Bridging the Gap: Moving from a 5 to a 9

This Wednesday marks only 10 weeks until the AP Language exam! Like many of you, I am constantly trying to plan activities and select readings that will get me the most juice for the squeeze with my students to help them feel confident and prepared going into the exam. Over the next 10 weeks I will devote much of my time and energy focusing on lessons that might help my students transition from earning a 2 to a 3 or a 4 to a 5. Since I have been teaching AP Language I have found that students don't necessarily need to do more work in the few weeks leading up to the exam. No, they just need to be doing the most meaningful work. Since the free response questions count as 55% of the students' overall score, I tend to spend much more time improving their thinking and writing than I do focusing on multiple choice. 

In the next few weeks, I will be asking my students to write, read, talk, and reflect multiple times each week in effort to improve their writing scores. Here is a protocol I'm using in the weeks leading up to the exam to help them make the jump from mid-range to successful, convincing writing. 

Day 1: Students complete a timed writing (I recently had my students write the 2011 Thomas Paine Q3). 

Day 2: I team students into small groups (usually 3 or 4) that are complementary to their strengths and weaknesses. I truly want my students to learn from one another during this process.

Students review College Board's released exemplar essays and determine the strengths of each essay. As a class, we discuss the scoring of each essay. (I like to use exemplars that scored a 5 and a 9 so students can easily see the differences between them. I rarely show my students the 2 or the 3 after January.)

In their teams, students focus on a mid-range essay (typically a 5 or 6). They read it, they talk about it, and then they annotate it. I prompt them: How can you take this 5 and make it a 9 while still being true to the student's ideas? The teams work together for 15-25 minutes working on the essay. We spend the rest of class discussing how to improve the mid-range essay.

Day 3: Students sit with their teams. I give them a new prompt that is similar in structure or topic to the prompt from the day before. (I followed up the Thomas Paine prompt with the 2016 Civil Disobedience prompt.) I ask students to work together to craft a thesis and to create a master list of evidence they could use for that prompt. I check in with each group and ask them which evidence would be most sophisticated and convincing from their list. Then, the groups write an outline for the essay.

Day 4: Students work to complete a group essay answering the prompt. (Here is a helpful handout when doing group essays for the first time.) I score the group essays before the next class day, but I do not mark my score on the actual essay.

Day 5: Students sit with their teams to review the highest scoring exemplar essay from the new prompt. While they read, I place the group essays around their rooms at different stations. Students then read each group essay with their team and give it a score. Then, I reveal my scores to each group. 

Once the group has their scores and have discussed them, I ask each student to answer the following questions:

1. What do you understand better after working with your team?

2. What aspect of this prompt or question do you need to work on?

3. What advice would you give other students about this prompt/question?

I use the feedback from these questions to plan upcoming lessons and/or organize study sessions by the topics they list for question two. I try to incorporate this protocol for each type of essay in the final weeks leading up to the exam, so my students will do it three times. 

Have a great back-pocket trick to help your students transition into deeper thinking and higher quality writing right before the exam? Share it in the comments!

Summer Camp for English Teachers

Well, it's winter, but rapidly catapulting towards spring, and that means that summer is just around the corner (ok, so I'm pushing it a little bit).

Aside from the obvious benefits such as flip-flop weather and silenced alarm clocks, one of the things I most look forward to in summer is my opportunity to be an AP exam Reader.

Most people's first question would be: What does that mean? And then after hearing my description: Why would you want to do that?

If you're reading this blog, you're probably familiar with the basic concept of an AP course: students take a rigorous course in high school and then have the opportunity to take an exam, on which a qualifying score could earn them college credit. In AP Lang, our students take a section of cold-read Multiple Choice questions and then respond to three essays... all over the course of a 3 hour and 15 minute time slot.

AP Lang is a widely-popular course; according to this site, over 500,000 students took the exam last year. If you consider that each of them wrote 3 essays, that leaves over a million and a half essays that need to be read. And thankfully, the world of automated essay scoring has not made it into AP world yet. That means that people, a whole lot of people, must read a whole lot of essays. That's where we Readers come in (that's also the point in the conversation where astonished friends, family, and colleagues question my relative sanity).

AP Central provides excellent information about being an AP Reader, which outlines the basics: we're a mixture of college faculty and high school AP teachers, we gather during a designated time and place to read essays, we get trained by experienced exam leadership to ensure fair and accurate scoring, and yes, we earn professional development credit and compensation. The College Board and ETS take test security very seriously, and as such, you won't find much posted publicly about the details of the reading (for example, you will find no pictures of the process).

The Reading is undoubtedly hard work. We are there to get a job done, and we do it with gusto. We read for a full work day, yes read hand-written papers on a single topic for eight hours a day, for seven days in a row. We sit in an inevitably arctic convention center, in small diverse groups, with individual table leaders to guide us, and we are amazingly pretty silent. We munch on candy (or bananas… lots of bananas) and take a short stretch break, and then get back to reading some more. In the evenings, there are professional and/or social opportunities, but most Readers I know find they need to schedule in some downtime as well, because the pace of the week is demanding.

But the AP Central website also highlights some intrinsic value to the experience, and that's what I'd like to share with you today because that's ultimately why I so look forward to something that seems, to an outsider, like an anxiety dream about never-ending papers.

First, many Readers will tell you that it's the best professional development they've experienced. Being in that room, being trained on the scoring rubric, studying samples, digging into the prompts, reading essay after essay.... that's all learning. That's all new understanding that I can take back to my own classroom to better prepare my own students. Going to a Summer Institute is a great first step towards this knowledge, but I found that I didn't really internalize it, didn't really get it, until I was in "the room where it happens." There's something about reading a thousand student essays that helps you learn what works and what doesn't. Now I know exactly what differentiates an adequate paper from an effective one, so I can give my kids more targeted feedback on their own writing (and bonus, it builds my credibility with them and their parents!). Sure, next year they'll be writing to different prompts, but the writing skills will be the same, and the Reading helps me help them hone those skills.

But in addition to the educational benefits, we gain so much from the environment, of being surrounded by so many other "like minds."

Imagine, waiting at an airport gate, and looking around you knowing that the majority of these strangers do the exact same thing as you for a living. Imagine seeing old friends excitedly greet each other for the one week of the year they get to physically be together. Imagine the absolute nerdiness that ensues when you take 1,500 book geeks and throw them together for one glorious week where everyone knows exactly what it's like to have the same passion. Imagine a place where you can sit down to a meal in the dining hall, at a table of complete strangers, and know that you automatically have something in common with them, that you can sustain conversation for an hour, get some great new teaching ideas or book recommendations, and perhaps make a lifelong friend. And then imagine being immersed in this world for 7 whole days.

My first year at the Reading, I met my first Reader friend, Andy; we struck up a conversation based on the fact that neither one of us knew anyone else (Literally I said something very close to "I don't know anyone here, want to be my friend?"), and by the end of a two-hour dinner conversation, we had shared our Dropbox folders of course resources. The following year, we formed a walking group through social media, and that's how Andy and I met Christine, Robin, and Cathlina. Through more social media connections on Twitter, the following year we welcomed Crys. And the year after that we finally met Liz.

If those names sound familiar, it's because most of them are the co-contributors to this blog. In reality, they're my best friends. We're scattered in all corners of the country, but we talk every. single. day. And that's not to mention the dozens of other Reader friends and acquaintances I keep in touch with throughout the year, so many that I couldn't possibly shout out to all of them on here.

These Reader friends have become a lifeline, not just as friends who are there for me on my best and worst days. But they help me be a better teacher. Our conversation never steers away from our classrooms for long. We help each other by sharing lessons, giving feedback, brainstorming new ideas, problem solving, and being each other's loudest cheerleaders. Every day. All hours of the day. How many people get that kind of support from ordinary professional development opportunities? I would not be half the teacher I am today without these rockstars by my side every step of the way.

And it's all due to the Reading.

Sure, Facebook and Twitter allow us to create Professional Learning Networks a mile wide, and we gain so much from those opportunities. But nothing compares to personal connections that cannot be made through a screen. When you have a real friend, one whose voice you can hear in your head, with whom you've wandered an unfamiliar city or shared a 3AM alarm clock for a flight home... that becomes a professional connection times twenty.

So I have a countdown app on my phone. Every June, when we cheer our accomplishments and exhaustedly say goodbye, I reset it to the following year's start date. That's how I know that in 114 days, I will be heading to what is affectionately dubbed "Summer Camp for English Teachers." And I can't wait.

Recognizing Bias in the News

Many of you have probably seen the picture on the right in the form that shows up on this Patheos blog post. The group who runs this blog got to discussing it, and then Sandy recreated it adjusting the labels to be more neutral in tone for possible use in the classroom (Thank you Sandy!).

Given the issues with fake news during the election and our president's predilection to call reporting he disagrees with fake news, I felt doing something with this in my classroom would be worth the time.

To put this in context, we've spent much of the year on rhetorical analysis, but are moving into a practice of argument. My students have been very aware of the election, but less savvy about where they get their information. I teach in Washington state in a county that is less reliably liberal than Seattle is a mere 40 minutes or so to the north. My county goes democratic on many issues, but republican on others. My AP Lang classes are primarily more liberal with a very small handful who supported Trump. Those who support him feel in the minority. As many of you wherever you may live, I would have to tread lightly. So, this is what I did.

I began by distributing a black and white version from our school copier and put a color version up using my projector. We walked through it, navigating from the middle outward and from clickbait to complex. I let them know when I wasn't familiar with a news outlet, when I'd only heard of them, when I accessed them regularly, or when I had a subscription in the case of The Atlantic. I told them about how my father gets his information primarily from Breitbart and Facebook and we discussed how that created holes in his knowledge, caused him to believe things were true that had long been proven false, and made it difficult to talk to him. Living in one of the lower corners can skew your understanding of the world and even cause you to make decisions based on falsehoods. We also discussed how the BBC and The Guardian were British-based and that this list was not exhaustive by any means or completely authoritative.

Their assignment was this.

Where we get our news seems to matter more and more. Many people, like my dad, live in news bubbles of questionable or downright low quality driven by partisan fervor and advertising profits. To be an educated person in our increasingly fractured society requires that we understand what the news landscape looks like and how the various entities form their arguments.

Your task is this:

• Pick a news story that will have been reported on and discussed across the spectrum.
• Read about that from one or more mainstream sources.
• Then read about it in one or more partisan sources on each side.
• Lastly, write up you observations about how their bias manifests itself. Refer to the texts to do so. Are the fringe sources telling the whole truth? Lies? Hyper-focusing on something and blowing it out of proportion? Using inflammatory diction? Mocking the other side? Etc. Etc.

Post this on your blog.

News Source Chart in Color (PDF)

As a side note, Bucknell University has this site to help figure out how to determine whether a site is credible or not. http://researchbysubject.bucknell.edu/framework/auth

The next day in class, we pulled up their blogs on the projector, and students talked us through where they went and what they discovered. This made of a very interesting class period. I invited people to ask questions of the presenters, and I modeled that as well.

What they discovered was that the center sources were noticeably balanced. On the other hand, the sources on the fringes had recognizable problems, often only providing one side of the story. They noticed this particularly when the fringe sources were going negative on something. A few kids found deceptive stories with "facts" only reported by a single source on either the far right or the far left. They were actually quite scandalized at how poor the writing and editing was on the fringes (I confessed to them that that warmed my English teacher heart). Where the Economist stretched them intellectually, InfoWars might only quote a bunch of tweets from random people with commentary that amounted to "See what we mean?"

We ended our day with the encouragement that no matter where you live, be in Fox News or Huff Post (no one felt it safe to live in the lower corners), as educated, thinking individuals we should spend significant time in the middle so we can get all the information and have access to mainstream, balanced views of issues and the world we live in.

This activity was very positive. My students told me it was very helpful and made them feel empowered. One of my AP Lit classes saw it when I turned on the projector before I could switch the input to the document camera. They wanted to know what it was and why they didn't get to do it last year. Their take was that it sounded like a great assignment, and they wanted to do that instead of Heart of Darkness (can you believe it!?). If I do this again next year, I will likely place our local news sources (print, TV, and radio) on this chart as well.

I'd be interested to know what your students think should you choose to try this or something similar. Please leave feedback in the comments below.

Players, Game & Response: Expanding Perspectives for Synthesis

We often discuss having students enter a conversation with the sources when they write a synthesis essay.  This activity helps students think creatively about a source in order to determine multiple perspectives on an issue and enter the conversation as various stakeholders.  It can also be used with current events to build a repertoire of evidence to draw from on the exam.  I start by modeling the activity with an article I select and then have students bring in an article or editorial on a topic of choice.  The activity is as follows:

Step 1: Select an article on a topic of choice.  I used an article from my local newspaper about air quality issues. 

Step 2:  Have students read the article and mark the following:

a)    Highlight the issues discussed in the article in pink.

b)    Highlight who cares about the issue in blue (These are the players in the game or the stakeholders interested in the issue.)  On the side of the article, have students list people or entities that are not named in the article that also have an interest.

c)     Highlight what they think in yellow. Students also give positions for the people or entities that they added in the margin. 

Step 3:  Pass out the Players, Game & Response Chart to the students. 

In the Players column, students list five stakeholders (people or groups with concerns about the issue).  These players can be named in the article or be those people or entities not named in the article that would have an interest in the issue.  Students should choose players that have a variety of perspectives on the issue.  In the “American Lung Association ranks SLC in top 10 for worst air quality” article, players listed in the article are the Sierra Club (Shane Levy), the American Lung Association (Paul Billings), Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment (Brian Moench), and Utah’s Department of Environmental Quality (Alan Matheson).  Players not listed in the article are Utah residents who suffer from bad air quality, parents, business owners, automobile drivers, Utah Transit Authority, Utah Legislature, City Council members, etc.

In the Game column, students describe each stakeholder’s position either from the article or from what students know about this person or group.  For example, students listed that the legislature wants to encourage business development with fewer regulations, but they also want protect the health of Utah Residents.  Students felt business and industry would be against stricter emission controls since these regulations would cut profits. 

In the Response column, students pair with another student and discuss the stakeholder’s position.  Students decide whether they agree, disagree or qualify the argument and provide reasons to support their perspective. 

Have students share their thinking with the class. Creativity in naming players adds depth to the issue and makes for a lively discussion.

Step 4:  Have students select their own article to use with this activity.

Students like using this activity as a preparation for research, for it helps them brainstorm key terms for research.  I like using this to train students to interact with the sources they read. In addition, I will often assign articles from different perspectives for a seminar on an issue.  This activity helps students interact with their source so they are prepared for discussion.