AP Course:

AP Business & Personal Finance

CONSULTANT: Patrick Connolly

My name is Patrick Connolly. I am excited to be leading the AP Summer Institute for AP Business and Personal Finance. I live with my wife and seven year old daughter in Las Vegas, and I am a teacher at Faith Lutheran High School in Las Vegas Nevada where I have been teaching business classes for over a decade. I head our business program, run our business academy, and am our DECA advisor. I also serve on the board of directors for Nevada DECA and help to run our FBLA club as well. I have been an AP teacher for the past six years teaching AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics, and am extremely excited that AP has created this new business course. 

I have been running AP Business this year in my classroom as part of the focus test for College Board, so I have seen how amazing this class truly is. This APSI should help both the experienced AP teacher, and the teacher that is completely new to AP classes or business classes as a whole. We will be going over all the acronyms that you need to know in the AP and business education world as well. By attending an AP Summer Institute you will be given access to all five projects that correspond to the five units of this course. You will be given a day by day curriculum breakdown that you can use and modify to fit your particular classroom needs. You will also be given case studies and resources to go along with all of the project based learning guides. This is not your ordinary professional development, as we will get a chance to explore project based learning together. 

Expect to be able to collaborate with other business teachers and to discuss best practices as it pertains to project based learning and career and technical student organization involvement. We will run through some of the assignments you will be giving students and talk about how they correspond with and relate to this new course. You will also be given the guide and time to actually look at how you will be implementing this into your classroom next year. One of the big complaints that I know I have with professional development sometimes is that it isn’t immediately applicable to my class, but I can assure you that will not be the case here. You will have materials, curriculum, project guides, and a pacing guide all that can instantly be worked into your classroom. As someone who attended an AP Summer Institute for this course last year, I can personally say that I grew immensely as an educator and built a network with other teachers that I work with even now to make my courses better.

Things to bring: A notebook, pen, and a laptop or similar device.

Look forward to seeing you this summer.