Seminar Pacing Part 3: A 3-Week Mock
When two hurricanes steal nearly a month of school... you get creative
My last two posts have been about how I structure my year in AP Seminar. They aren't dramatically different. I have the tested and true method that always got me excellent results and the journalistic approach that I felt led to more innovation and growth on the part of both myself and my students. But if my mother taught me one thing, it was a respect for Murphy's Law.
What I'm about to share, I've done twice. Once when the time just got off, everything in the first two quarters ran over and I felt like I had to squeeze in my usual PT1 Mock. The second time, I had lost three weeks of the school year to hurricanes (first Debbie, then Milton). But I was prepared. I knew how to fit a mock team project into just three weeks.
Students enter the room and find a table with 8 different stacks of notecards. They say things like "Chocolate," "Trains," and "Oceans." (These are all subjects, for those keeping score.) The bellwork is to just take one. They don't get to know more than that... for now. Underneath each card are four more of the same. Obviously, you can adjust the number of groups and people per group to fit your situation.
Next, I explain to them that for their next project, I am going to give them the majority of their research. No, this isn't like stimulus sources. They're going to use all of them. Because we're short on time, I'm going to just give them the 8-10 sources. There's a lesson in here, I tell them. It's not just so that we can rush to the next part of the process, it's not just so that they can get practice analyzing high-quality sources, though both of those things are true. The benefit here for students is that they get to see what expert research looks like. They get to see the depth and breadth of good research (and because of that, the text sets that I'm about to share are truly and deliberately expansive).