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By Hattie Brown Garrow
The Virginian-Pilot
© August 10, 2009

WILLIAMSBURG
  Rookie teacher Morgan Stevens watched as her lab partner Eileen Pascucci twisted shut a floppy cylindrical tube filled with glucose and starch.

By fall, Stevens will need to know the ins and outs of this lesson on diffusion and osmosis. It is a requirement for the Advanced Placement biology course she will teach at Norfolk's Booker T. Washington High School.

That's why, on a sunny August day, Stevens and about 360 other teachers from at least 15 states were gathered at the College of William and Mary, hoping to become better AP teachers.

"It takes three years for a teacher new to AP to feel like they have a handle on it," said Bruce Brady, Norfolk's AP teacher specialist. "The first year you just hang on for dear life."

Summer institutes such as the week long one at William and Mary take place all over the country, serving as training grounds for both newcomers

and seasoned educators. For Stevens, an AP biology instructor in Norfolk, the alternative was spending her first full year as a teacher "treading water."

"I feel like coming here I'll be much more prepared than if I had tried to do it alone," she said.

Enrollment in the higher-level courses has soared as schools all over the country beef up their AP offerings and open them up to lower-performing students - an effort to increase minority participation and improve college readiness across the board. Nearly 59,800 Virginia students took at least one AP class in 2008, up from 36,597 five years earlier.

With that influx comes new challenges. In the Suffolk school division, for example, fewer than a quarter of the AP exams taken in spring 2008 received grades of 3 or higher - the scores typically needed to earn college credit. A disproportionate number of students earned an A or B in those same classes.

Suffolk administrators blamed the low exam scores on students being more concerned about inflating their grade-point average than performing well on the tests. Changing how credit is awarded and increasing teacher training were among a set of reforms approved by the School Board earlier this year.

Heather Krukonis, soon to be an AP English language and composition teacher at Lakeland High School in Suffolk, decided to take advantage of the training opportunity.

Her instructor at the institute assigned reading passages and asked the teachers to come up with questions that required true analysis.

Before, when Krukonis taught the course in another state, she'd simply ask her students to write how they felt about a work. Now she'll use the new techniques she has learned, she said.

Teaching AP classes - essentially college courses in a high school - is difficult because you're covering more material and you're doing it at a faster pace, said Ann Griffin, a Richmond private school teacher leading the AP biology sessions at William and Mary's summer institute.

At the same time, teachers have to work with students who may not have the grades, background or skills previously considered a must for AP participation. The trick is to be inclusive but maintain high standards, Griffin said.

"I think you just have to stop making excuses for them," she said.

And if students don't score high on the AP exams? No matter, Griffin said, as long as they experience some academic growth.

While Griffin's biology class conducted experiments, Chesapeake teacher Dawn Newell learned about the exam grading structure for AP world history. Patrick Whelan, a College Board consultant who teaches in Florida, encouraged his colleagues to assign some form of writing every day to better prepare students for the exam.

Remind students to read questions closely, Whelan said. One year AP exam graders were flooded with essays about the Holocaust in response to a question about anti-Semitism in the 19th century, he said.

Newell starts teaching AP world history at Indian River High School this fall. It seemed like a daunting task to her at first. With thousands of years worth of history to glean from, how do you choose?

"With this, I've learned it's not really about what you teach," she said. "It's about getting kids to think historically, globally."