Leaning Away from the AP: A Cross-Disciplinary Transition

As physics teacher David Hallwood said, teachers at Deerfield Academy actively strive to find the “best way of teaching.” Throughout the past decade, administrators and educators asked themselves if they should continue with Advanced Placement-labeled courses. 

The Advanced Placement (AP) program was officially launched for high schoolers in the 1955-56 school year after the government-funded “Kenyon Plan” from Kenyon College in Ohio had conducted studies and trials runs with high schools and colleges like the Lawrenceville School, the two Phillips Academies, St. Paul’s School, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Yale University. 

From the start, the College Board took over the AP program. The purpose of AP courses and exams were to allow high school students to take college-level courses in high school for  college credit. Now, AP classes have become more present in the world of education and applying to colleges, taking up a significant portion of students’ attention in their academic career. 

Currently, the only classes that are designated as AP classes at the Academy are various visual arts courses, AP Calculus AB and BC, AP Statistics, and AP Seminar: H20 & Food Systems. Common AP-labeled courses that have transitioned from that system are the core science courses and some history courses. English was never offered as an AP class and history classes were not offered as AP classes earlier on as well. 

One of the classes that shifted away from the AP curriculum was the Art History class. Lydia Hemphill, Dean of Academic Affairs, taught this class from when she started teaching at Deerfield in 1995 until four years ago, when John Leistler took over. 

Previously, Art History was a three-term course and Ms. Hemphill had taught three full sections. The start of the shift away from the AP was caused by a change in the official College Board Art History AP exam and curriculum. In the 2015-2016 school year, the AP went from covering only Western art to global art. 

Ms. Hemphill said that these changes in the course were “good changes, but just not changes that made sense for us here, given the length of our school [year].” Her students were less interested in studying for AP, and she made the decision on her own to redesign the course. Her suggestion was taken well by the department and a relatively quick shift was made. The current Art History course is now two terms instead of three and serves as a history elective course. 

In this case, this course became one that truly was not an AP-preparatory course, unlike some current honors science classes that provide a proficient education in the AP topics for students to fill in with individual study. 

In the 2010s, the science department also saw a shift away from AP courses and removed the AP-label from Honors Biology and Honors Chemistry courses courses. Science Teacher Heidi Valk, who previously served as the head of the science department, said, “We felt like we could teach a better class, and that by taking away the AP structure, we gave our teachers the opportunity to imagine what they think is the best class.” 

At the same time, the Academy’s advanced physics curriculum also began a restructuring period. Before the pandemic, students took every class daily, giving classes twice the time and almost twice the amount of homework time than they currently have. 

The AP science courses were also given double periods, which gave them even more time to cover AP topics in depth. But after it no longer became feasible to teach Advanced Physics 2 in one year due to the schedule changes, the department attempted to teach the class in four terms, creating unnecessary and overwhelming complications.

At this point, Head of School John Austin told the Advanced Physics 2 teachers of the time Ben Bakker and Mark Acton to change the course completely. “Dr. Austin said you can do a better course that's not an AP course. Let's move not just a little far away. We didn't want to be close to having a lot of students thinking, ‘I'll do this, and then I'll supplement on this side,’” Mr. Bakker said. 

Dr. Hallwood expressed his gratitude for the opportunity, saying, “It’s a brilliant opportunity because a lot of headmasters would not give you that opportunity [to remake the course].” 

Without the label, Mr. Bakker and Dr. Hallwood were in a position with immense freedom to decide the future of the course at Deerfield. Dr. Hallwood said he enjoyed designing this course free from the need to prepare for the Advanced level (A-level) exams in the UK that mirror the American AP system, which he worked with before coming to teach in the United States. 

“This course has given me a chance to really think about what these students actually need. How can we make them the best physics students that we can? How can we provide them with the skills and the knowledge they need for when they go on to college?” he said.

This summer, Mr. Bakker and Dr. Hallwood are going to the American Association of Physics Teachers conference in California to present their course to other physics teachers around America. 

“I would I've never done [the conference], but we think this course is unique and interesting enough that other physics teachers would like to hear about it,” Mr. Bakker said. Dr. Hallwood added that the two wanted to give back to the community by sharing their course. “I want other teachers to realize they can do this, that there is a way of teaching students these skills that are just not possible in a traditionally taught course.”

The AP label that courses received was removed for many reasons at the Academy: schedule changes after COVID-19, AP curriculum redesigns, and a hope for the best classes, outside of college-driven programming. These changes allowed for teachers to explore and improve curriculums, across disciplines and departments. 

“It was great to see Deerfield students learn to step up and push themselves and become curious and become collaborative and become people who have high-level conversations with me that even I had no idea what the answer was,” Mr. Bakker said, reflecting on the deep growth of his students.