AP teachers face a major challenge: covering all Course and Exam Description Guide material by early May. Our classes are packed with AP thinking skills, writing styles, historical content, and illustrative examples. Even veteran educators may find this workload overwhelming.
Podcasts can help address these challenges. They offer engaging content and can serve as core lessons or quick activities to enhance learning. Here are some ways to use Everything, Everywhere, Daily in your classroom.
The Bell Ringer
The first 15 minutes set the tone. Present clear objectives and engaging content. For AP World History Unit 9.3 Technological Advances: Debates About the Environment, assign the episode “The Honey Hunters of the Sundarban.” It highlights deforestation’s impacts in South Asia and related regional dangers. Connect this to economic challenges in globalization. The episode captures AP themes through storytelling and serves as an illustrative writing example. Afterward, have students research deforestation in other regions.
Writing
Assign evidence-rich episodes such as “The May Fourth Movement” for students preparing for the Short Answer Question and Long Essay Question portions of the test. This episode is designed for AP World History Unit 8 and covers several historical developments. The claim-evidence-reasoning format of the podcast models effective writing, presenting examples and reasoning to connect evidence to its main idea. Students with exposure to targeted episode content will have a stronger base for exam writing sections.
Developing Context
Students often confuse an event’s context with the event itself. Context explains what made the event possible. Think of the Star Wars crawl. Everything Everywhere Daily episodes emphasize framing stories with strong context. For example, the Thirty Years’ War episode links origins to the Protestant Reformation and the House of Habsburg.
Promoting Content Knowledge
Every AP teacher worries: Do students know enough? Exam success depends on reading, writing, historical thinking, and content knowledge. Since 2019, World History has shifted to skills, but it still requires content fluency. Sometimes, you just need to focus on what students need. Everything, Everywhere provides valuable content. For example, the House of Wisdom episode offers rich information on the Abbasid Caliphate (Units 1.2 and 2.1). Assign this episode instead of a lecture.
Complexity
If you are an AP teacher, just seeing the mention of that word makes you nervous. The elusive complexity point. That rare point on the DBQ and LEQ rubric that is given out so infrequently that some teachers ignore its existence! Everything, Everywhere, daily episodes can help promote the depth of skills and content required to unlock that “unicorn point”.
Connecting to Primary Sources
The episode database is filled with episodes that offer opportunities to connect students’ learning to primary source materials. Teachers can use the Ibn Battuta episode as background information, with its rich storytelling about this famous Moroccan traveler, to support a reading of a primary account from his vast cache of sources.
Engagement
This is one of the hardest things to define as a teacher. Are the students interested in what you’re doing? We all hope so. One thing you can do is introduce them to history and how exciting it can be. Teaching AP can be frustrating at times because our courses are more like escalators; we take the tour at a constant pace and get off at the end. If our course were more like an elevator, we could get off and look around. Thinking: Hey, I love this topic; I would like to spend some time on it. Sometimes you can, most of the time you can’t. Episodes of Everything Everywhere Daily are cataloged by AP unit, so you can share an episode (with embedding in your student learning system, a great feature) with your kids, and many of them may be interested and want to use that elevator approach. They may want to get off and look around a bit. This podcast gives students a chance to study history like a museum visit. For example, the episode on the Great Fire of London may not fit completely into your unit design, but it is a great story, and your students can benefit from developing a love of historical content.
Joel Hermansen
Appleton North High School
AP Teacher since 1998, (APWH, APUSH, AP GOV/COMP POL)