Advanced Placement Seminar at EHS one of 120 in the world
El Dorado High School’s new Advanced Placement Seminar course is one of only 120 in the world.
AP Seminar, a relatively new course, was created to respond to the needs of colleges and universities, EHS teacher Stephanie Fussell said.
The College Board used to select what schools were eligible to offer the course, but now schools are able to apply to offer it. After a lengthy application process throughout last year, the El
Dorado School District was accepted and Fussell was invited to a training session.
“For years, they’ve been repeatedly hearing from colleges (that) our students aren’t coming in with oral communications skills, our students aren’t coming in with an ability to work as a team and our students aren’t coming in with really good research skills and so much of college … (is) doing research papers or long term papers,” she said.
The class is one of two courses in the AP Capstone program, and content in the rigorous, “skills-based” course can be tailor-made to the student’s interests. Students will learn how to “have difficult conversations,” debate, use teamwork to do research and sift through documents, Fussell said.
Unlike content-based AP courses, the Seminar exam is segmented throughout the second semester, she said.
“In January, they get in groups of three to six and they can choose their group based on who else is doing the topic that they want … They choose a topic as a group, divide up who’s interested in looking at it from different lenses. Then they each do a 1,500-word research paper just on their part of the project and then they bring that together and form a presentation.”
The paper and presentation are followed by an oral defense and then uploaded to an online portfolio. The College Board would send back “stimulus material” and the test-takers have to connect information in two articles. The students would then form a research question and write a 2,000word research paper.
“The last part is a ‘sit down’ exam but it’s only two questions, one is to analyze an article or speech just for what is the argument, how does the argument make that argument and is the argument valid. Then the second part of the exam is like a mini synthesis paper where they read four documents and from those documents they form a question and write an argument from two of those documents,” she said.
“The AP Seminar class itself is very
interesting and has a very unique outline to it … I have to teach them the skills and they actually some control over what content so if they want to have a debate over something that’s really relevant in their lives, there’s room for that in the curriculum.”
Seminar is one part of the two-course AP Capstone program and offers great incentive for students who plan on attending college, she said. The Common App already has a place where applicants can specify if they’ve participated in the program.
“AP Seminar is actually the pre-requisite for AP Research,” Fussell said. “If you take those two classes … and any other four classes and pass the AP Exam, then they’ll actually graduate with another diploma, which is the AP Capstone diploma.”
During a recent training session, Fussell said, she learned that more than 80 percent of students who took AP Seminar felt like they were more prepared for college.