I haven’t updated this site in a year and half. 18 months later, my AP Physics 1 pacing guide is still ranked 3rd on Google. This realization boggles my mind and gives me new motivation. I will admit – after working on this site for only a few months, I felt unmotivated to continue. Particularly, I spent so much time in the classroom, it felt like a chore to continue outside the classroom. However, your views and comments and emails show that teaching Physics is important and new teachers need help.

Am I famous yet? No, just proud to be helping so many teachers with their course pacing! I will have to update this guide to reflect changes I have made.

To get us started back up, here is a bonus topic – learning goals for AP Physics 1!


AP Physics 1  Learning Goals for each unit


My school district requires teachers to have a learning goal for each unit displayed and referenced throughout the unit. For more day to day plans, I use the College Board learning objectives for AP Physics 1, but I struggled with coming up with overarching unit goals. In addition, I felt the Big Ideas from College Board were too broad and not student friendly.

Here is the AP Physics 1 Course Description from College Board, just to illustrate how cumbersome this process can be.

Example from the AP Course Description – these objectives drive the instruction, but I need more overarching goals for my classroom.

However, during our teacher preplan this year, I sat down and created AP Physics 1 learning goals for each unit, mostly based off the learning objective I thought most encompassed the entire unit. These are the goals displayed on my board every single day, and together we dissect what they mean and how we can achieve them. 

My classroom hub, with our unit learning goal. I need to figure out how to condense this to be even more student friendly.

Learning Goals by Topic

Physics Skills: The student is able to express the motion of an object using
narrative, mathematical, and graphical representations.
Kinematics: The student is able to analyze experimental data describing the
motion of an object and is able to express the results of the analysis using
narrative, mathematical, and graphical representations.
Forces: The student is able to represent forces in diagrams or mathematically
using appropriately labeled vectors with magnitude, direction, and units during
the analysis of a situation.
Dynamics: The student is able to analyze a scenario and make claims (develop
arguments, justify assertions) about the forces exerted on an object by other
objects for different types of forces or components of forces.
Momentum: The student is able to analyze data to characterize the change in
momentum of an object.
Energy: The student is able to apply the concepts of Conservation of Energy to
determine qualitatively and/or quantitatively that work done will change the
kinetic energy, the potential energy of the systems, and/or the internal energy of the system.
Rotation: The student is able to describe a representation and use it to analyze a
situation in which several forces exerted on a rotating system of rigidly
connected objects change the angular velocity and angular momentum of the
system.
Waves: The student is able to design an experiment to determine the relationship between periodic wave speed, wavelength, and frequency and relate these
concepts to everyday examples.
Electricity: The student is able to apply Kirchhoff’s rules to the comparison of
electric current in various segments of an electrical circuit with resistors in series and in parallel and predict how those values would change if configurations of the circuit are changed.

What do you think? Are these learning goals a good representation of each unit? How do you decide your overarching learning goals?