APNC 2005 Testimonials
Nick Argento
Social Studies Teacher, Former Social Studies Department Head Boston College High School
AP: What prompted you to attend the conference?
N.A.: This is my second time at the AP Annual Conference. I went to one in Los Angeles three years ago and was very impressed. I thought the conference was really a meeting of some of the best secondary education and middle school teachers in the country. And I still think that. You can just tell with the vigor with which people talk about the subject matter, the enthusiasm they seem to bring. They're talking about teaching methodology, and their enthusiasm for the AP Program and what it brings to their students as far as both the intellectual challenge and the development of their academic skill -- you just have to combine all that. It's really just a great conference to go to.
One of my favorite things to do at the conference is sit at the different meals. Whether it's lunch, breakfast, dinner, whatever, you get to meet a great collection of people from across the country. The consistency that I see is this love of teaching, this love of learning, and this love of trying to find new ways to instruct students better.
I think that's one of the things that AP does well. It has been able to find people who can discuss how they fit the AP Program into what they do, into their school setting, and into their school culture. I think you walk away with a lot of new ideas. I walked away feeling very invigorated about the coming school year, so much so that I'd like to go to the conference again in the future.
AP: Did you attend the dinner for the fiftieth anniversary of the AP Program?
N.A.: The function for the fiftieth anniversary celebration was held at the National History Museum in Houston, and that was a stunning setting. I talked to so many people the next day who spoke so well of it. It was an excellent way to run the event instead of just having us sit at tables and get talked at. It was nice to be able to mingle and to see the exhibit. There was a live band. It was treated professionally. I wish that was the case with other organizations. I go to other conferences, and sometimes you see that they nickel-and-dime the teachers. That's not the case with the AP Annual Conference, and I think that's why people like to go to it.
AP: What workshops did you attend, and which ones stick out in your mind?
N.A.: My background is in economics, so I went there with the intent of mainly going to economics sessions. However, I did go to a session about the introduction of the AP Chinese curriculum. It so happens that my school runs a five-week immersion program for students during the summer in Beijing. A colleague of mine runs the program and he is the AP Coordinator for our school. So when we were together in China, I told him about this conference, and he said, "Could you get some information about the AP Chinese program because I'd like to put it in the curriculum?" And so I went to that.
I did go to one session about colleges and universities that are accepting AP credits. I thought that was an interesting session because it dispelled this rumor that many colleges are starting to reduce the number of credits that they're going to accept through the AP Program. I thought that was pretty interesting.
AP: What did you think of the plenary speakers?
N.A.: For me, the highlight of the conference was the speech by Juan Williams from NPR. He contextualized what a teacher does in a classroom. I think it's easy for teachers to become myopic about what they're doing, and some teachers, I know, become jaded about what they're doing in the classroom, not being able to recognize whether they're being helpful to a student. Juan Williams helped contextualize that, I thought. The thing is, at the AP conference, you don't run into a lot of teachers who are jaded. You run into teachers who are simultaneously passionate about their subject areas and passionate about helping students learn. And I think that in his speech, talking about how long it took him to be able to learn and to finally be able to interview Thurgood Marshall, he just explained that a bit. He said that he recognized that this was his place in history when he went to interview him. He was very excited about that. He drew that analogy, and he said, "You know, this is what you're doing in a classroom. This is what teachers do in a classroom day in and day out." And when you start to think about it in that context, you recognize how important the role is, and you further recognize how important it is that you need to be at your best every time you set foot in the classroom. And regarding the AP Program, that's one of the things I think it does. It brings out the best in people, and I think it brings out the best in your teaching.
AP: Do you think the sessions and workshops will help you expand your professional role?
N.A.: I went to the conference Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I went to the preconference workshop that was in my subject area. This would be twice I've gone to that, and I know from my previous experience having attended the preconference workshop that the ideas and the methodologies I learned in those sessions directly, positively influenced the way I taught in the classroom. And I picked up some of the new ideas and methodologies this year the same way. This does two things. It makes you excited about what you're going to do when you get back in the classroom. It also enhances your confidence with the material. It seems to me that enhancing learning is AP's goal.
Every school has its politics. Every program has its politics, and I know that there are other programs out there, like IB. I know that people out there can be critical of the AP courses because they focus too much on AP Exam grades and not enough on what the content is in the curriculum, and I disagree with that. I think the strength of the AP Program is that it enhances the expectation -- the student's expectation -- and it's very clear what the expectations are. When you can do both of those, when you can have students walk into a classroom knowing that they have to be at their best and at the same time knowing clearly what's going to be expected of them, then they're going to perform. They're going to reach those goals. I've seen it very much with the AP Program.
AP: Did you like the presenters at the sessions and the workshops, and what was most striking about them?
N.A.: There's a teacher from San Antonio named Sally Dickinson. She's a presenter who gave a lot of practical information about microeconomics and macroeconomics. To be really specific, she took all of the diagrams that one would use to teach microeconomics concepts and put them onto what she calls "learning cards." She gives them to her students at the start of each unit and says, "These are the diagrams you need to know. You need to memorize these, and you need to know how they function." She broke that down. Every textbook has these diagrams, but she broke them down so they have specific directions that point out important content to make sure you learn them. She took our email addresses, and she gave us a PDF file with all those cards on them, so I'm going to be able to use those cards.
To me, any time you can get additional tools that are going to help students learn is useful. The more tools you can get, the more you can try to throw at the students. A lot of it is going to start to stick.
I know for a fact that particular sessions made trekking from Boston to Houston entirely worthwhile. I feel like it's an art. So I'm an artist with the palette in my left hand, and the canvas is the student. It's a matter of which color you're going to use to paint the student. Going to something like this allows me to add another color to my palette. Any time you can do that, it's going to enhance the picture, i.e., it's going to enhance the learning.
AP: Did our conference this year meet your expectations?
N.A.: It exceeded my expectations. When I went to the one in Los Angeles, I had a different agenda. I was trying to find a lot of information to support this decision to open-enroll the social studies courses. So I went with an agenda. I wanted to see if there was information that would help me better sell that idea and convince my colleagues that this was the way to go.
This time around I went with the idea of specifically trying to enhance my content background. And it exceeded my expectations. Many times when I go to a workshop, if I walk away with one new idea, then it makes attending the workshop worthwhile. I walked away with more like 15 or 20 good ideas and helpful ideas. Given the distance that I traveled to go to the AP Annual Conference, smack in the middle of the summer, it certainly makes that journey worthwhile. Many of those ideas came from the workshops, but it's also just the culture of the conference that makes it all the more worthwhile.
Striking up conversations with teachers who are vertical coordinators or team-teaching an AP course or working in a district that doesn't appear to have many resources, hearing how they're being innovative, only helps me have new ideas on what to do in my classes. Plus, it kind of starts a change of thinking about how to be more innovative in the classroom. I think that's why it exceeded my expectations, because it sort of changed my thinking a bit and how I approach the teaching of the subject.
AP: Can you give me some examples (two or three) of the most important things you will take back to your school?
N.A.: Okay. One was the way I go about scoring an AP Economics free-response question. We were given some very specific ideas on how to go about doing that. The technique that we were taught is called "Going Around the Clock," which means that you advise the kids to do the same thing; they put symbols around the outside of the diagram. That's also the way the Reader is going to read it when he or she goes to score it, score the response.
Critics of the AP Program think that we're teaching to the test and that it can constrain teachable moments in a classroom. But the second thing that I learned at this conference is that I disagree with that. Because there's a lot of content, you do have to move at pace; there's no question about that. And anybody teaching an AP course is going to have to know their content area; absolutely they need to do that.
I learned that you can take many different newspaper articles from today's news and find the concepts that you are teaching. Having the students pick them out from a magazine or newspaper article helps. So you've got some versatility, and it shows that I can be more student centered and less teacher centered in the way I teach the course. Because of the content expectations in the AP Program, I think a lot of teachers try to focus heavily on a teacher-centered method of teaching; that's the way they learned when they were at the university. It looked to me like that was the focus of the AP sessions, to give teachers options to have their classes be more student centered. So that, for me, was a real paradigm shift. I recognized that it was (a) helpful and (b) necessary.
My school sends a lot of teachers to the one-week workshops, but I think that going to a three-day conference has a greater benefit. It is a meeting of very talented, intelligent, well-skilled, well-trained teachers who want to make themselves even better. So how can you not want to go to that?
AP: And what type of educator do you think would get the most value out of attending?
N.A.: The sessions at that program are geared toward a couple of groups. One it certainly is geared to is the classroom teacher, and it should be geared to the classroom teacher. Some information could certainly be very useful to any administrator in a school in terms of planning where they want their curriculum to go and how to figure out the progress of their students in the curriculum. Administrator conferences are like temperature checks on how well the students are performing, how serious the culture of their school is, and how to create an environment of learning.
I think if you're a principal at that conference, and you hear what other schools are doing with their programs, you'll bring back some of the information you hear. It comes down to some of the fundamental tenets of what the AP Program strives to do. That is to create high expectations, clear expectations, with students. When you do that, it creates a de facto of the same level of expectation with teachers. I think what happens is that you start to cultivate a better environment for learning. I think that's ultimately what the goal is.
AP: The last question, is there anything else that you wish could have been at the conference that wasn't there this year?
N.A.: You know what I think might be interesting is to bring in students who have gone through the AP Program and maybe bring them in at a couple of levels. Students who are going into senior year—students who took a full-year AP course as sophomores in high school—because there's a perception. I know at my school and many schools that the AP programs are targeted only for juniors and seniors. Maybe bring in some younger kids. That might be one idea.
A second idea would be to maybe bring in some students who had finished their freshman year of college. I guess it would be tantamount to an exit interview. I think it would be interesting to hear an honest discussion of what they saw as the benefit of the AP Program beyond just the way college admissions people look at the program.
I think the strength of the AP Program is that college admissions counselors across the country like the program because it's a way for them to further confirm how students do on SAT and ACT testing. It's another snapshot of the student. It's a way for them to assess students who are taking English in Sacramento, California, at a public school; or a public school in Macon, Georgia; or a private school in central Pennsylvania. It's a way for them to coordinate the quality of the teaching and the quality of the school. I think it's an additional tool.
College counselors like the AP Program. They like it because it gives them additional information about the ability of the student.
