Lt. Col. Farmer attends summer institute to stay ahead of sweeping AP changes

 

Lt. Col. Bill Farmer, a veteran Culver Academies math teacher, spent part of his summer back in the classroom, attending a national training institute to ensure his students are prepared for a redesigned AP Statistics curriculum and exam.

"I wanted to be prepared to make those changes that would match the emphasis points from the College Board to ensure my students have the best opportunity for success on the exam," Farmer said.

The College Board redesigned the course this year, consolidating eight units into five, combining and rearranging topics while shifting curriculum emphasis, altering pacing and introducing a fully digital exam format.  Farmer described the changes as the most significant overhaul of AP Statistics in years.

Farmer joined 35 AP Statistics educators from across the country, ranging from first-year teachers to instructors with more than two decades of experience teaching the course, at the four-day seminar at Eastern Kentucky University.

"It was a wonderful wealth of knowledge and experience," Farmer said. "We were sharing techniques on what worked and what didn't work with students."

He said that because of the seminar, he doesn’t feel like he's "on an island" teaching the course. He said the teachers have kept in touch and continue to share information.

Another benefit was hearing directly from Darren Starnes, lead author of “The Practice of Statistics,” the textbook used by most AP Statistics courses nationwide.

Farmer said the conference provided practical guidance on how students will encounter the material on the redesigned exam.

Among the changes, the multiple-choice section now groups several questions around a common scenario, reducing reading demands. The free-response section has been reduced from six questions to four, while new scoring methods and command verbs require students to understand precisely what exam prompts are asking.

“They now have a list of what they call action verbs. Each one of the action verbs has a different meaning. So part of my requirement as a teacher is to ensure my students know the action verb itself and the AP stats meaning of that word,” he said.

Another challenge is with the exam now entirely online, students must enter statistical notation on a computer. Although the College Board will provide a selectable palette of notation symbols, many students will be unfamiliar with the format. To help them adjust, Farmer said he plans to create online assessments that mirror the testing environment.

Without the training, Farmer said, students might have entered the exam prepared for content that no longer receives emphasis while lacking experience in areas that will now be tested.

"If I didn't go to the course, my students would not be as prepared for the exam as I would like them to be," he said.

Farmer is particularly enthusiastic about a new emphasis on having students formulate their own statistical questions instead of simply analyzing questions provided by instructors.

 

 

"As a practicing mathematician out in the world, you have to come up with a statistical question," he said. "Your boss might say, 'This is what I want you to think about,' but they don't give you the statistical question. You have to come up with it."

At the same time, Farmer has reservations about some aspects of the redesign. He worries that reducing focus on the mathematical foundations behind statistical procedures could make students more dependent on calculators and software without fully understanding how the underlying processes work.

Even so, he remains open-minded about the changes and plans to evaluate their impact after teaching the revised curriculum for a full year.

He said a bonus of attending the institute was Eastern Kentucky gave every participating teacher a $500 scholarship to be awarded to a student at their school. It can be awarded to a Culver student who decides to attend Eastern Kentucky in the next two years. Farmer notified Culver's Academic Affairs Department.

Farmer joined Culver in 2014 and is now beginning his 13th year at the school. During that time, he has taught some of the school's most advanced mathematics students, including those enrolled in AP Statistics, AP Calculus BC and the Honors Seminar in Mathematics.

A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he served 23 years in the Army. About seven years into his military career, the Army sent him back to graduate school to earn a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Kentucky before assigning him to teach math at West Point.

"That's when I fell in love with teaching," Farmer said.

Even as he continued serving in the military, he sought opportunities to teach evening courses at local community colleges. When retirement approached, a friend on Culver's mathematics faculty encouraged him to apply.

Known for hands-on classroom activities, Farmer has built AP Statistics lessons around real-world applications and interactive experiments.

"I wanted a lot of activities to get the students up out of their seat, get them to play with math in life and see how math is connected to life," he said.

Farmer said he sees the world through a mathematical lens.

“When I see the tree move or I see the shadow on the ground, I immediately begin thinking math," he said.

Farmer views professional development as an essential part of teaching, especially working at Culver, an elite leadership-oriented boarding school in northern Indiana. In addition to AP training, he has completed advanced coursework in data science through the University of Wisconsin and annually evaluates international mathematics papers through the Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications (COMAP.

His motivation, he said, is to continuously improve as a teacher.

"I want my students, when they complete my course, to be extremely prepared to do very well on the exam," Farmer said.

He strives for at least a 4.5 average score for his students. The national average is about 3.

That goal of wanting to continuously improve as a teacher is why he continues to seek opportunities to learn, he said, even after decades in the classroom.