Instructional Planning Supports

Instructional planning before and throughout the school year is key to successful implementation of Pre-AP courses and fulfilling the Pre-AP program commitments. To support new Pre-AP teachers' instructional planning prior to June —when access to Pre-AP Classroom (and all instructional materials) is available—we’ve created some supports to help them use the course frameworks, standards alignments, and Instructional Planning Guides.

Familiarize Yourself with the Course 

The Pre-AP course guide serves as the core document for a teacher's Pre-AP course. Pre-AP course guides are available on each specific course page.

Explore the course guide and review these elements:

  • Approach to Teaching and Learning: The Pre-AP theory of action includes focused content, horizontally and vertically aligned instruction, and targeted assessments and feedback.
    • Shared Principles: Cross-disciplinary principles that allow students to effectively extend their content knowledge while strengthening their critical thinking skills.
    • Areas of Focus: Practices that students develop and leverage as they engage with course content. They are vertically aligned to practices embedded in courses within a discipline, giving students multiple opportunities to strengthen and deepen their work with these skills throughout their education.
  • Course Map
    • Shows how Pre-AP components are positioned throughout a course.
  • Course Framework
    • Back mapped from AP expectations and aligned to grade-level expectations, the course framework is a teacher’s blueprint for instructional resources and assessments. Components include big ideas, enduring understandings, learning objectives, and key concepts for the course.
  • Assessments for Learning
    • Pre-AP assessments serve as tools for understanding progress and identifying areas that need more support. They provide frequent and meaningful feedback for both teachers and students across each unit of the course and for the course as a whole.

Engage in Cycles of Unit Preparation

Pre-AP courses are designed to provide teachers with purposeful time and space to bring their own voice and lessons into each unit to best meet the needs of their students and address the full range of state standards.

Use the following resources to begin planning at the unit level. All of these resources are available on each specific course page.

  • Instructional Planning Guides: Customizable templates designed to help teachers create a road map of the key instructional activities and assessments they will use to design their course in alignment with the Pre-AP course framework and instructional principles.
  • State Standards Alignment Executive Summaries: Outline connections between the Pre-AP course framework and the select state standards.
  • State Standards Crosswalks: Identify specific state standards and their alignment to the Pre-AP course framework. Teachers can customize this tool to support planning and align instruction to the Pre-AP learning objectives and state standards.

Engage in Cycles of Lesson Preparation

Teachers must authorize courses in Pre-AP Course Audit and access Pre-AP Classroom to complete professional learning and utilize additional resources for lesson preparation. 

Dive into daily lesson planning with these resources once access to Pre-AP Classroom is available.

  • Professional Learning
    • The Pre-AP Online Foundational Module Series supports teachers in planning and preparing for their Pre-AP course, while fulfilling the commitment to professional learning for course designation. These course-specific modules can be completed in 12–20 hours.
  • Pre-AP Model Lessons
    • Pre-AP instructional materials include model lessons for each instructional unit that are designed to illustrate on-grade-level instruction.
    • Support features for model lessons can be found in the course guide for each course.
  • Course Level Resources and Planning Tools
    • Digital teacher resources include the course guide and all teacher resources for the lessons and performance tasks for each unit.
    • Additional support resources include distance-learning companion slides, audio recordings of student texts that accompany the teacher and student instructional materials, and a collaboration tool for use in synchronous and asynchronous settings.
  • Partner Resources
    • Partnerships with organizations like Quill, Desmos, and Vocabulary.com give teachers additional digital tools to engage students in Pre-AP lessons.
    • These resources are linked directly in Pre-AP Classroom where appropriate.
    • They are available free, as part of your Pre-AP implementation.
  • Assessments for Learning
    • Digital learning checkpoints are formative assessments intended to inform both instruction and learning.
    • Performance tasks are performance-based unit assessments that provide teachers with the opportunity to measure student performance on key concepts and skills not easily measured by multiple-choice questions.
    • Optional final exams provide an opportunity for students to demonstrate success with the content and skills articulated in the course frameworks.
    • Sample performance tasks, performance task scoring guidelines, and learning checkpoints questions can be found in the course guide for each course.

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