How to Use the Learning Target Overview Pages
We wanted to share with you a new resource we created to help you organize your AP Precalculus course: the Learning Target Overview page! Many of you have asked for a unit-at-a-glance printable page and we hope this new resource provides you with what you need to keep yourself and your students organized! You can find this resource at the top of every unit page on the site.
Each Learning Target Overview includes a list of all of the lessons in the unit and the learning targets covered in each lesson. These pages can be downloaded as a Word document so you can edit them to best fit your classroom needs. Here are three of our favorite uses for these docs:
Use 1: As a schedule
When starting a new unit, we like to give our students a schedule for the unit with important dates and assignments. If you print all the lessons for the unit at once, this is a nice cover page for the packet. We add columns to the table in order to add dates and homework assignments. We also add in additional rows for quiz and test days. You can see an example of this use below.
Bonus: If you’re using the Math Medic Assessment Platform, you can add links for the homework and post it to your Google Classroom! We like to assign homework digitally, but we still print the in-class quizzes and tests.
Use 2: For students to self-assess
One way to help students prepare for a quiz or test is to offer them a tool that will allow them to allocate their study time appropriately. They can't focus on every single topic of the unit, and it's unhelpful to spend a lot of time practicing problems they already feel comfortable with. Before tests, we would have students use the list of learning targets as a checklist to help them study. They checked off the learning targets they felt they understood and spent their study time going back over the ones they didn’t. Then we decided to update the process a little bit by having students evaluate their level of understanding of each learning target.
Try adding this reflection tool to the list of learning targets for students to score their understanding:
I don’t know how to do this
I can do this with some support
I can do this independently
I can teach this to someone else
In order for this to be most effective, give students a chance to score themselves during class. An example is shown below.
Use 3: As a digital launchpad to share with students and parents
Try turning the unit overview into a digital launchpad that you add to throughout the unit. Add links to videos, answer keys of the notes for absent students, and additional resources that students may find helpful--like the AP Daily Videos or Personal Progress Checks from AP Classroom. This is also a great way to re-use all of those videos you created during the remote teaching days!
As we transitioned away from traditional textbooks, we found these overviews were a simple and effective way to communicate with parents (and our admin) what we were working on in class and to provide additional resources. Our students consistently told us that having everything in one place was super helpful--no more trying to search through all of Google Classroom to find important links!
We hope you find these unit overviews helpful. Let us know how you use them in your classroom!
For a compiled list of ALL the learning targets for the whole course, broken up by unit, click here.