It’s August 1968. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago is getting underway, with delegates, protestors and reporters all in attendance—Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, Mayor Richard Daley, Abbie Hoffman, Bobby Seale and Dan Rather, among others.
With nervous energy, they walk among each other, review their prepared remarks, take their places.
But this isn’t Chicago, and it isn’t really 1968. It’s modern-day Penn Charter, and this cast of characters is actually a roomful of juniors enrolled in the Advanced Studies: Modern American History course. Embodying the characters they have been assigned, the students are re-creating a pivotal event in the nation’s political turmoil grounded in the Vietnam War.
Catherine Murray, assistant director of Upper School and teacher of Advanced Studies: Modern American History, employs in her curriculum interactive games called Reacting to the Past (RTTP). Described as “an active learning pedagogy of role-playing games designed for higher education,” RTTP is developed by a consortium of colleges and universities to promote engagement and to improve intellectual and academic skills. Murray was excited to bring this innovative approach to teaching history to Penn Charter after first using Reacting to the Past— Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman—in the Modern American history course she taught at Ursinus College.
This year, Murray used two games in her PC course: Greenwich Village, 1913 and Chicago 1968: Policy and Protest at the Democratic National Convention. “Both allow students to immerse themselves in critical issues facing America,” Murray said. “At Penn Charter we aim to foster students who are empathetic, courageous learners, as well as constructive communicators. Participation in RTTP supports these goals. Specifically, protesting the Democratic Convention of 1968 is not unlike what these students have witnessed with Black Lives Matter as well as recent protests on college campuses. Therefore, they’ve been able to draw connections with the process of political engagement.”
Louella Whitaker, a junior, found that Murray’s Advanced Studies course— with its role-playing, interactive games—gave her a richer understanding of history because she could explore it “on an everyday level, through deeper personal experiences and perspective.”
Through the arc of the Chicago 1968 game, students use primary and scholarly secondary sources to research the politics, people and history leading up to the 1968 election. Within their individual roles of delegates, protesters and journalists, they influence policies for the domestic platform for the Democratic Party and also set the course for the future of the Vietnam War. In other words, each class has the agency to affect the outcome of the game.
In May 2021, Penn Charter, after a two-year self-study, announced that the Upper School would be moving beyond the College Board Advanced Placement (AP) program to develop its own rigorous advanced courses that would provide for innovative teaching and deeper exploration of content areas. Advanced Studies courses better align with the school’s Strategic Vision of thinking differently about how to prepare students for life in a complex and changing world.
The Class of 2025 will be the last students offered AP courses at Penn Charter. As the school continues adding to its own advanced courses, the transition from Advanced Placement to Advanced Studies will be complete in 2025-26.
“The AP program was developed in the 1950s,” Murray said, “during a time when America was trying to address some serious concerns related to U.S. education during the Cold War. So it served its purpose at one time, and then it really hasn't grown in a way that has shown innovation in teaching and learning.”
Unlike Advanced Studies: Modern American History, Murray describes AP U.S. History, or APUSH, as “racing to the finish line.” She doesn't feel able to tap into student interests or to react to something happening in the world currently because she must guide students through the sweeping, prescribed content on which the AP exam is based.
“In the APUSH classroom,” she said, “by the nature of the curriculum and the goal of the test, there isn't as much ‘let's take this journey together.’ It's more, ‘I am your guide, and I am going to get you to the finish line. Buckle up and let's go!’ But in Advanced Studies, I am able to create a learning community in which I develop curriculum related to student interests, while also maintaining the same standards I employed while teaching at Ursinus. Ultimately, with this model, students are willing to take risks that they haven't taken before.”
In 2022-23, Murray’s first year of teaching the Advanced Studies course, she saw such growth from students early on that when they were studying the civil rights movement, she asked how they wanted to be assessed. “I never would have asked that in APUSH,” Murray said, “because I know how I have to assess them; the AP Exam is explicit in the types of questions students will be expected to answer. But here I asked. And in that conversation, we decided together that we would do a civil rights forum.”
Murray assigned each of the 19 students a civil rights leader. They researched their roles and held a debate. “And we developed the rubric together of how we would assess,” she said.
Even when students are not researching and embodying a historical figure, the course is more guided conversation than lecture and includes group projects, presentations and graded discussions.
This underscores the ways in which Advanced Studies is different from AP, as Murray sees it, because it’s a collaboration between teacher and students—and students can take ownership and self-direct their learning.
“I feel like there's a lot of room to breathe and to find your own interests in this course,” Louella said.
David Nichols teaches Advanced Studies: Experimental Biology. As the name suggests, it is heavy on experimentation.
“It's very much about the action of science,” Nichols said. “It's really a chance for students to be able to turn more of the class into action—for them to apply things that they're most interested in.”
After students interview each other to build a research team of three to five, Nichols assigns them readings from textbooks and scientific articles that support their research interest. With a research question and testable hypothesis in mind, they begin to design an experiment, writing a proposal that is much like a research grant. Rejection of a proposal by Nichols may be expected—and it provides important experience in revising and resubmitting. After the group presents the revised proposal to their peers to evaluate, they budget for materials and begin.
With feedback in hand, Nichols said, “they know they have to make sure that it’s a controlled experiment and that it meets the requirements of the statistical design. And so even the conversations happening in class are interesting because they're speaking from experience now, rather than just exploring the topic.”
Nichols’ course is grounded in his experience both teaching and designing courses at West Virginia University and Drexel University. “A big part of my job at Drexel,” he said, “was evaluating lab-based courses and figuring out ways to give students more ownership over their projects.” He and his colleagues in the science department had an idea: “Maybe we should just let the students decide what they want to do. And as soon as that happened, it made the class more interesting to them.”
In the first semester of 2023-24, one group studied the effects of a sunscreen ingredient—zinc oxide—on an algae species that's a symbiote to coral. In other words, one can’t survive without the other. The algae in the experiment didn’t fare well with the changes in chemistry—that is, with the addition of zinc oxide to the water. “And so what the students showed with their study,” Nichols said, “is that what is advertised as a safer alternative for humans is not necessarily a safer alternative for the coral.”
In the second semester, a different research team studied the effects of microplastics on the behavior of zebrafish. The fish were raised in the same environment and trained in the same 3-D printed maze. Later, in a two-factor design, they were put into two different treatments: one a change in setting, and the other a change in the chemistry of the water that mimicked the effect of microplastics with, essentially, an endocrine disruptor. Finally, the zebra fish were returned to the same maze to see which fish were able to solve it.
“A cool thing for the students,” Nichols said, “is that they learn each other’s strengths and feel comfortable letting each other take the lead on different pieces of the experiment. In that group, one student was more interested in the technological aspect of it, and she designed the mazes with CAD software. Another student is really interested in psychology, so she looked at how to use the data from the animal behavior study to relate that to humans. And then the third student is really into marine studies, and so he was more interested in the direct effect on the fish.”
One of senior James Langham’s group experiments was determining how large maturing tree species influence the soil ecosystem in which they grow. What did he learn besides the influence on the ecosystem? Creativity and problem-solving skills. “You're creating your own experiment,” he said. “You don't know what kind of troubles you're going to run into. So there are a lot of things that we had to troubleshoot after our initial thought process.”
More so than particular facts that he learned, James said, “I feel like I'm going to remember the challenges from this year in Experimental Biology and the workarounds that we did.”
In contrast to AP Biology, Advanced Studies: Experimental Biology has no tests or quizzes. Students are graded—both independently and as a group—primarily on proposals, research presentations and a final manuscript detailing their experiment.
“I think they're being challenged in different ways in this course,” Nichols said. “And I feel like our goal as teachers really should be to create interest in how science really works.” PC
To learn more about Penn Charter’s move “beyond AP,” visit: penncharter.com/beyondAP.