Welcome! I'm a local, state, and national award-winning science teacher. While this website was originally created to help students by providing a useful resource to explain concepts, I am adding this section to share what I have learned from my experience to help other teachers as well.

Before I get into strategies to use, I want to explain my course setup. Many teachers - myself included - do not teach the CED in the exact order that it is presented. 

After spending years fine-tuning how I group topics in AP Bio and APES, I have settled on the following unit sequences:

This will hopefully help you in how to use this website as a resource for your class and your students.

As teachers, we all know that studying and note-taking are incredibly important skills for students. However, despite this, a lot of us take it for granted that students have learned these skills prior and don't explicitly teach them to students. A lot of students never develop really strong skills in these regards because they don't actually know how. 

I take the first week of class to teach students the neuroscience behind memory formation, strategies behind how to do active studying, and how to take notes efficiently and in a way that fosters deeper learning. Please see this document for a brief and simple guide of how you could help teach this to students.

Our planet is home to seemingly endless wonder and natural beauty. It is a source of excitement, curiosity, and passion. One of the most amazing things about being a science teacher is the ability to foster the wonder that can come from learning about the intricacies of our world.

The sense of wonder and innate curiosity about the world is something that a lot of people can lose as they get older, but they don't have to. I believe that students learn best when they are enjoying themselves and that science lends itself incredibly well to pedagogies that maximize engagement and foster curiosity.

This is realized in a variety of ways in my class, which has earned my class the reputation of being "over-the-top". Some examples include:

• Teaching through the lens of pop culture to increase student engagement

• "Food labs" that teach scientific concepts through cooking (and that come with a tasty treat)

• Labs/activities that turn the classroom into a safari, game show, or restaurant hosting speed dates (complete with full decorations)

• Very frequent labs, hands-on activities, and learning by "doing" - including both inquiry-based labs where students engage in science practices and create knowledge, as well as more scaffolding activities that reinforce learning of specific concepts. I frequently have students developing procedures to answer their own questions, and the guide I give them on how to do this - as well as how to write conclusions - can be seen here.

We live in a time of great scientific advancement, changes, and worldly concerns that impact us all, such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. In order for students to prepare to interact with and properly understand these topics, certain public policy debates, and even healthcare information shared by doctors, scientific literacy is essential.  Unfortunately, scientific literacy (an individual’s ability to understand scientific concepts and to apply their knowledge to new situations, whether they be scientific or non-scientific) is frighteningly low among both students and adults in this country.

Many of my students have never learned how to properly take notes and just focus on copying everything on the board word-for-word. To support students during direct instruction, I use guided notebooks. These are structured to move students beyond passive note-taking and toward deeper learning. Each notebook emphasizes three components:

1. 1. The Notes: Students will follow along as material is introduced (while I do this live, you could do it in a flipped manner - whatever is best for you and your students) and take notes. In line with neuroscience research, it is encouraged that students write the notes in their own words, rather than just copying.

   2. Summaries: Deeper processing is engaged when students summarize information. That’s why so many famous notes styles, such as Cornell Notes, feature a “summary” section in their notes. I have students summarize information – in their own words or with their own diagrams – after major topics. This encourages review of the material, as well as results in stronger recall from deeper learning.

   3. Application: After the summaries, there are application-based practice questions in the notebook. These ensure that students understand the material and strengthen their knowledge through retrieval practice. These are graded on a mastery-based system to encourage proper comprehension and learning from mistakes.

This structure ensures that note-taking isn’t just transcription - it becomes a process of processing, summarizing, and applying knowledge.

Personally, I am a big fan of reviewing with students. I think they can benefit a lot from in-class review, whether it be for a period before a test, or a couple of weeks leading up to the AP Exam. When I review with students, I try to focus on review strategies that foster higher-level thinking and encourage deeper processing and connection-making.

Here are a few of my favorite in-class review strategies:

• Whiteboards: students are paired up and given a whiteboard and some EXPO markers. Students take turns going through the following process - one student does a "chalk and talk" and explains a concept, while the other uses their notes to point out mistakes or missing topics. Students will do this, going through a list of concepts. As the Tarzan song by Phil Collins goes, "in learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn."

• Review Board Games: I have made a variety of review board games for both APES and AP Bio that center on student connection-making or needing to think of different ways to describe a topic. This fosters deeper thinking, and adds a competitive aspect to the review.  These games are currently for sale on my TPT store. If you want to, you can turn making the game into review as well though! Have students create their own "Taboo" cards - they'll be reviewing before they even play by thinking of what connected words shouldn't be allowed.

• Raffle Review: Student groups work through practice problems one at a time, checking in after each one. When they get one right, they get a raffle ticket - a prize is given to the one group whose ticket is pulled at the end. This can be done with printed-out practice problems, or online ones on something like AP Classroom or Castle Learning.

Teaching evolution properly is one of the most important parts of teaching a biology class. Geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky famously stated that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” Biochemical processes, aspects of anatomy and physiology, ecological relationships, and more can be explained and understood better by understanding the underlying process of evolution.

Despite its importance, there are a wide range of misconceptions surrounding it among students, the general public, and even teachers. I once met a biology teacher who believed that the formation of the Grand Canyon was evidence of evolution because it has "changed over time - and that's evolution." This brings me to the biggest point I want to make when it comes to evolution education - do not use the definition "change over time" for evolution. It is simplified to the point of inaccuracy and lends itself to the development of misconceptions. I've written on this for Edutopia, but this definition helps build one of the larger misconceptions - that evolution is like it is in Pokémon, where an individual changes during its lifetime. Use a more accurate definition, such as "the change in a population over generations" or, even better, "the change in genotype of a population over generations".

Another important consideration is when to teach evolution. I used to start my AP Biology class with the evolution unit (with Hard-Weinberg saved for the genetics unit). While I liked that a lot, I decided to change it and move to a single-day brief intro to evolution during my "Unit 0" and then keep a full-length unit on it later in the year. This allows me to give students an initial framing of the concept that I can build on and refer to throughout the year, leading up to its full unit. Either way, what I prefer is starting with some evolution, so that it can be interwoven throughout each units. Afterall, nothing in biology makes sense without it.

I know a lot of AP Science teachers like to have a summer reading assignment, or like to have discussions about a non-textbook book that is read throughout a course. If you're planning on doing that, and looking for some books to choose from, here are my top recommendations. 

The first two work really well for both AP Biology and AP Environmental Science, with A Life on Our Planet being I think the PERFECT book for APES and the one that I would recommend above all others. Your Inner Fish I would only recommend for Bio, as APES doesn't go into evolution to the extent that it's really needed.

While you can use worksheets, writing assignments, etc. for a reading assignment, I've found that the most fruitful thing to do is just to have a genuine discussion about the reading.