Recently, I invited readers to a chance to submit questions about the upcoming school year. I told them I would answer the questions (as best as I could) and try to offer some advice as we all prepare to return back to school.
I will admit, I got more questions than I expected! And while there were a few I couldn’t answer (or only answered privately), here is a collection of the ones I found the most useful for others to read. The good news is that many of these questions are things I’ve written about, so there will be a lot of prior blog posts linked here to help!
AP English Lit Questions
How are you going to prepare AP Lit students for a digital exam? – Rebecca R.
This is a question I expected and dreaded at the same time. The answer is, I’m not sure yet. I’m waiting for more information from College Board on what students will have access to on the digital exam. The biggest hurdle I need to cross is teaching digital close reading skills, as so many of my tips involve annotation. I know you can highlight and underline in Bluebook, but I question if that is especially helpful or just distracting.
I believe College Board is working on integrating annotation features into AP Classroom, so I’m going to give them until September or October to release those features. If they’re not out by then, I’ll be looking into external websites for my students to practice digital close reading skills.
What kind of icebreakers, teambuilding activities, getting to know you activities do you incorporate in the first few classes that are pertinent for AP Lit? – Liz N.
I don’t have to do much for icebreakers in AP Lit, as I’ve usually taught all my students before. However, I do have a few crucial first day lessons that give a glimpse at the course and help me unlock the side of students that I need.
How do you balance AP Lit curriculum and getting kids ready for college-research, etc.? Leslie H.
Part of this answer requires knowing what your school expects. When I was in high school, my senior English course was called British Literature. We read only British authors, then took the AP Lit exam in the spring because it was our highest level English course. We only spent a few days planning from the exam, and it was considered a special opportunity for those that take the course. The AP Lit course that I teach in my school is entirely geared towards the course and the exam. I’m not expected to do any ACT prep or research assignments since they aren’t included in the CED.
It’s important to know your distinction for your course. If you are expected to teach beyond the CED, then don’t kick yourself if you don’t also get all nine College Board units in. To create a more college prep atmosphere, I would try to emphasize rigor, autonomy, and choice. High school students are still used to being spoon fed many things. However, college instructors teach whether you’re listening or not. Students that get a chance to choose their own novel, complete assignments over a long course of time, and get opportunities to check in with their instructor will likely feel more prepared for the freedom that college presents.
I will be teaching AP Lit for the first time this. Do you have any suggestions on how to make it fun? I am worried it’s a lot of reading and answering questions. After a while, I may lose them. Thanks. – Dayanara B.
AP Lit can be so much fun! But it’s true that the workload can suck the joy if you let it. To answer this, I have more of a list:
- Embrace mess. Every day I have a plan, but I keep it loose. I allow the conversations to travel where they need to and sometimes they derail our whole lesson.
- Incorporate media. I love teaching intertextuality, which means that I do a lot of text pairing and thematic units. I often pair media clips with novel units just to keep things interesting.
- Mold to your students’ personalities. Once you’ve been doing this for a while, you start to collect more lessons and units than you can use in a year. This allows you to pick activities that your group of students will like more than others. Last year I leaned into poetry much harder than normal because my students loved interpreting poems. One year my kids became obsessed with gothic literature, so I incorporated gothic novel book clubs.
- Share your personality. My AP Lit students know that I get a little crazy with them, often going on tangents that I don’t allow in my 10th grade classes. They also enjoy hearing about my blog posts and being used as “guinea pigs” for future TpT work. I think my openness helps cultivate a relationship that is trustworthy and makes students feel special because they take risks.
How many essays do your AP students write a year – Molly K.
My AP Lit students write an on-demand essay for each unit of the CED. The first three used to be just paragraphs, but now that my students are almost all coming from AP Lang, I have found I can jump into essays faster. I also do an open-style question for each quarter to match our independent reading, so that is an additional 3-4, depending on time.
We struggle with AP students showing up to the first days of school without completing the mandatory summer reading assignments. Usually there is a good excuse (schedule change, student new to school etc.) but when our focus for the first assignments depends on the students’ knowledge of the assigned reading, it can really create problems and a negative start to the year for those kids. Any advice? – Jennifer L.
First of all, my sympathies. Mandated summer reading puts teachers in a really tough spot when this happens and I’ve been there. I used to require summer reading for my AP Lit students. I also used to have mandated summer reading for my 10th graders, which was even harder. For the reason you’ve identified, we abandoned it. Here’s a blog post explaining that choice more in detail.
However, if summer reading requirements are not a choice you can control, I tried to make sure that whatever the assessment was for summer reading, it was broad enough that anyone could complete it. If everyone had to read The Great Gatsby and the first day is a Socratic Seminar, then I would give the list of Socratic Seminar questions to the outlier and ask them to answer them for a different book they’ve read in the past. Or aim for projects, rather than tests or discussions, that can be completed for more than one title.
How do you teach text structure? – Marsha H.
This is a broad question, but a good one! Structure is one of the lowest performing skills on the AP Lit test because it’s so hard to teach. I think one huge way to teach structure is by studying excerpts. When students are dropped into a text without exposition, they must study the structure to make sense of narration, plot, and character. Excerpt study is highly underused in AP Lit but I think it’s crucial for success.
I also have a free lesson on teaching structure in poetry available on my website here: https://lit-and-more.com/ap-skill-spotlight-structure-in-ap-lit/
Planning & Prep
Our school is transitioning to block schedule. Do you have any tips (strategies, mindset shifts, etc.) that would be helpful to our English department? – Ashley P.
I think there are lots of merits to a block schedule, but I do think it’s especially hard on the humanities courses. I had a block schedule in high school and teachers would assign 1-2 hours of reading each night for homework. And if you didn’t complete that reading, you were pretty much unprepared for 90 minutes of rigorous classwork. I don’t think this method flies as well with Gen Z, so now it becomes a lot of reading or work time, which can feel like wasting instructional time.
That being said, I do teach on a modified block schedule, so I’m somewhat familiar with strategizing for long class periods. I like to “chunk” lessons together during my block schedule. For my modified block, we do our current unit Monday, Tuesday, and Friday. But on Wednesday/Thursday (our block day) we pause what we’re working on and do voice lessons, poems, multiple choice strategies, and lit term bellringers.
For classes on a block year-round, I would find ways to chunk 2-3 ongoing units into a lesson. For example, I would start an AP Lit lesson with a bellringer, then teach a lesson on Frankenstein, and finish with a writing prompt on poetry. In summary, I would find throughlines to start combining units so you can teach 2-3 at a time.
How far into the year do you plan? – Molly K.
This is a great question that I don’t think anyone has ever asked me! I tend to plan unit by unit, with a general idea of what I’m going to cover for the year. Remember that I am a veteran teacher with 18 years under my belt, so content creation is not really an issue. For brand new teachers, I’d advice a general course layout and then plan week by week. To daily plan too far in advance will only bite you in the end when you get a snow day or sudden assembly!
Do you do choice novels ever? How do you structure lit circles or something like it to keep students tied to some type of purpose? – Amy N.
Yes, I do choice novels for each quarter of the school year with my AP Lit students. Our independent reading program allows them to select any book and they get 45 minutes of in-class time to read. At the end of the quarter, they have to write an on-demand essay on their book. I create writing prompts for each individual student/book (usually based off the released Q3 questions from prior exams).
Structurally this has worked well for my AP Lit students, especially when I roll it out in a way that really emphasizes their choice. I like to set up a book tasting in the first week or two, where students browse the titles and make a list of titles that interest them. Here’s more information on book tastings.
However, I should say that I’ve abandoned choice novels for my sophomores. I found that students didn’t honor our in-class reading time (either sneaking their phones or trying to nap). Some also just read too slowly to finish a book. I decided to quit sacrificing 45 minutes of instructional time for a unit that less than half were actually completing.
Teaching Strategies
How can I get my students up out of their seats and talking to each other, rather than me talking “at them” the first few days of school? – Sr. Maria Catherine
This is an excellent question! I think this is a good practice to start in the first few days. Look to integrate gallery walks, scavenger hunts, and jigsaw activities as often as you can. Socratic and think-pair-share activities are also good daily activities to get the focus off of you. I use think-pair-share at least five times a lesson, often when I need to input attendance or answer an email quick!
One wonder I have is how you address use of AI and your expectations for its use in the English classroom right out of the gate. – Jennifer B.
The first piece of advice I would give is to talk to your administration to get a school-wide policy in place. Almost all disciplinary actions will fail if admin doesn’t have your back.
After that, I would go over your expectations and the reasons for your expectations early in the year. I have even seen teachers use ChatGPT to write a basic response, then ask students how that response can be improved. Last year I invited students to use ChatGPT to replicate a poem and they got so frustrated that the AI couldn’t even get the rhyme scheme correct! Overall, don’t wait until it becomes an issue to address it. It’s already an issue and it needs to be talked about, and often.
My question is, as the education profession becomes more and more complex and demanding, how are we educators going to keep up without burning out? (Even though we attempt self-care, it seems like it’s never enough…) – Nina G.
I think if I had the answer to this, I’d have a lot of money! But overall, I do have some advice for self-care.
- Set reasonable expectations for yourself and demand the same of your kids. Kids can’t submit an assignment two weeks late and expect their score immediately. You shouldn’t need to score a class set of essays in two days. Be kind to yourself about what you can get done and when.
- Set reasonable goals for yourself as well. This is the counterpart to my previous point. It’s very easy to procrastinate as a teacher, which we all know just leads to a huge stack of grading that we can’t get out from under. I break big tasks into chunks and do them every day. When I have to grade research papers for my sophomores, I make myself score 10 per day and I can’t go home until I do (because I know I won’t score them at home). If I get that many done per day, I can usually get the whole stack done in a little over a week.
- Honor how you work. I struggle with grading but love prepping. If I get overloaded, I prioritize grading at school, knowing I’m more willing to prep at home.
- Work during your prep time. It can be tempting to spend your prep hour talking with your colleagues or taking a nap at your desk, but I’d encourage you to spend your prep hours getting as much done as possible to keep your work at work.
- Use your sick days. I recently learned that I have saved up 30 sick days in my 14 years at my school. I also learned that if I were to fall ill, I wouldn’t even be able to use them all, as FMLA would kick in. What I learned is that I need to use more sick days throughout the year. Whether I need a day to rest, shop, clean, or even just do nothing—mental health days are important, and I plan to take more of them. I also recommend scheduling these days ahead of time!
How do you get to know your students but not lose time? – Kendra M.
I recommend getting out into the hallways to build those relationships. Obviously, you can get to know your students during lessons, and you will. But to jump start the process, get out with the kids. Stand in the hallway during passing time. Attend your school’s sporting and fine arts events. Volunteer or coach an extra-curricular activity.
Wrapping Up
Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for this blog post! I hope it gives some clarity or insight as you plan your upcoming year!
