AP Psychology Resources for Unit 5 Cognitive Psychology

Phew!  Cognitive Psychology is a beast!  Seriously, CollegeBoard took what was already a huge unit that included encoding, storing, retrieval (of memory), forgetting, thinking, and language, and added intelligence to it.  Not just intelligence though... all intelligence theories, no doubt, and psychometrics and measuring of intelligence.  These are not simple concepts to wrap one's mind around.

If you are a newer AP Psychology (or non-AP Psychology) teacher, this unit can just about deflate any energy you have left as you come into some difficult weeks of the school year around the holidays.

I want to help you.

The BIGGEST piece of advice I can give you is to ORGANIZE students' thinking in this gigantic unit.  Organize the unit into cohesive subcategories that are formatively assessed, showing students the "map" so to speak of the whole unit.  I was always quick to show students the calendar each day in class so they understood what topic we were on, where we had been, and where we were headed.

In addition to the big organization of the unit, be sure to help them organize the finer details.  What I like about this conscious effort to organize thinking is that it so nicely reflects the unit itself.

Take memory, for instance.  Our brains can much better remember something new if we can tie it directly to something (event, experience, idea) already in our brains... which only happens because of how our memories are organized.

Likewise, with thinking.  You will cover the organization of our brains' thinking with concepts, schema, and prototype... the basis of our we organize our thinking.  Like a glove, am I right?!?

To better understand what I mean by organizing students thinking I want you to check out a Facebook live video I did recently where I explain an example... check it out.

Alright, so what about resources?

What about supplying you with time?  Time of your own that you DON'T have to spend creating slides, student notes, reading guides, or other activities.  Yea, that time that once you're in it flies by faster than Christmas season, am I right?  And you come out of a four hour work session with only ONE day planned!  Cue panic attack.

I want to help you avoid that unnecessary panic.

Teacher Slides

There are over 200 slides included in 9 powerpoint presentations of this file.  PHEW - a ton, but it will have you covered from Intro to Memory at the start of the unit, all the way through Intelligence.

Student Notes

Whether you use the slides link above or have students watch my YouTube videos as part of your flipped classroom, the student notes I link in the image below will be your jam.  You can just print and go with these, helping your students to organize their thinking and learning in this GIGANTIC unit.

Reading Guides for Myers' for AP 1st Edition

If you use Myers' Psychology for AP textbook, 1st or 2nd edition, these reading guides are for you.  They help students work through the reading in ways that are engaging and help them remember the information they're taking in.

Last but not least, I want to make sure you are in the know about something really cool I have coming up.  On December 2nd (as of this post, that's one week from today) for a limited time I will releasing three content coaching videos for AP (and non-AP) Psychology.  These videos are meant to assist teachers new to the subject so they can feel confident about how they present the information to their students.

Here at Teach On A Mission, we are all about empowering teachers as the experts, and that's EXACTLY what I want to do with these three FREE videos that I'll be sending straight to your inbox.  These videos will only be available for a limited time, but they are designed to show you how I coach teachers in this specific content area.  To get on the waiting list, be sure to grab the workbook I made for all AP Psych teachers linked on the image below called AP Psych Done Right!

Seriously, DON'T miss this resource.  

As always, don't hesitate to reach out on social with any questions or awesome AP psych or flipping related wins you may have.

Until next time,