We will cover one semester--i.e., the first four units--of AP Biology. (I will most likely create another series for the second semester at the start of the second semester of the academic year, but I will decide that for sure later on.) The series is aimed at students who are studying AP Biology (in school or alone at home / self-studying) and are planning on taking the AP Biology exam.
PREREQUISISTES & COREQUISTIES
There are no prerequisites for this series. (You may want to kindly note that the CollegeBoard mentions “high school courses in biology and chemistry” as a prerequisite for AP Biology.)
For corequisites, it is preferable for student to be taking AP Biology at school or self-studying it.
MATERIAL COVERED
As previously mentioned, this series will cover the first four units of AP Biology: Chemistry of Life, Cell Structure and Function, Cellular Energetics, and Cell Communication and Cell Cycle.
Below is a link to a document with the Course At a Glance provided by CollegeBoard for the first four units attached. It details the lesson titles in each unit.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LDWzzLGmKCex1k722AvOShM53HmOyLnWdVRxwIt70K0/edit?usp=sharing
TEACHING METHOD / FORMAT & RESOURCES
Each unit will be divided into two sessions. During each session, I will start with a general, somewhat detailed review of almost everything in half of the unit. I will focus on the topics in the unit that the students in the class mention they find difficult and tailor the session for the students based on their feedback. Also, I will be focusing on topics and ideas that the recent Chief Reader Reports state that many students seem to have difficulty with and do mistakes in questions relating to them. Next, we will solve some practice questions during the class itself. I will constantly try to include both MCQ and FRQ questions.
I will give some homework that I encourage students to do, but it will be completely optional. I will assign / suggest readings from Campbell Biology in Focus (The 'in Focus' edition was written with AP Biology students in mind). I will try to attach a pdf of the assigned readings, depending on the students' needs (i.e., if they request it because they want to do the reading but do not have the book). I will also provide other resources that I personally used and found helpful. These may include questions, summaries, etc., and I may assign some of them as suggested HW. The resources may include certain pages of CliffsNotes AP Biology, Princeton Review AP Biology, Preparing for the Biology AP Exam: To Accompany Pearson's Campbell Biology Programs, and, again, I will try to provide the needed resources as pdfs. Lastly, I will likely scan the notes I have taken on Campbell throughout the whole course and attach them to students if they request them.
I will have an Office Hour between each unit and the other. This session will be unstructured and solely for answering students' questions and repeating the explanation of certain topics if students need that, for example, because they missed a session or did not understand.
The last session will be a Review session where we will briefly go over all of the first four units and solve some randomly ordered practice questions relating to the units covered.
NUMBER AND TIMING OF SESSIONS
This series will only be for one semester of AP Biology, so it will run from the 8th of September, 2022 to the 3rd of November, 2022 and will consist of 13 sessions (including Office Hours).
There will be two ninety-minute sessions for each unit followed by a sixty-minute Office Hour for that unit. The first two sessions of each unit will be on Thursday at 3 PM EDT / 7 PM GMT, a week apart (i.e., one session a week). The third session of the unit, which will be an office hour, will be on Tuesday of the following week at the same time. (If you would rather have the sessions on a different day or at a different time, please mention that in the public discussion, and, though improbable, changes may be made if many students want them.) The last session of the series is a two-hour Review session.
(For my qualifications, please refer to the bio in my profile. My most important qualification is that I took the AP Biology course and got a 5 on its exam.)
