Since his first year of teaching, AP teacher Todd Carpenter has worked with freshmen through the challenges of AP Human Geography. As of the start of this year, he is expanding his spread of knowledge into AP World History, giving some of his former students the chance to learn from him for another year.
“The idea of being able to have the continuity of teaching my freshmen one more year, as sophomores, I thought could be much more effective,” Carpenter said. “By teaching them history by using everything that I knew I already taught them, which allowed for a lot of alignment between AP Human Geography and AP World History. Which hopefully proves to be successful with our test when scores come out.”
By carrying the same students from geography into world history, he says lessons feel more connected. That continuity has not gone unnoticed by returning student sophomore Elena Sadie.
“Mr. Carpenter is a great teacher and I’m happy to have him again,” Sadie said. “ I feel like [Carpenter] has so much knowledge about the topic. It’s so fun to be in his class. Obviously it’s super educational, but he has a way of making you enjoy the lesson and understand everything very well.”
Carpenter embraced the opportunity of collaborating with a new teaching partner this year, AP World History teacher George McGilligan. After working with AP Human Geography teacher Austin Crane for years, he said working with someone new gave him new knowledge and perspectives.
“Having a new teaching partner is great,” Carpenter said. “I’ve had the same teaching partner since I started teaching and we did get along great. We were very effective in the way we operated. But being able to get a new viewpoint on a new subject with a new person, it’s a new collaboration for me, so it gives me that diversity of thought that we’re seeking in students when we do all of our collaborative engagements in the classroom.”
McGilligan stated that they have delegated duties to suit their “preferred tasks” to keep up efficiency and have effective collaboration.
“Mr. Carpenter has long established himself as a primary personality within the Social Studies Department,” McGilligan said. “Overall, I’d say it’s a positive experience. The ability to have your ideas questioned by another teacher is a very big help. Now that I have a cooperating teacher right next to me, it’s a lot easier to be significantly more productive.”
The collaboration with Carpenter’s teaching skills is expected to keep students’ performance strong, though he acknowledges that the best results will take time.
“I think I’ll maintain my percentages,” Carpenter said. “I don’t think it’s going to be any better or any worse, but they’re already pretty high and we look great amongst not only the district and state, but also globally. So we hope to just maintain that and always try to improve, but we’ll see. Being the first year, we’re just going to have to wait. That way, I can have some data to run against, and then we can refine the course for next year.”
Ultimately, Carpenter sees this upcoming year as an opportunity to connect with his students and take this year as time to grow.
“I’m super excited so far, it’s gone really well,” Carpenter said. “The majority of the students I have are students I had last year, so I’m able to align what they learned in AP Human Geography with AP World History. Now I get to go from teaching spatially to storytelling, which is a completely different type of teaching, so I’m excited for that.”
