Biology by Bradford
cramlyStart here. Fold your own approach around it.
The rough ER folds polypeptides into proteins. These are the basics I lean on for IB and AP Biology. One input among many toward your own way of teaching it.
Teaching approach, by program
Laying the foundations.
How the course is structured to beat the forgetting curve.
Perfect preparation makes perfect. We have to play the game of taking an exam, so repeat, repeat, repeat.
Repetition has a physical anchor in the brain. Each loop strengthens a slightly different stretch of wiring:
- Short-term (working) memory. When you first meet something, it sits briefly here. Limited capacity, fades fast without active attention.
- The hippocampus. A processing and routing hub. Through repetition, the neural signals fire repeatedly, holding the memory active.
- Long-term memory. Continued repetition strengthens the synaptic connections between the hippocampus and various regions of the cerebral cortex. Over time, the memory consolidates into long-term storage.
That same wiring is why the forgetting curve shapes the course: without revisiting, students lose roughly 70% of new information within a day. By the time a concept is discussed in class, they've already met it through pre-reading, Cramly, and a video. Each unit then starts with a student-built one-pager rather than copied notes, which forces genuine processing and is much harder to fake.
Make biology move.
Why students watch before class, not during.
Your textbook drew a mitochondrion that looks like a peanut. Reality looks like a writhing tube. Press play before they have to imagine it.
Static cross-sections sit in short-term memory; motion forces the brain to build a process model rather than memorise a label. Videos are the preparation phase: the second scheduled exposure after flashcards, and they happen before class. By the time we're in the room together, I'm not explaining from scratch. I'm going deeper.
What I actually do: Amoeba Sisters is the staple channel. Then I wrap each video in questions to force engagement: Google Classroom will AI-generate them for most YouTube videos inside the assignment, and tools like Playposit, EdPuzzle, and WeVideo add an interactive layer to any clip. Another approach: hand an AI model the YouTube link and ask it to write ten questions on it.
Biological molecules → Cells → Metabolism →
The order topics are taught and why.
Many ways to skin a cat, and the IB just made it more interesting to find your path with the grid-style curriculum document.
The new IB grid curriculum is designed for concept-led teaching (transport across plants and humans at once, say), but I use a more traditional sequence with deliberate linking sessions built in. This is an organic document and what works at my school with my learners.
The teacher is lying.
Formative tasks designed to surface wrong thinking.
One of my favourite jokes in class: 'Where did I go wrong?'... 'no, I don't mean becoming a teacher.' Also a great bit of formative.
Here is a flavour of the formative tasks I use to test and develop understanding. When teaching DNA, for instance, I open with origami DNA: students evaluate its limitations and design a better model, and that becomes the focus of the dialogue. Other staples like FAB dominos, tarsia puzzles, concept maps, and 'where did I go wrong?' are all built to surface misconceptions and make thinking visible. Defending a pushback in writing is the assessment.
Every unit ships with a little tool.
Custom-built tools that live on the apps tab.
As teachers we're curators of resources and facilitators of learning. The twist in my class is: if it doesn't exist yet, we build it, sometimes in class.
Custom-built study apps live on the apps tab. I still love building resources like dominos, bingo, and word searches, but now instead of spending three hours on a domino set, I use Splycr to generate a starting point in seconds; just give it plenty of detail in the emphasis section. Every card set it generates can also drop straight into the multiplayer games.
Curiosity is the only grade I care about.
What gets marked and what doesn't.
But unfortunately the IB doesn't. So: 'If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.'
I formally grade one thing: weekly IB questions, cycled between MCQ (marked fast with ZipGrade) and longer-answer. Notes are never graded: it takes forever and gives students nothing useful. A great opportunity to discuss metacognition instead: write on the test what score you predicted and star the questions you got wrong. Standardised scores are a side-effect of actually caring; they follow, they don't lead.
One underrated advantage of ZipGrade is the speed of feedback: scan the papers, pull class data in seconds, and see exactly where understanding is breaking down before the lesson is even over. I also often (though not always) hand out the corrections during the test window itself and award half marks for self-correcting. It turns the assessment into a learning event rather than just a measurement.
A large component of biology is memorising facts. You can connect them and interrogate the complexity all you like, but to play the test game students still need the vocabulary in their heads first. That is where spaced repetition comes in. I built Cramly because Anki proved too much effort for most students to bother with. The advantage of building it myself is that at least I know the content is on point.
We all love Internal Assessments.
How the IA is structured and scaffolded.
That time of year you mentally juggle 30–40 labs that are definitely 'independent' and you definitely don't have to coach every student to draw a table.
Internal assessments use PEEL paragraph structure and a student-choice topic grid, so the writing stays focused on the research question rather than the mark scheme.
Perfect preparation makes perfect.
Revision strategies and past paper practice.
Once you have set everyone's hands on fire with methane bubbles, it is time to lock in and have fun with it.
Every past paper under the sun, obviously. But revision should be enjoyable. A pub quiz with teams and rounds, some silly and some genuine review, goes down well. I love a good list: a clean way to scan the whole curriculum and pull at different strands. And Linki is a game that genuinely challenges both me and my students, which is the best kind.
The null hypothesis comes first.
Two weeks of experimental design before Chemistry of Life even opens.
Long before chloroplasts, students learn to write a hypothesis nobody can prove right, only wrong.
Unit 0 runs before Unit 1: observation, inductive versus deductive reasoning, and a hypothesis written as a null (H₀) plus one or more alternatives (H₁, H₂...), never claimed "correct," only supported or refuted. Then experimental design proper: independent and dependent variables, constants, and the difference between a positive control (should show an effect, proving the method works) and a negative control (should show none). It closes on data: mean, median, mode, standard deviation, continuous versus discontinuous data, and a design-your-own-experiment task that puts all of it to use.
None of this sits apart from the biology that follows. Every AP FRQ leans on some part of it: identify the dependent variable, justify a claim, calculate a percent change. Skipping it to save two weeks costs far more than two weeks later.
Eight units, one date that doesn't move.
Taught to the CED, in CED order, with two weeks spare before the exam.
A bought curriculum got the scaffolding up. Everything since has been rebuilt from scratch.
Chemistry of Life, Cell Structure and Function, Cellular Energetics, Cell Communication and the Cell Cycle, a cumulative exam on Topics 1 to 4 before winter break, then Heredity, Gene Expression and Regulation, Natural Selection, Ecology, and two weeks of review before the exam in early May. The CED sets the order and I teach it straight, because the exam is cumulative and there is no time to double back.
The AP exam date does not move. Everything upstream of it is paced against that one fixed point, including the mid-year exam that forces Topics 1 to 4 to actually be finished, not merely started, before the calendar turns.
Twelve of the thirteen, and counting.
The College Board's required investigations, run against the unit they belong to.
A lab pack is not a demonstration. Students design or run most of it themselves.
Properties of water opens Unit 1. Surface-area-to-volume with agar cubes and a diffusion/osmosis investigation carry Unit 2. Enzymes and the floating-leaf-disc photosynthesis lab run through Unit 3, cell division through Unit 4. After the winter exam: corn genetics and chi-squared analysis, Hardy-Weinberg for Unit 5, artificial-selection modelling for Unit 6, a BLAST sequence-alignment investigation for Unit 7, and mesocosms for Unit 8.
That covers most of the College Board's thirteen required investigations, each sitting where the biology actually needs it rather than bunched into a lab week at the end of the year.
Notes ahead, in whatever language gets there.
Prepared before class, in the student's own words, in whatever language that takes.
Many of my students sit this exam in their second or third language. The notes don't have to be in their first.
Students take notes before we meet, and they can write them in their mother tongue, as long as the key terms get translated into English. What matters is that the concept exists in their head somewhere before class starts. Class time is then spent using the biology rather than hearing it for the first time: unpicking what they actually understood, working through the harder half of the reading, modelling a process rather than describing it.
The loop is what makes that possible: a topic gets prepared, then applied, then tested, but never in the same week as each other. One real week looked like this: Unit 2 prepared and applied, Unit 1 tested on what had already been covered. Written up in full from the IB side, where it runs the same way.
Amoeba Sisters videos do a lot of the pre-reading lifting for anything visual.
A glossary, not a translation.
Original exam-format practice, seeded so a paper can be rebuilt exactly.
For students working in a second or third language, a translated exam changes the exam. A glossary of key terms doesn't.
The exam maker generates original AP-format practice: Section I multiple choice, Section II free response, or a full mock built to the real timing. Pick unit, pick a mark or question count, and it is seeded, so a paper handed out today can be rebuilt to mark or reprint whenever it's needed.
Turkish and Mandarin support ships as a glossary of the key terms rather than a translated paper: the biology has to survive the language, not get replaced by it.
Built for one student, then rebuilt by thirty.
A flashcard app that started as mine and became the class's.
I built it. They ignored it. Then a student asked for one button, and it became something the class co-authored.
Cramly started as a spaced-repetition flashcard app I built for my own AP and IB students, handed over finished. They used it once and stopped, because it was still mine, not theirs. What changed it was a student asking for a feature. I added it. Then came the next request, and the next, until the tool was something the class had shaped rather than something I had shipped.
Retrieval practice now runs in the background all year, not as a revision-week cram: a deck goes live the week a unit is taught, and it keeps surfacing that unit's terms long after the test has passed. Without a second look, students lose most of what they met within a day; each touchpoint bumps memory back up and the next decay is shallower, so retention by test day comes from meeting the content four times, not from cramming the night before.
Curiosity is the only grade I care about.
What gets marked and what doesn't.
But unfortunately the College Board doesn't. So: 'If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.'
I formally grade one thing: unit tests, cycled between multiple choice (marked fast with ZipGrade) and free response. Notes are never graded. It takes forever and tells a student nothing useful. A better use of that moment is metacognition: write a predicted score on the front of the test, then star the questions you got wrong once it's back.
ZipGrade's real advantage is speed of feedback: scan the stack, pull class-wide data in seconds, and see exactly where understanding broke down before the lesson is even over. I often hand out corrections inside the test window itself and award half marks for a genuine self-correction. It turns the test into one more learning event instead of only a measurement.
Sit it yourself first.
The same ninety minutes and the same task verbs I train students against.
Before I teach an FRQ, I sit it myself, on the same clock a student gets.
The free-response section is ninety minutes: two long questions worth 8 to 10 points each, four short questions worth 4, which works out to roughly 20 to 25 minutes on a long question and 10 to 12 on a short one, with 5 to 10 minutes left to check that every part actually got answered. Sitting real, released FRQs against that exact clock is the only way to know whether the pacing advice I give a class is real advice or a guess.
What gets trained after that: read every question before writing anything, since a Section II paper does not reward answering part (a) beautifully and running out of time for (d). Bullet points under time pressure beat a tidy paragraph. Every sub-part carries its own marks, so a skipped part is the cheapest point lost on the whole exam. A diagram with no label is a diagram with no marks. And the task verbs are scored specifically: calculate wants working shown, justify wants reasoning attached to a claim, describe is not the same question as explain, whatever the biology underneath.
The six Science Practices are the other lens: explaining a model in writing, reading a visual representation, designing an experiment, representing data, running a statistical test, and building an evidence-based argument. Every FRQ tests one of those six, dressed up as a specific organism or gene. I write my own practice questions rather than reuse a bank; the point is the skill, not any one question.
Rapport is the invisible curriculum.
The league, the snacks, the things that make the room work.
A classroom where students feel comfortable enough to laugh is one where they feel comfortable enough to ask questions and get things wrong.
The classroom league keeps a gentle hum of competition going: Kahoot earns 3 points for a win, 2 for second, 1 for third, and Splycr randomises outcomes enough that consistency beats reflexes. Points stay compartmentalised to defined moments; scatter them through the lesson and students get needy. Keep it to a few anchors and it stays fun.
Birthdays get a . British sarcasm, when it is warm rather than cutting, builds rapport fast. Compassion matters just as much: I don't chase missed deadlines, I ask how they're doing. Students thrive when they feel like humans rather than grade-producers.