AP® Psychology Resources for Unit 8 Clinical Psychology

To say I LOVE this unit would be an understatement, and here's why...

1. It is the perfect culmination (almost) of the course because it revisits the perspectives and that crucial knowledge students need to have, and
2. Students love this unit; in fact it's probably a huge reason why many students take the entire course.

So I want to provide you with some resources to make this unit as awesome as it should be.  Here we go.

Clinical Psychology Resources

All of the major disorder categories laid out by CollegeBoard are covered in these slides with understandable definitions and visuals to assist in your delivery of the content.  This file also includes the Psychotherapies and Evaluating Psychotherapies slides.

To accompany these slides, I've created guided notes for students so they can spend their time focusing on the content and less focused on what to write and when.  I've heard from many students and teachers that these guides really assist students in being able to put their focus where it needs to be to succeed with the notes.

If you use the Myers' for AP Text, these reading guides will be a huge asset to your students, helping them organize the information and easily retrieve it.

Clinical Psychology Activities

Now, just talking about these disorders and going through the notes will be engaging in itself, however, there is so much more to do, and so much deeper to go with this content.  So I've provided some engaging activities for clinical psychology that I know will help your students engage with the content and prepare for the test.

I LOVE using stations in my high school classroom, so that's why I made this brand new resource to get your students looking at real life scenarios with disorders.  These stations are for the Anxiety Disorders, Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders, as well as Trauma- and Stress-related disorders.

In each station, students are give a prompt, a patient to consider.  On their handout they are asked specific questions about finding evidence to support their diagnosis.

This resource is a fantastic review for all the psychotherapies.  Each of the three columns has missing boxes, so it adds a bit of a challenge for students.  The file includes the link to the key as well so that you can either grade their charts or have students check their own understanding.

The last activity I would like to share is a more non-traditional one for a science or social studies classroom because it includes reading fiction.

Yep, you heard that right.

In this "booktivity" students will choose a fiction book (sometimes non-fiction) whose protagonist is living with a psychological disorder.  The resource provides a list of books that you are welcome to add to, and then explains a quick mini-project they can do to wrap up the activity so as to allow students to focus on the journey of reading and learning rather on creating a product.

The goal of the booktivity is not to increase fiction reading in a science or social studies classroom, but rather to increase empathy among humans around the mental health stigma.

Here are some examples of the mini-project my students completed last year...

This unit is full of vocab-specific content so you'll really need to focus on clarifying the differences between easily confused disorders.

I suggest making giant venn diagrams on chart paper or on the white boards in your room to compare the disorders that are easily confused.  Discuss each venn-diagram, or better, have students walk the room with post-it notes writing about what they know of each disorder.

I truly hope these resources are ones that take quite a few items off of your to-do list for this unit so you can focus more on your students.

All my best,

P.S.  I've recently changed Youtube channels and have move all of my flipped AP Psychology videos to the new channel.  I also create a site for my students so they have one place to find all of our videos rather than searching around on YouTube.  Please feel free to use the site at bit.ly/appsychrice. 

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