Sem Teachers: This is How You Start

Okay, after the happy horseshit of team building and learning names and burning time while half of them are in an assembly where admin yells at them to pull up their pants or something, it's time to start.

Here's a couple of things NOT-to-do that you might feel you need to after APSI:

• Spend days and days going over acronyms. For years I spent the first few class periods going over IRRs, IMPs, TMPs, PTSDs, EOCs, IRAs, PT2s, NAMBLAs (some of those are jokes, don't panic) I realized that it was a losing battle. Kids will still confuse them and ask you what's what, even in March, and you'll want to pull your hair out. Even when I doubled down and reinforced learning them with quizzes and structured notes and blah blah blah... it's a losing battle with small returns. It's also overwhelming. Unless you're trying to get kids to drop your class, skip the war briefing.
• QUEST. Okay, don't fight me. I like QUEST. I think it's a great way for TEACHERS to understand AP Seminar, but it's a piss-poor way for students to understand the course. Some will latch on to it like Rose's door. Buddy, the QUEST door is not big enough and that water is cold. Students get caught up in using it as 1-2-3 step process and it's not that. It's recursive. We know this, but you can't tell a kid. They don't get taught cursive anymore. (get it?) I choose to focus on transferable, real-world skills. No student is going to college and telling their professor about how they're going to QUEST their final paper (though it makes me laugh to imagine the interaction).

"But what DO you do, Eric?" I got you, boo. Here it is:

(Curricular) Lesson 1: Teach them the difference between a subject, a topic, and an issue. Cardinal Sin Numero Uno of AP Sem projects is a student taking on something that is just too large. Illustrate the difference: War is a whole subject. They can't write about ALL WAR in a few thousand words. War Crimes is a topic. Closer to where we need them to be but not yet. Food access as war crime in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict is an issue. Demonstrate this. Practice it with them. Have groups brainstorm.

Lesson 2: A natural extension of day 1 is teaching lenses and perspectives. This is useful vocabulary and an important distinction.

Lesson 3: How to write research questions, the 5 qualities of a good research question. I know many teachers like to give them bad questions to fix; that's cool. Because I have an impish sense of humor, I like to give them good research questions to break. It ensures that they have exemplars to model off of and makes when they share out a lot more humorous.

Lesson 4: I like to get them into the databases quickly. This class is about research. But also, baby steps. I bring them up to the media center and my awesome media specialist introduces them to Gale. Yes, JSTOR and EBSCO are better, but if you have access to Gale, I think it's a great research starter pack, especially with the topic finder tool and the global perspectives/opposing viewpoints database.

Lesson 5: Culminates everything we've done with students using Gale to drill down from topic to issue, write a question related to an issue of their choice and pull three articles that represent three different perspectives on the issue.

Below is a ppt that's free to members. They are daily slides that I use with the kids. It's almost exactly what's above with lesson 2 split into two days.