I’ve been teaching AP for about 10 years now, and each year has been different from the last. I continue to refine and try to improve my teaching practice, and therefore the learning experience for my students. Just when I thought I had hit my stride, COVID changed everything! This past year was normal-ish, but at the end of the year I found that students were struggling to be in touch with the content that we had studied early in the year. Our class takes place on alternate days all year long, so the gap between the start of the year and the AP exam in May can be long. Lots of our work was in digital formats, and students didn’t have easy access to tangible resources to help them review & refresh their knowledge, let alone to make comparisons and connections that we want them to make.
While we were doing school at home during the pandemic I had played with some long-term digital organizers. Some students reported them to be very helpful; others, not as much. I wasn’t thrilled with the overall outcome, so I put them on the back burner for a while.
This year, however, I am trying something new in collaboration with my teaching partner for our classes. We are intentionally reshaping the digital organizers into old-school paper fashion and merging them with features of interactive notebooks. Our goals:
- create a reference tool to support students as they progress through the course
- improve the collection & storage of content over the course of the year to help students study for their exam
- reduce the need to repeatedly provide handouts (streamline distribution of scaffolding documents)
We are asking each student to bring a composition notebook as part of their back to school supplies. We are watching for them to go on super sale this summer and will provide them for students who don’t have them. So far, here’s the general outline that we are playing with:
- index/table of contents
- reference: alternative words for common expressions like bien, divertido, & interesante
- personal dictionary
- reference: circumlocution phrases
- reference: annotation & self-correcting guides
- reference: AP themes/subthemes
- reference: current event guide & instructions
- reference: photo description
- a section for each of the 4 free response questions
- instructions
- rubric
- guided template
- chat mat/reference of helpful phrases & vocabulary
- space to glue in examples of completed work
- reference: overview of common conjugations + most common verbs
- space for noting cultural content based on essential questions & common themes.
Many of these documents and resources already exist, as they are documents we have been using in class in various formats. We are adapting them to fit into the composition notebooks as well as creating dividers to organize each section.
While these are not truly “interactive” notebooks in the truest sense, I’m holding out hope that they will be a valuable tool for our students. If you’ve used notebooks like these in an upper level WL class, what tips would you give? Please comment below!
Aventuras Nuevas 