Meet the College Board Endorsed Consultant for AP Human Geography Online Event 2, Max Lu
I am a geography professor at Kansas State University but have had the privilege of serving AP
Human Geography in several capacities.
A chance encounter with an AP teacher and reader led me to my first AP Human Geography reading in Clemson, South Carolina in 2003, the third year of the course. Since then, I have read the exam every year except for one and have been a reader, table leader, and question leader. I was on the Test Development Committee from 2007 to 2015 helping to put the annual AP exam together and continue to serve as a senior reviewer for the College Board. Recently I co-authored (with Barbara Hildebrant, Ken Keller, and Rod Neumann) a textbook titled Human Geography for the AP Course (Bedford, Freeman & Worth, 2021). It has truly been a fun and rewarding experience meeting and working with AP teachers from around the country at the readings and at the AP Human Geography workshops and summer institutes I have been teaching.
I look forward to working with you at this APSI in June.
The overriding goal is to make this APSI a practical and teacher-centered event by covering the key changes in the recently published Course and Exam Description (CED), sharing the resources for teaching the content, and providing a forum for participants to share ideas and teaching strategies.
Major topics to be covered may include:
- The course and the exam
- The new CED, including the 3 Big Ideas, 5 skill categories, and the 7 content units;
- The new exam format: the 5 task verbs, strategies for answering multiple choice questions and 7-part free response questions (FRQs), how to use FRQs from past exams, etc.
- The AP Classroom resources such as personal progress checks, question banks, etc.
- Tips for preparing syllabi for the course auditing.
- Diversity, inclusion, equity and access in AP
- Unit-specific resources and activities
- We will spend the bulk of our time to share a wide variety of teacher-developed, classroom-tested resources and activities for teaching content topics in each of the seven units. All of them can be readily implemented in your classroom.
- A workbook (pdf file) with detailed descriptions of the resources and activities will be provided.
- AP exam preparation
- How to better prepare students for the exam? What should students do with specific task verbs in an FRQ? How can improve their quality of writing in answering FRQs?
- The FRQ scoring process and how it can inform us about preparing students for the exam (i.e., tips and lessons).