Well, it's almost time for school to start again - and I think I'm pretty much ready for it. I had planned to make some changes in my PreAP Bio curriculum this year - as always - and I've done some thinking and a little bit of work in that direction, but not much concrete work on it. Since there are only 2 1/2 weeks until staff development begins, I guess I'd better get busy! I feel pretty good about the sequence I already have in place, but have in mind some tweaks here and there in the topics included in some of the units. My goal is to enhance the students' understanding of how things work together for the organism's overall good.

After receiving my AP students' scores and information on where their weaknesses were (feeling pretty good here - not too many weaknesses!), I've also decided to make some changes there. Again, I feel pretty good about the sequence and don't see much need for change in that respect, but I do want to change the way we're approaching each unit. I plan to assign some pre-discussion questions for each topic and spend more time discussing rather than lecturing. If the students are somewhat prepared ahead of time, I think the depth of their understanding will be greater as we discuss each topic and do activities to reinforce the content as we go along. Hopefully, we'll have an even greater percentage of 5’s as a result! (Not complaining - our 29% far outstrips the national average of 6%!)

I'm once again looking forward to a successful school year - hopefully you are, too!