to 12 of these and CB suggests that you can teach these within 1-2 class periods (let’s get real, some of us like that week-long exploration on the topic of GMOs). While it’s easy to go on a tangent on ANY topic in this course, try to plan for divergencies, but teach to your strengths. If you love the topic of GMOs and have a killer week long lesson plan, do it. Your kids will probably remember it.

ENDURING UNDERSTANDING:

These are the “long-term” takeaway goals that we want to leave impressions on our students. We should think of these as developing throughout the course, with other topics compounding to form a deeper understanding of the materials. In summary, our long-term goals for the course include the Enduring Understandings & Big Ideas (content based), and Course Skills (skill based).

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: 

The learning objectives tell us what our students should be able to do (Identify, Explain, Define, Describe). Now, if you’ve been paying attention, there are verified rumors that these four verb prompts are the ones that will be asked on FRQs (one FRQ verb prompt that is NOT used as a learning objective prompt is “Compare,” so add that one to your repertoire).

Here are the Chief Reader’s tweets about the FRQ verb prompts:

Seth Dixon And my Twitter comments of the command verbs:
The 3 entry-level ‘command verbs’ in #APHG: 1-Define: Provide a specific meaning for a word or concept. 2-Identify: Indicate or provide information about a specified topic, without elaboration or explanation. 3-Describe: Provide the relevant characteristics of a specified topic.

The 2 more in-depth ‘command verbs’ in #APHG: 1-Compare: Provide a description or explanation of similarities and/or differences. 2-Explain: Provide information about how or why a relationship, pattern, position, situation, or outcome occurs, using evidence and/or reasoning.
0 replies 11 retweets 17 likes

Using a neat outline in an #APHG FRQ isn’t just to make things easier for the reader; more often than not, a clear ordering of ideas that are properly labeled improves the student’s likelihood of getting a higher score than an undifferentiated, unlabeled narrative.

I’m not suggesting that they will straight-up ask a Learning Objective question verbatim, but I think it does get us into a better mindset for the the types of questions we should be ask our students.

So,…

students need to be able to DO the Learning Objectives in order to grasp the Enduring Understandings.

And finally…

ESSENTIAL KNOWLEDGE

In order to complete the learning objectives, they need the content, which is the Essential Knowledge. Each is tagged with the Big Idea type (PSO, IMP, SPS) to help us keep sight of the big picture, (ex: IMP 1.A.1).

I wasn’t introduced to the Understanding by Design Framework (UbD), until a few experienced teachers brought it up in the Facebook group a day ago, and it does appear that our CED is modeled off this pedagogy. So, I read the UbD which basically says that teachers traditionally follow a pattern while lesson planning…

1. What do I want students to know?
2. How do I want them to learn it?
3. What do I want them to do with it?

Look familiar?

But this clever new UbD framework, likely the product of an EdD PhD LMNOP, said…

“You know what?”

“Let’s flip……lesson planning step 2….with……3!”

::Head exploding::

Why didn’t I think of that?!

UbD says that the problem with traditional lesson planning is that we let our lesson plans drive what we want our kids to learn (the outcome), leaving the possibilities of real-world application as an afterthought (if we even have time to get to it!). I don’t mind this concept and I enjoyed reading a new idea. You can read about it in the above link.

(Step 1) Instead, they are saying (at least how I interpret this), that the lesson plan needs to keep the big picture’s, global application as the goal (Course Skills, Big Ideas, Enduring Understandings, Learning Objectives). Or should I say goal”S”?

(Step 2) THEN, we should be looking at the Essential Knowledge (the content) to help provide the evidence they need to attain the above said goals.

(Step 3) Only then, should we delve into instructional approaches, which are included in the next tab of the binder!

Instructional Approaches

I really appreciate this section of the binder, one that I wish I had when just starting out. Here we find strategies for choosing and evaluating course materials, a bunch of instructional strategies, and ways to help develop those ever-present Course Skills. I think these are presented better than most of our textbooks (IMO). That’s In My Opinion. Don’t confuse that with a Big Idea.

Exam Information

This last tab reminds us of the AP Exam structure with 60 MC questions in 60 minutes, and 3 FRQs in 75 minutes. 30-40% of the MC exam is now stimulus based (chart, graph, image, map), while the FRQ’s include 1 question referencing two stimulus, 1 question referencing 1 stimulus, and one FRQ with no stimulus. This tab also includes some quality sample questions with new styled FRQs.

Sidenote: If you are interested in collaborating/practicing your hand at FRQ and MC writing, it can really help the larger group (and yourself!). Check out the Facebook page to ask/find these links to contribute!

The chief reader for AP Human Geography has this to say about our exam:

Seth Dixon: Just some clarifications:
-While more parts will be the norm, they will not all be 7 parts (but they will all be 7 points). We will try to narrow down the tasks into smaller chunks.
There will be less “multiple examples” in the same part but it is still a possibility if it makes sense for the question (we will not ask students to identify AND explain in the same section anymore).
-Subsections aren’t limited to two sentences, especially for an explain or a compare.
-More MCQ will be stimulus based, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50%, but no firm number.
-While I might wish to give zero’s for bad penmanship, the threshold is “illegible.”
–Maps: while there is no map associated with the CED (not our choice), students still need to know regions from the old maps in the old course articulation for some questions as a solid foundation.
–I could be off on some of these (I am typing off the cuff) but this my understanding of the new procedures as of now–the test development committee and I are also dealing with the new changes as we go as well so while we have more time with the new procedures, we still haven’t gone through it with years of experience yet either.

WHAT?

At the end is a fold-out poster of the course framework for my classroom wall?!?! (My empathy for those who have yet to receive their binder)

Yes please!

Well, at least we know where that money from selling the Pre-AP World History class is going 🙂

Alas, regardless of my love-hate relationship with College Board (ok 70%-30%), I think they gave us a good product, and one that I am eager to embrace.

I look forward to the professional discussions about our CED on the Facebook group and with my PLT/PLC.

Now, the August 1st wait is on, when we get to see the student formative modules rolled out on the CB website. I’m sure it’s enough to give the makers of Albert.io a scare.

I am truly impressed with the machine AP has become. My department now teaches more AP sections than regular/under-level/ESL.

How about you?

Happy planning!