Advice for New Instructors

• Some websites containing general advice:
  
• Preparing to Teach Statistics: this article by Joan Garfield on AP Central contains some practical advice and recommendation for teaching statistics. It also contains links to many other useful websites.
  
• See The AP Stats Top 10 FAQ . Much of this advice is also applicable to many undergraduate statistics courses.
• Emergency Relief for First Time AP Statistics Teachers
• Importance of Communication in Statistics
• Keep it simple the first time you teach statistics! Do not feel you need to incorporate every activity, project, etc. into the course right away. You can expand.
  

• If you have never taken a statistics course before:
• You might glance through the beginning of the book and think "this is easy, I'll have no problems teaching this."
• However to effectively teach statistics you need to understand the last part of the book and have an idea of where all these "simple" topics are leading to, i.e. statistical inference.
  
• Make sure you understand sampling variability, sampling distributions, confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, and in particular what is meant by statistical significance before beginning to teach the course. This way you can hint at what is to come in the course while teaching the "easy" topics and also motivate why they are so important.
  
• For example, when teaching the sample mean students are usually very familiar with this topic. Later on in the course they will be testing when two means are "significantly different" or not though (two-sample hypothesis test of means). Thus it is a good idea to already have them compare data sets to each other early on in the course and have them start thinking about the idea of when sample statistics are different or not. This then also motivates why the standard deviation is important.
• For a complete set of tools to help you teach (and learn!) statistical inference, go to the website Tools for Teaching and Assessing Statistical Inference.
  
• This website has many activities, assessment questions, and very helpful lists of student misconceptions to guide you.
  
• You may not have time or feel ready yet to incorporate all of the materials into your class the first time you teach it, but it the many assessment questions will be very useful in preparing your lesson and writing exams.
  

• ASK for help.  The community of statistics teachers is welcoming.  You can find them meeting at the Joint Statistics Meeting in August, Section on Statistical Education (see www.amstat.org/education) or the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January at the SIGMAA StatEd (see www.maa.org)
• The AP Stats information is appropriate to most first level statistics courses taught to general education college students.
• If you are an "isolated statistician," then joining the Isostat e-mail list server is highly recommended.
  
• This will immediately connect you to the community of people who are the lone statisticians in their departments.
  
• If you have a question about a certain topic or how to teach it, what book or type of technology to choose, assessment items, etc., this is the place to post it.
  
• You can also search the log of previous posts to see if your question has already been addressed. 
• The list serve will also keep you up to date on what is going on in the statsitics community: conferences, journals, webinars, etc.