AP United States Government and Politics

College Board offers both face-to-face and online professional learning for new and experienced AP teachers as well as AP coordinators. Led by experienced instructors, AP professional learning provides educators with the support and training needed to successfully teach an AP course.

June–August

AP Summer Institutes are offered online and in-person, with 30+ hours of content-rich training on the course and exam, leveraging AP resources, and strengthening teaching and learning.

Scholarships are available for qualifying teachers.

Project Based Learning Series for AP U.S. Government and Politics is a new AP Summer Institute offering based on powerful new research showing that project based learning can significantly improve student performance on the AP Exams. Teachers engage in 30 hours of content-rich training during the summer along with four workshop sessions during the school year.

September–April

Online workshops are offered as a combination of live and on-demand sessions led by expert AP teachers. Targeted exercises will explore the course and exam, enable effective lesson planning using AP resources, and model using data-driven feedback year-round. 

Developed by experts in AP instructional design, these free webinars and online sessions will guide you through the instructional resources and how to use AP Classroom effectively.

Webinars and online sessions are 20–90 minutes long and illustrate how the instructional suite can support your teaching this school year.

Working with Challenging Primary Sources

These free online resources offer strategies for teaching reading and writing focused on challenging primary sources. The modules were developed for AP U.S. History teachers, but the nonfiction reading and writing strategies they explore will be useful for teachers of a variety of AP subjects:

Teaching and Assessing AP U.S. Government and Politics gives you online access to sample free-response questions, examples of how to score student responses, videos of master educators modeling key instructional strategies, and resources to help implement these strategies in your classroom.

To access the training:

1. Sign in at myap.collegeboard.org.
2. Click the Go to AP Classroom link for AP U.S. Government and Politics.
3. Click on the Overview page under Course Resources, then select the More tab.
4. Click the Professional Learning link. The Teaching and Assessing course will open in a new browser tab.

Sign in to the AP U.S. Government and Politics Community.

• Share real-time strategies, ask questions, and collaborate with teachers worldwide.
• Search, add, and rate teacher resources with your peers in the resource library.
• Daily or weekly digests help you keep up with your community, wherever you are. Select all discussions or just the topics and discussion threads you choose to follow. You can also reply to discussion posts through email.

Learn more about the AP Community.