Syllabus Development
Before the school year begins is the best time to plan your
course syllabus. Translating the Course
Description’s topic outline into a schedule of dates, units, readings,
lectures, labs, and activities often
feels like a considerable task to new AP Biology teachers.
How many days should I spend on diversity of
organisms? How will I get all 12 AP Labs scheduled
before May? The suggestions in the following sections
will help with your planning.
Stay Organized
Organization is the key. If you aren’t organized, work on it each year. Map out a basic syllabus for the
entire year
and stick to it as much as possible. Keep notes on what worked and what didn’t. This makes planning
for the
next year much easier.
—Bobbie Hinson, Providence Day School, Charlotte, North Carolina
Following the Formula
Your first step is to determine the numberof instructional
days in your school year. These are the days that
are left after subtracting the days you will lose from the
school calendar to bad weather, state and other
testing, holidays, breaks, class meetings, all-day field trips for other
courses, AP Exam review sessions,
assemblies, and senior skip day. Be aware of the numberof
hours of class time you have during the school
year as well. Coverage of some of the topics may take only
hours instead of days.
Teachers on AB block schedules whose classes meet every other day
for a 90-minute period have less
instructional time than teachers on a traditional schedule
whose classes meet every day for a 55-minute
period. While it may seem difficult to cover the entire AP Biology
curriculum on an AB block or comparable
schedule, it can be done. The key is to know exactly
how much time you have to work with during the school
year and planning your coverage of the topics carefully, not
wasting time on in-depth coverage where the
topic outline percentages indicatenone is needed.
Chapter 3
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Planning Class Time
We use our local community college, Montgomery College, as a model for fi guring out how much
time to allow
for teaching AP or dual-credit courses. College science classes meet 6 hours a week for 16 weeks, a
total of
96 classroom hours. We are on an alternating block schedule with 90-minute classes that meet 5
times in 2
weeks, an average of 3 hours and 45 minutes per week. Some arithmetic yields the conclusion that
we need
about 26 weeks to clock 96 classroom hours.
We need to allow some extra time for high school activities like pep rallies and state-mandated
achievement
tests. Our semesters are 18 weeks long, so our school made the decision to make courses that are a
semester
long in colleges run a full year at the high school. This gives us more time to cover some topics in
greater detail,
do a research project, and so on. Your decision might be different if you have more classroom hours
per week.
—Alexa Noble, Oak Ridge High School, Conroe, Texas
Once you know how many instructional hours or days you have for
the school year, multiply them by
the percentages in the topic outline to get roughly the total
numberof instructional hours or days for each
topic. Use these blocks of hours or days to sketch out your
course schedule for the year, unit by unit. Be
sure to remember to include sufficient lab time in each
unit. Also, plan on padding each unit with one or
two days of unscheduled time to absorb the time that will be
taken by fire drills, pep rallies, assemblies
and other unanticipated disruptions.
Now that you have determined your course schedule and decided
how much time you will allocateto
the units, divide each unit into doable chunks with their own lecture
topics, lab work, and assignments.
Assignments should be scheduled several weeks in advance so that
students can plan their time to meet
required deadlines. You may find you are unable to fill in
all of the assignments for the full year at the
beginning of the course. If this is the case, be sure to
stay at least one unit ahead of time in your ongoing
planning. Similarly, at the beginning of the year you may
not be able to predict every special activity you
will offer. Try to give your students as much advanced
notice as possible, however, about before- and afterschool
activities or special assignments for vacations or long
weekends, even if you may have to change the
date later