We’ve all been there. Short on time, stressed, and rushed. I started a whole (pre-pandemic) series about it, but even before then, teaching this class in a semester is difficult. ESPECIALLY in the spring. One year, I sat down and thought about what really needed to happen and came up with this. We cannot possibly teach every single thing, but we can focus for our own sanity.
If you are interested, I followed a sample schedule to really drive home the point and I created a round-up of resources here to help you lesson plan easily.
Disciplinary Practices
-Skills over content or teaching content using skills. Ditch the lecture. Dive into documents to explore the skills needed. Now, lecture has its place, but if you are short on time ditch it.
-Use podcasts to review content so students can do it on their own time. (All of my unit guides have podcasts attached to them!)
–Breakdown the documents to analyze argumentation and source analysis.
-How can you do more than one thing at a time? (Here is my example. Showing Supreme Revenge hit so many things at once.)
Writing/Socratic
Honestly, I feel that my focus on writing and skills helped propel my students in the content and on their AP Test (yes, even the 2020 one). Students can forget content, but if you teach them how to write, you’ve got them!
-Focus on skills such as thesis writing (check out one of my most popular posts!)
–STOP using full unit tests/writing assignments. Use these small bits as assessments.
Students and You!
–Check out this post about knowing content and adjusting to that. The more you know, the better you can adjust to your students.
-Sometimes, you need to just let go and let them explore the content.
You can’t do it all, and that’s perfectly ok because if this year taught us anything it’s that we need to take care of ourselves and our students and THEN care about content.
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
Maya Angelou
You’ve got this!
Liz Evans, NBCT 