AP Business with Personal Finance (Launching 2026–2027)

Hey teachers, this is Jacob Clifford. With a brand new year comes a brand new class, AP Business with Personal Finance. You have no idea how excited I am about this. Over the next few years, I'm gonna be making videos and resources to help you teach this course. I just interviewed Alex Lamont. He's an amazing business teacher out of New Jersey, and he's been piloting this new course for two years, so he knows everything about it. Here's what he had to say. This is going to be awesome. I'm really excited about this course. Me too, Jacob. Thank you so much for having me. AP Business with Personal Finance is going to be a fantastic course, and I'm really excited to join you to talk a little bit about it. Give us a quick overview of this class. It's a really nice survey or introduction to business type course. So in the first unit, we see students considering, well, what is a business? How are ideas generated, right? Doing maybe a little bit of market research too. And then we move on in unit two to the marketing unit, right? Where students are diving deep into market research, where they're learning about the four P's of marketing and a lot of fun stuff with consumer behavior and psychology. Unit three is all about the financial aspect. There's some personal finance and then plenty of business finance. We can talk about that distinction later. So some of what some of our accounting teachers are doing is inside that finance unit. And our unit four is the last. For business unit, which is the management and strategy unit, things like performance like KPIs, performance indicators or SWOT analyses are in that unit as well. Unit five is where we cap everything off with a pure personal finance unit where students are being a financial advisor for a fictional family and applying a lot of what they learned in the course to a personal finance project. So it's a really comprehensive course, really great survey. For kids who want to study business, that's awesome. So it's business and personal finance all combined in one. You said it was like project based. What does that look like? Yeah, so this is going to be a project-based learning course. The students have a business canvas project. So business canvas is not something invented by the College Board. It's a model used by a lot of schools to do more of like a lean startup type model for your business plan. So students come up with an idea and they test it out. They learn about marketing theoretically, but then they also apply marketing principles to their business idea, right? So My students just now were developing an MVP or a minimum viable product, a small testable version of their idea, and going out there in the real world, talking to their classmates, talking to other people to see, hey, what do you think of my business idea, right? When they learn about accounting statements, right? They learn about it in theory, but then they make some statements for their own company, right? So it's that constant, like really nice switch between theory and practical application from that project that spans the entirety. And I think that's really exciting. It's going to keep kids engaged. And it makes this course more accessible because it's project based and kids get to actually, you know, learn about business for a project that they're really interested in because they got to choose it themselves. So I heard the College Board is really trying to push this towards freshmen and sophomores. Really, it's really designed to in some cases, a lot of schools, at least here in California, it's probably going to be their first AP class. Okay. The big question for all the teachers watching this video is what do you do now to get ready to teach this course? Well, I'm a business teacher or I'm an econ teacher, or I'm just kind of interested in this course, or I have a colleague who might be interested in this course. What does a teacher do to get ready now to be able to offer this course starting maybe next year when it actually gets fully launched? Yeah, so now is the time to definitely go to your administrator. If you haven't already, get other teachers in your building invested in this as well. Go together and say, hey, we need to get this course. Business has been the number one major in America for a long time now. And in surveys done, students say, we want an AP business course over and over and over again. So go to your administrator and say, this course is going to be really big, really popular. It's very popular. If you're watching this video, you probably want to teach it. An admin normally needs Someone who they're confident in, who can teach that class, right? So you being that person will be really valuable, right? APSIs, AP summer institutes. If you're new to AP, we all take an APSI before we actually teach that AP class, right? So there's going to be APSIs offered throughout the country, online and in person, all by college board endorsed consultants, right? So you'll want to attend one of those this summer. Real quick, I heard that they're going to do that for free. So at the APL conference, Summer, probably maybe the following summer, too, to get this thing launched, the college board is basically saying, hey, just anybody who wants to take these courses, sign up for the Summer Institute, which is really cool. What a great way to launch it and get the professional development that teachers need. So is there anything else that teachers could do now to get ready to teach this course next year or maybe the following year? Yeah, absolutely. You're going to want to find a community of teachers who are also teaching this class and collaborate with them on resources. I hear that there is a Facebook page for AP Business with Personal Finance. Is that? Yes, yes. Facebook is the key. I mean, you're in the AP Econ Facebook group. It's awesome. There are these people there that will help you out, experienced teachers. Absolutely. That Facebook page is where you will be able to connect with other teachers. And we're going to be releasing some. Great resources, a few worksheets, a few videos to keep you updated before the course launch, just so you're prepared when you eventually get to teach AP Business with Personal Finance. And the part I'm most excited about is you and I working together to making more resources. We've got an ultimate review packet coming. We've got some teacher worksheets coming. You're doing all these amazing teacher workshops. Basically, we're there to help teachers along the way to get them ready to teach the course. And when they're actually in the mud, in the trenches, We're gonna give them resources to help them on a daily basis as well. So I'm super excited about building these resources with you. Yeah, me too, Jacob. It's a for teachers by teachers effort, right? And that's what we need. We know what works best. Perfect, awesome. Hey, thanks so much for doing this interview. So you're awesome, Alex. High five, have a good one, man. I hope that was helpful. Expect more videos like this. We're gonna cover activities, resources, strategies that are gonna help you teach this brand new class. Thanks for watching. Until next time.