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Well.
This week has been fun! And I’m mostly not sarcastic about this! I’m in training all week in order to be allowed to teach AP Research next year. I don’t particularly want to teach it because literature and writing about lit is my passion, but it’s a marketable qualification. The training, although done through Zoom and thus its own brand of exhausting, is well run and gives me a lot of practical skills to use in my classroom. I’m thinking about using the framework with my regular research class. I’m learning so much about how to research, things I was never explicitly taught, even at university. Kids today I think are generally better prepared, but I winged it all the way through grad school. I didn’t even have much of the appropriate vocabulary for academic research until this week! But that’s another story. The point is that I’m feeling pretty confident about teaching these skills going forward.
But. Here’s the thing.
The school where I currently teach has an interesting curriculum. The curriculum is based on mastery learning — that is, a student passes a unit when they show they have mastered the skills, based on a rubric, rather than on points totals as is typical in American schools. From our promotional material: In this research-validated model each Essential Unit is taught with a view to excellence. When students demonstrate mastery of the essential unit, they move on to the next essential unit. If the student does not achieve mastery, the teacher re-teaches, and the student revises as necessary. Additional conferencing and extended practice may be given for the student to demonstrate proficiency at the appropriate level before testing again. When the students demonstrate mastery, they are rewarded with an “A” or “B”. Thus, a student never “fails” in the traditional sense. Instead, he/she proceeds logically through the curriculum at a pace determined by his/her mastery of the material.
This is great in theory. In practice, when you have real-world deadlines? There are problems. We also create our own curriculum and rubrics, and I have many many thoughts and feelings about those rubrics, but for now, this is the main issue: QSI’s units and the AP units don’t really mesh. The AP test is a one-and-done deal. In addition, I learned that I am not allowed to use the AP rubrics to score the student work and use it for a grade on their transcript. However, I was reviewing the QSI curriculum documents, and guess what rubric is attached to all units? Yup, the AP rubric.
AP Research teachers are absolutely not allowed to give specific feedback on the paper or presentation, nor are we allowed to read and score the essays and presentations for our own use. AP employs specially trained readers for these tests. I have some thoughts about this, but they don’t really matter right now. If a school wants to be allowed to offer AP classes, they agree to follow the curriculum and guidelines. Big tests aside, I’m pretty confident that the process of attempting a giant research project with minimal direct teacher guidance (and maximum scaffolding) can, if the teacher is otherwise supportive and does the scaffolding well, be a valuable experience. It’s stressful and rigorous, but overall, I feel pretty good about the course and how much my students will learn next year.
The grades are a whole other matter. I emailed our curriculum director and my school director because I suspect that the other schools that have offered AP research have not been fully following the guidelines, so I’m recording my concerns and then I’m going to leave it. This is waaaaay above my pay grade, but I’m not going to compromise my integrity or put my students at risk of having their hard work invalidated, and that’s the best I can do right now.
This week has been fun! And I’m mostly not sarcastic about this! I’m in training all week in order to be allowed to teach AP Research next year. I don’t particularly want to teach it because literature and writing about lit is my passion, but it’s a marketable qualification. The training, although done through Zoom and thus its own brand of exhausting, is well run and gives me a lot of practical skills to use in my classroom. I’m thinking about using the framework with my regular research class. I’m learning so much about how to research, things I was never explicitly taught, even at university. Kids today I think are generally better prepared, but I winged it all the way through grad school. I didn’t even have much of the appropriate vocabulary for academic research until this week! But that’s another story. The point is that I’m feeling pretty confident about teaching these skills going forward.
But. Here’s the thing.
The school where I currently teach has an interesting curriculum. The curriculum is based on mastery learning — that is, a student passes a unit when they show they have mastered the skills, based on a rubric, rather than on points totals as is typical in American schools. From our promotional material: In this research-validated model each Essential Unit is taught with a view to excellence. When students demonstrate mastery of the essential unit, they move on to the next essential unit. If the student does not achieve mastery, the teacher re-teaches, and the student revises as necessary. Additional conferencing and extended practice may be given for the student to demonstrate proficiency at the appropriate level before testing again. When the students demonstrate mastery, they are rewarded with an “A” or “B”. Thus, a student never “fails” in the traditional sense. Instead, he/she proceeds logically through the curriculum at a pace determined by his/her mastery of the material.
This is great in theory. In practice, when you have real-world deadlines? There are problems. We also create our own curriculum and rubrics, and I have many many thoughts and feelings about those rubrics, but for now, this is the main issue: QSI’s units and the AP units don’t really mesh. The AP test is a one-and-done deal. In addition, I learned that I am not allowed to use the AP rubrics to score the student work and use it for a grade on their transcript. However, I was reviewing the QSI curriculum documents, and guess what rubric is attached to all units? Yup, the AP rubric.
AP Research teachers are absolutely not allowed to give specific feedback on the paper or presentation, nor are we allowed to read and score the essays and presentations for our own use. AP employs specially trained readers for these tests. I have some thoughts about this, but they don’t really matter right now. If a school wants to be allowed to offer AP classes, they agree to follow the curriculum and guidelines. Big tests aside, I’m pretty confident that the process of attempting a giant research project with minimal direct teacher guidance (and maximum scaffolding) can, if the teacher is otherwise supportive and does the scaffolding well, be a valuable experience. It’s stressful and rigorous, but overall, I feel pretty good about the course and how much my students will learn next year.
The grades are a whole other matter. I emailed our curriculum director and my school director because I suspect that the other schools that have offered AP research have not been fully following the guidelines, so I’m recording my concerns and then I’m going to leave it. This is waaaaay above my pay grade, but I’m not going to compromise my integrity or put my students at risk of having their hard work invalidated, and that’s the best I can do right now.
