What this year looked like in AP Biology

Note: I had posted the focus of this piece as part of a list of curricular supports for educational videos, but I think this one deserves its own spotlight, so that's what follows.

A few years back, I realized that keeping a longitudinal google-doc-based course agenda for my students was a useful exercise for me, too. And then I realized that I could share it with the larger AP Biology Teaching Community. So I did that.

This year, with the move to FIS, I had to change some things about my course. Specifically, I had to figure out how to fit something that approximated my historical, 90-minutes-per-day course into a new schedule where I see my students for 80-minutes-every-other-day (also known as "slightly less than half the time").

The equity of course time issue is a perennial discussion in AP Biology Teacher circles. The College Board does not provide firm recommendations on just how much time an AP Biology course "should" be given, so the variation between schools can be quite extreme. In my experience, my prior situation was pretty extravagent. Most people teach their course in something that is more like the FIS time-allotment. So I knew it was possible to teach the course this way before I started doing it this year. But it still took a bit of thought, and a pretty rigorous scaling back of many in-class experiences that were not essential to teaching this course to my new population.

Here's what the agenda for the year looks like (after a bit of cleaning up and getting into presentable form for public consumption):

What does your course look like? Do you have a document similar to | better than this agenda? Leave me a comment or drop me a line if you want to have a conversation. I do not check social media.