AP Comparative Website

We started our last country today, Iran, in AP Comparative and as a way to prep I am searching the Internet for assignments that might be useful to my class.  As part of that search I found Robert Crawford's great AP Comparative page.  If you look at it, there are individual country pages which include key vocabulary as well as a number of questions that should be considered for each state. 

How to Determine the Reading Level of a Document

I am thinking ahead to next year and how I will use the reading tests I give my students at the beginning of the year.  Since I have technology for them all my next goal is going to differentiate for them.  I see differentiation as going two different ways: 1) learning type which I also have a test for if you look below 2) reading level.

The reading level tests are also in early posts.  But then what.  Google Documents, before it was Google Drive had a very early way to determine readability, but it is now gone.

• You can do it in Microsoft Word, but if you don't use Word 
• The easiest site to use is this one and it tells you the reading level. 
• Here is a great page that lets you insert a url and it even tells you how to calculate the level if say you are using a paper document (although in that case I would try to find it on Google books and just use the url finder).  While this site gives the scores for three reading level tests it does not tell you what approximate grade it is read at.
• Here is a way to hand calculate it for Flesch-Kincaid,  Gunning Fog Index, SMOG Index, Fry Readability Formula, and Coleman-Liau Indexs. 

So for example here is an article on Obama and his consideration of his legacy from the WashPost and here are the results for the reading levels and here is what grade it is at level 8 which means it is appropriate for 13 and 14 year olds. For comparison I entered in an article from the Economist and it said it was a reading level of 7 or could be read by 12 and 13 year old students.   The truth is that generally any article or news magazine other than scholarly articles are going to be appropriate for your high school students - unless they test below reading levels and that is where you will have to have them look up key words.  If you follow this it will also impact state exams - or at least mine which give a lot of our ESOL students problems. 

Judge Roberts' Hearing

Thanks to my colleague Charity Fisher for sending me this News Hour report summarizing the Judiciary Committee hearing in the US Senate. 

Reading Strategies

One of the teachers in my department correctly pointed out that while I had a good post on judging reading levels, I did not have a way to help solve the problem since most of us cannot just send a student to a reading specialist without missing the content in our classroom.

So Pearson has a succinct description of how to improve reading many of which you might know such as pre-reading, reading groups, organizers (I love this one) and more.  If you want more details here is a longer description of how to integrate reading strategies in your classroom go here. 

Use Our Twitter Hashtag (#apgovhelp) for AP Government Exam Prep

I have written several times about how Frank Franz, myself and Rebecca Small had three assignments where we had our students Tweeting during the fall campaign and the State of the Union.

Well now one of our Fairfax teachers, Eliot Waxman, has pulled together a number of teachers to run the hashtag "#apgovhelp" which I would encourage you to give to your students. A number of teachers in my (Fairfax) county have joined together to have our students post questions and to answer any that your students might have.

Your students will know how hashtags work, but if you put the hasgtag in your Tweet then our students will see it. To see all the items on the hashtag just put it in the search engine and return. You will then see three items and click on "View all Tweets."

We want this to work both ways so you if your student sees something they can answer, then just have them give and answer with the hashtag in it. Perhaps you could even have it as an assignment as I am doing (and the kids who do not have Twitter will do the same in an editable Google Drive document.

We are concentrating on different topics each week, but your students can ask anything you want every week.

Week	Topic
April 6 to 12	Constitutional Foundations, Political Beliefs & Behaviors
April 13 to 19	Political Parties, Interest Groups, Mass Media
April 20 to 26	Institutions
April 27 to May 3	Public Policy, Civil Rights, Civil Liberties
May 3 14th	Any topic

If your kids do not want their friends to see them doing school work in Twitter, have them start of their Tweet with "@HideTag" or "@HideChat"

Finally if you want to present it to your students, here is what I am giving my students.

Learning Styles and Reading Comprehension

At my school we are working on Tier 1, 2 and 3 learning which essentially asks the teacher to differentiate learning with your students who are not meeting all of your objectives.

Two main items that we are looking at are learning styles and reading comprehension. Sure we think we know our students after a year of being with them, but isn't most of it anecdotal.  Next year I am going to talk to my department about having our students complete this learning style test (no login/password required).  

Secondly I want our teachers to consider reading comprehension using this test (or similar ones later).  Of course the hard part is once we know how learning style and reading comprehension the hard part is taking the information and putting it into action (more on that later).  

Chinese Court System

Considering that AP Comparative has had a lengthy free response question on the Chinese judiciary, I do not feel Hauss' AP Comparative book (but I still like it better than the other ones) is adequate. There are multiple sites on the Internet, but I like this short summary of the recent changes and the way the Chinese judiciary works. 

Summary of Maggie Thatcher's Accomplishments

Since PM Margaret Thatcher is fair game for the AP Comparative exam I believe I will have my students read this NYTimes article from today on her career as it would be fair game for one of the short answer questions on the exam.  Above is a video of her important quotes.   The third or fourth part of the video has a nice run down on the parts of the European Union's governing bodies which you could use as a review. 

New Example of Super PAC

Outgoing mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who was a (D) until he ran for mayor and is now a (D) and is enough of a billionaire that he flies in his private jet to his weekend home in Bermuda most weekends, has his own interest group Mayors Against Illegal Guns is doing all the things interest groups do even if this one is largely one mayor against guns!

• Above is a new ad that starts running today with a father of one of the Sandy Hook kids.
• It is targeting the ads in swing states against senators who have not made up their minds (Sens. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), Daniel Coats (R-Ind.),Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.),Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.), Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.),Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.).)
• The group is starting to have Congressional report cards on votes just as most interest groups do
• Bloomberg has spent $12 million on his super PAC
• The NRA is speaking out against the group with Wayne LaPierre saying "Bloomberg can't buy America." (see new NRA ad below and its own report cards)

Margaret Thatcher

With the death today of Margaret Thatcher you will certainly be seeing a lot about her career.  I, of course, am thinking of how I can use it as a review of sorts for my AP Comparative students.  One place to start is the of Margaret Thatcher foundation.  While obviously biased it does have a good chronology of her life and you can click on their links for more details.  More importantly you could ask your students about the Parliament, how people get elected and then go to how did she get elected to Parliament, backbencher, Prime Minister, Conservative and on it goes!

Studying for the AP US Government Exam

May 14th is a big  day in my classes as my AP Government students are taking their AP exam and my AP Comparative students are taking both exams (thankfully in 2014 the exams will be on different days).

• To prepare them for the exam we have already given them a ton of previously released AP exam questions.  I actually encourage the students to talk about the questions with each other (could I really stop them from not doing so).  Every year I find that most kids do about the same as they do on my tests (percentage wise), but some of the kids who really work hard improve and some of the lazy ones go down. 
• Then I give them Rebecca Small's 100 questions. I don't ask them to do the court cases since they will have just taken a test on them.  
•  Since my AP Comparative students have already (back in January) completed the questions, they will have to complete a lot of this lengthy review. I also give a "final test" before the actual AP consisting of 60 multiple choice and two free response questions.   After years of teaching I know seniors are more likely to care about the test than the AP exam so know this will get them to study for both.  
• Finally we will go over my tips for the AP exam itself.   I have been teaching AP Government for I believe 13 years and grading them for 11 or 12 so I think my tips are fairly useful.  I haven't yet developed them for the AP Comparative exam, but it is fairly similar except for the free response portion which I will add to in a few days. 

Text2MindMap

I recently posted about Text2mindmap, but in my teacher class tonight we were looking at it and so I decided I wanted to make a how to film for people.  If you every want to have a great way to create a flow chart about something this is a great tool.  One of the drawbacks is that it does not allow you to add a photo or a link, but if you go to your Google Drive drawing, you can download your Text2mindmap and then upload it there and add photos.

Iranian Presidential Elections

One day I want to return to Iran where I spent four wondthis NYTimes article that, of course, will take some time.  The article discusses such important AP Comparative terms such as president, supreme ruler, Guardian Council, clerics and parliament.  Iran is our last country which we should be starting the week after next.

erful years as a child (what could be better than a pool, lots of snow and camels coming to your front door), but not until the countries leaders change for the better.  Judging from

How to Use Twitter

This is a great video on why and, more importantly, how to use Twitter.  If you want to see different items to follow for social studies teachers, put "Twitter" in my search engine and you will get some great posts.

My View of the World, Part II

Microsoft's VP of Education Anthony Salcito asked me to pen my thoughts on education which you can find on his blog here.    I talk a lot about where I believe education is going in the next decade as well as who are some of my educational influences and what it is like in my classroom.  As with anything online, there are lots of links to help follow my discussion.

By the way the quote above is one that I got from a woman (long since forgotten her name) who taught my methods class when I was working on my teaching certification and has been my governing rule since I started teaching, hard has it has been at times to break the mold.