AP Seminar: Creating Students Most Likely to Succeed

After spending the afternoon re-reading the final two chapters of Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith's book Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era, followed by reading through the materials for the AP Seminar course (part of AP Capstone) for Fall 2016, I am encouraged by the dovetailing of recommendations by Wagner and Dintersmith and the requirements of the Seminar course we will offer to juniors this year.

The Junior Seminar course, as created by the College Board, is built upon the QUEST protocol which asks students to: Question, explore, challenge and expand their boundaries of current knowledge, Understand and analyze arguments and comprehend author's claims, Evaluate multiple perspectives and the larger conversation of the varied points of view encountered, Synthesize ideas of others and combine their own perspective into an argument and Team, transform and transmit their argument in a method suited to their audience.

Along with QUEST, other guidelines put the direction of the course in the hands of students. topics, and arguments will be based on student interests and passions and built on their own scholarly sources for both individual and team research projects and presentations without teacher involvement in choice of sources, research questions or revisions. That is a tall order for students who will have to be self sufficient and for teachers who have become accostumed to being a font of ideas and resources for their students.

We are in the application phase this year so we are not offering it as an AP class this year, but we will follow as closely as possible, the guidelines in the documentation on the AP Seminar website.

Following our first two years of teaching PBL, it is an exciting step in the process of re-creating public education.