One of the most critical skills students will need on the AP® United States Government Exam is data literacy. Not only will there always be a quantitative question on the exam, but the ability to swiftly process data is essential when trying to discern meaning in complex news stories and public...
I have become obsessed with trying to find activities in the AP® World History classroom that foster analysis. Having students understand what is meant by the word “analysis” is hard enough, but then finding ways to develop it often seems to be an uphill battle. This activity came about as a result...
Many teachers consider the Document Based Question (DBQ) of the AP® European History Exam to be one of the more challenging aspects of the course. Students are faced with a variety of tasks that they must complete in one hour.
The Supreme Court of the United States is often seen as the most distant and befuddling branch for my students. Whether it is misunderstanding their unelected status, difficulty in discerning legal language, or simply confusion about how the federal courts function, students are often left with a...
Teaching a young, eager, and naive student how to write a sophisticated DBQ is like teaching a similarly inexperienced athlete how to successfully clear the bar in a pole vault competition. You wouldn’t set them on the runway with a 12-foot long stick and tell them to go jump....would you?
In honor of Black History Month, I have created a lesson that can be used for students to learn (or review what they have learned) about African American experiences from the period after the Civil War through the Great Depression. Hopefully you will find the lesson useful and students will find it...
Whether you were relieved or intimidated to see nine foundational documents in the AP® U.S. Government and Politics course after the redesign, you most likely had to alter your approach to document analysis in your class. While the direction as to which documents to teach is helpful, it can be...
The following lesson plan uses the historical thinking skills of comparative and cause and effect to analyze two historians' perspectives on the Rwandan genocide. Helen Epstein and Philip Gourevitch relate their perspectives about that African genocide and students are asked to analyze those points...
For well over a millennium, Western Europe was unified by religious orthodoxy to the Roman Catholic Church. Although the church had been challenged on numerous occasions, religious uniformity only began to collapse during the 16th century during the period known as the “Protestant Reformation.”
I was pleasantly surprised with my students’ efforts and results on the Civic Engagement project in COVID spring 2021. The student-government connections were not what they might have been in a non-pandemic year, but with proper social distancing and a reliance on email and telephone calls, several...
