Course Syllabus: AP U.S. History

Meeting Times:

The timeframe of this course is 36 Weeks. Students engage in the online class according to the same academic calendar of their schools. Additionally, they can expect to spend additional time on student activities such as reading, writing, researching and completing assignments.

Course Description:

The AP program in United States History is designed to provide students with critical thinking skills and factual knowledge necessary to analyze and conceptualize problems and materials in United States history. The course includes the study of political institutions, social and cultural developments, diplomacy, and economic trends in history. The program prepares students for intermediate and advanced college courses by providing challenging curricular experiences that equate to the demands made by full-year introductory college courses. Students should learn to assess historical materials from a variety of perspectives- their relevance to a given interpretive problem, their reliability, and their importance - and to weigh the evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship. An AP United States History course should enable students to develop skills necessary to acquire information, develop and present information in well-reasoned ways, construct new knowledge and use valid information appropriately to make conclusions and to present reasons and evidence clearly and persuasively. Students are required to complete an enormous amount of reading, writing, and performance tasks. Projects and culminating activities are expected of each student. Students taking the Advanced Placement AP U.S. History course are expected to take the Advanced Placement exam. Students will not receive weighted grades for the course unless they complete the AP examination. AP U.S. History students are also required to take the U.S. History End of Course Examination administered online to all students taking U.S. History. As this course is delivered in a DL format, group discussions and projects require the students to participate in a threaded, asynchronous format. While the class is designed on a block schedule, because it is web based, students have access to all material 24/7.

Course Purpose and Goals

Philosophy:

Varied teaching and learning experiences should provide students with multiple opportunities to discover the numerous ways in which human beings acquire and use knowledge of historical events. The study of history should involve inquiry, active construction of knowledge, interactive discourse, well-reasoned arguments that show reflective and critical thinking, and real life applications. Opportunities to acquire knowledge should not be limited and rigid; rather they should reflect the fluid and changing nature of knowledge and understanding. Additionally, the resources available should reinforce the numerous modes of information available. Textbooks, reference materials, atlases, historical documents, media resources, Internet, museums, historical societies, and libraries are essential resources for the course. Teaching and learning experiences should seek to actively involve students, individually and as a group, allowing students to develop skills as independent or collective thinkers and participants.

Goals:

The AP course does not merely focus on the acquisition of factual knowledge but trains students to:

The AP college level course is designed to provide the student with learning experiences equivalent to that obtained in most college introductory United States history courses. Students should be exposed to historical content and use the perspective of time to explore causes and effects of events in the past. The course is challenging and rigorous and requires a great deal of discipline in order to be successful Skills in reading and deciphering are necessary as students are required to complete numerous readings, analyze and interpret documents and events, practice writing analytical and interpretive essays, and complete research and major study of pictorial and graphic materials. Frequent quizzes and outside assignments are to be expected. Students must master a broad body of historical knowledge and be able to apply analytical skills of evaluation, cause and effect, and compare and contrast to understand historical scholarship. As it is delivered in the DL format, the students are also expected to have a great deal of self-motivation. They must also be able to evaluate the usefulness of Internet sites for use with this level course.

The AP course content covers the study of U.S. history from Discovery to the present. The course emphasizes depth of development of important ideas and the significance and meaningfulness of the historical content. This is a rigorous and challenging course. The course focuses on sustained examination and analysis of several major topics rather than coverage of many. The content for the standard U.S. History course emphasizes our nation’s history from Reconstruction to the present. The standard United States history course focuses on content and concepts built around national standards that prepare students to comprehend the contemporary world based on an understanding of the past. Although the AP course utilizes the same national standards as a starting point, course content and activities require students to engage in higher level cognitive activities to apply, synthesize and analyze.

Conceptual organization:

The course is organized in a chronological order and broken into nine modules that group contemporary events that are closely related.

Themes/Topics:

This course follows a topical approach and utilizes many of the topics listed in the College Board AP United States History Course Description Booklet May 2006, May 2007. While the course is not organized on a thematic approach, the students are reminded of the recurring themes and their change over time. The themes utilized are taken from the aforementioned booklet. These themes often serve as unifying concepts to help students synthesize material and place the history of the United States into a larger analytical context.

American Diversity

The diversity of the American people and the relationships among different groups. The roles of race, class, ethnicity, and gender in the history of the United States.

American Identity

Views of the American national character and ideas about American exceptionalism, Recognizing regional differences within the context of what it means to be an American.

Culture

Diverse individual and collective expressions through literature, art, philosophy, music, theater, and film throughout history, Popular culture and the dimensions of cultural conflict within American society.

Demographic Changes

Changes in birth, marriage, and death rates; life expectancy and family patterns; population size and density. The economic, social, and political effects of immigration, internal migration, and migration networks.

Economic Transformations

Changes in trade, commerce, and technology across time. The effects of capitalist development, labor and unions, and consumerism.

Environment

Ideas about the consumption and conservation of natural resources. The impact of population growth, industrialization, pollution, and urban and suburban expansion.

Globalization

Engagement with the rest of the world from the fifteenth century to the present: colonialism, mercantilism, global hegemony, development of markets, imperialism, cultural exchange.

Politics and Citizenship

Colonial and revolutionary legacies, American political traditions, growth of democracy, and the development of the modern state. Defining citizenship; struggles for civil rights.

Reform

Diverse movements focusing on a broad range of issues, including anti-slavery, education, labor, temperance, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, war, public health, and government.

Religion

The variety of religious beliefs and practices in America from prehistory to the twenty-first century, influence of religion on politics, economics, and society.

Slavery and Its Legacies in North America

Systems of slave labor and other forms of unfree labor (e.g., indentured servitude, contract labor) in Native American societies, the Atlantic World, and the American South and West. The economics of slavery and its racial dimensions. Patterns of resistance and the long-term economic, political, and social effects of slavery.

War and Diplomacy

Armed conflict from the pre-colonial period to the twenty-first century; impact of war on American foreign policy and on politics, economy and society.

The AP U.S. History course is typically offered as a junior year (11th grade) course. AP U.S. History is offered prior to the U.S. Government class that students take in their senior year. AP U.S. History meets the mandatory graduation requirement in U.S. History.

Course Format and Policies:

The online courses have the same level of rigor and adhere to the same standards set forth by the school system and the College Board. To access all courses, students need access to a computer and the Internet via a web browser. All classes are offered via the Blackboard Learning Management System. The class is designed along the lines of a block schedule as that is the one employed by the majority of our schools. However, the flexibility of the class allows it to be utilized either as a block or an everyday class. An additional plus of the design is that students have access to the class 24/7 and can access it both from school and home. The block is designed to be run on a MWF/ TTH format. Each block is set up as a 90 minute period.

A typical class would start with a short (5-8 minutes) quiz based on a text reading and a set of homework questions. This is then followed by a lecture section (with a knowledge check worksheet) and/or some type of activity. The majority of these activities require the students to peruse documents and/or charts and graphs and answer a series of questions about them. This helps them learn how to analyze evidence and interpretations presented in historical scholarship. Most of the lectures can either be read or watched by accessing the CD that has a recorded version of the lecture. The activity may be a group or individual activity. Many of these activities use a wide variety of primary resources, such as documentary material, maps, statistical tables, works of art, as well as, pictorial and graphic material.

This course has been designed with a "hands-on" approach in distance learning. The student’s active participation in this course is essential. A great deal of learning in an online environment occurs as a result of learners being engaged in on-going conversations. I use discussion boards, Instant Messaging and collaborative group projects to facilitate this. When learners share their knowledge experiences, and understanding of the course materials, the learning process is facilitated and advanced. In discussions, they are expected to post substantive contributions. Examples of this include; supporting a position, beginning a new topic of discussion or adding to an ongoing discussion.

Homework:

Homework reading assignments serve to provide the students with background information and access to charts, graphs and documents. Study questions help students to gauge their own learning, develop a historical perspective and provide practice in writing analytical and interpretive essays such as document-based questions (DBQ) and thematic essays. All help prepare the students for classroom activities.

Students are encouraged to work together in preparation for major essay tests. Using the list of possible essay questions, they are encouraged to prepare answers and share their results using peer collaboration as a tool. While encouraged to work together and share information prior to the assessment, plagiarism on the test itself will not be accepted and will receive no credit.
The semester grade is the average of the first and second quarter grade and the exam for that semester.

Weighted grade policy: Weighted grades are calculated for students completing the course and taking the requisite exam of an AP course.
Unweighted Scale A=4 Weighted Scale A=5
Unweighted Scale B=3 Weighted Scale B=4
Unweighted Scale C=2 Weighted Scale C=3
Unweighted Scale D=1 Weighted Scale D=2
Unweighted Scale F=0 Weighted Scale F=1

Textbooks, Materials and other Resources:

Required text:

Boyer, Paul S., et al. (2000). The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People, 4th Ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Supplementary Materials Students:

Blumberg, Barbara. (2000) Student Study Guide to The Enduring Vision Volumes I and II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Supplementary Materials Teacher:

Bryan, John. (2000). Workshop Guide AP Summer Institute: Rice University.

Confort, Dan. (2001). Advanced Placement American History Practical Guide: DAC Educational Publications.

Kovacs, M., A., Miller, D. E., & Ritter, J. C. (1987). Advanced Placement American History VOL. 1 and 2. Center for Learning Publication.

Leach, R. J., & Caliguire, A. (1997). Advanced Placement U. S. History 1-4. Center for Learning.

Levy, T., & Krasnow, D. C. (1993) Lessons That Work Vol. 1 and 2: Cornfield Publications.

Rothchild, Eric (2000). Workshop Guide AP Training: RAF Lakenheath.

Official system-wide Grading Scale DoDEA

90-100         =         A
80-89           =         B
70-79           =         C
60-69           =         D
59 or below   =         F

Grades in this class are based on several different factors. I look at how students participate in discussion groups, group projects, assignments, projects, and exams.

The general quarter grade is determined by this computation: 600 points Unit Tests (Both Objective and Essay)

100 points Quizzes

50 points Lecture Knowledge Checks

50 points Journals

As Assigned Class work assignments

As Assigned Projects

20% of the semester Grade: Midterm and Final Exams

Support Services

To help students maintain successful participation, each student has a designated local facilitator who serves as the liaison between the teacher, the student, parents and school administrators.

Study Groups: Students can organize and participate in study groups, although discussion must be conducted in an asynchronous manner because of the distance learning aspect of the course. The students are in many different time zones around the world. They are periodically placed in groups in order to collaborate in long-term projects throughout the year.

Syllabus: AP U.S. History pdf icon