Advance Kentucky AP Professional Development!

I just signed up again for one of the most helpful professional development opportunities that I’ve attended in some years: Advance Kentucky Master Series. This will be my second time enrolling, although I only signed up for the AP Calculus BC sessions for next year. This past school year, I was enrolled in the sessions for both AP Calculus AB and BC, which were separate sessions. Math sessions are also offered for AP Statistics, AP Pre-Calculus, and AP Computer Science.. At first, Advance Kentucky was just offered for the AP math courses, but they have since expanded their offerings to also include AP science and AP English courses for teachers.

This is the planned program for the AP Calculus BC Master Series for 2026-2027:

This Master Series class has been offered each school year since 2021, the first ‘normal’ school year after the Covid remote school year. Somehow it was never on my radar until last year, when I enrolled for the first time. Below are all of the Facebook posts advertising the PD each year. I think their designs have gotten better each year!

This past school year, I did not hesitate to enroll in both the AB and BC sessions. However, I noticed that I rarely was able to make it to both live 75-minute Zoom sessions each month. AP Calc BC was held at 8am, which was a great start time, but AP Calc AB was held at 9:45am and lasted until 11:15, which really cuts into a Saturday. These sessions happened every month for seven months beginning in September, but I only ever made both live sessions once - my kids were not willing to just let me sit around for an entire Saturday morning doing math! Plus I felt bad ignoring them all morning on a weekend. I told myself that I would go back and watch each session’s recording if I missed one, but I was only able to do this for about half of the sessions I missed.

I found that as an AP Calculus BC teacher, the BC sessions were ultimately most useful to me, so I only enrolled in that one for this upcoming school year. Plus, the Master Series cost increased by 50%, so I wanted to prioritize and save money.

When you enroll in this Master Series, you get added to a Google Classroom that contains all of the course information, materials, surveys, and certificates - you get a certificate of attendance for each session once you fill out the feedback form. I used these certificates as part of my end-of-year evaluation for the Professional Growth standard.

Here is what the Google Classroom for AP Calc BC looked like. Aaron Timmons seemed to be one of the main organizers of the Master Series - he attended all of the live sessions and did a great job of maintaining the Google Classrooms and keeping them up-t0-date with all of the materials.

Here is the Classwork section in the AP Calculus BC Google Classroom with the Topics for the seven sessions:

All of the sessions that I saw live and recorded were excellent quality - the 75 minutes were packed with resources, ideas, conversations, breakout rooms, and time to work out problems and discuss answers. At the end of each session, an evaluation Google Form was posted by Aaron to allow teachers to provide feedback on their session.

I absolutely loved the final session led by Virge Cornelius and Mark Kiraly, mainly because of their high-quality, challenging, relevant Mini Mock Exam. They put us into breakout room in small groups and gave us time to complete the Mini Mock Exam. Then we all regrouped and had time at the end to compare answers and point out portions that we predicted would lead to common student errors.

Another highlight for me was the session led by Brian Shay. I was familiar with most of the presenters, as many are somewhat of celebrities in the AP Calculus world, but I had not heard of Brian Shay before - not due to a lack of accomplishments on his part though. During his sessions, he showed us a Desmos graph resource that I incorporated frequently in my convergence unit:

This Desmos is not an activity; it is a single graph that can be edited to visually show a series’ individual terms and partial sums. This is SO IMPORTANT for students to see! Convergence is confusing to them at first, and it is a brand-new idea for many of them, so conceptually understanding that individual terms must go to zero (quickly enough) and partial sums must approach a horizontal asymptote (whose value is the actual sum of the infinite series) can be a challenge.

One thing about getting great new materials as a teacher is this: there are SO MANY RESOURCES out there, and many teachers already have a full year’s worth of lesson plans. I literally cannot waste a SINGLE DAY in AP Calc BC. This means when I get an awesome new lesson plan or resource, I need to cut something out that I currently use and replace is with the new material. Brian’s Desmos graph was perfect because it was incredibly helpful, seamless to integrate into my lessons, and took almost no additional time.

If you teach an AP math course and haven’t tried the Advance Kentucky Master Series, I highly recommend you sign yourself up! Every year something different is offered with different presenters, so there is always something new to learn.