Counting down to the Exam!

It is time for the annual  student-teacher #aplangchat. We invite your students to join the chat and ask questions about the exam.  This is a opportunity for students to ask questions of AP Language teachers from around the country.  Several of these teachers read the exam.

We invite you to join the chat and contribute by answering student questions.  The power of this chat comes from many AP Lang teachers sharing their approaches to the test and answering student questions.

I love this chat. It gives my students the chance to interact with other teachers who reinforce what I have taught.  Sometimes another teacher can phrase an idea that resonates with my students in a way I haven't expressed.  Other times, teachers say exactly what I have taught all year, but this time the many teacher voices drive the point home with my students.  Finally, I use it as a way to judge what students are thinking about the exam.  I often cull ideas that I need to reinforce with my classes.  Not all my students can chat that night and I bring the conversation back to my classroom.


Before the chat please review some twitter etiquette with your students:

1)  Have students label their answers to the questions as A1, A2, A3, A4, etc.
2) Remind students to be courteous to others.
3) Have students include #aplangchat on all tweets so everyone can see them in the chat.


If you use a personal twitter handle that you do not want your students to access, you may consider creating a handle for this chat.

We look forward to having you and your students join the conversation at 8 p.m. EST Wednesday, April 26th.  If you miss the chat, you can always search the #aplangchat hashtag to see what you missed.

Collect, Debate, and Synthesize Evidence using Non-Fiction Book Clubs

Sometimes I want to pour knowledge into my students' heads to prepare evidence for the argument question.  I want students to synthesize ideas from multiple perspectives in discussions and written arguments.  Non-fiction book clubs help students learn new information and discuss ideas with others.  Students read a book of choice and meet topically in non-fiction book clubs.  Some clubs read the same book and discuss, while others read different books and discuss the ideas in the various books. All students learn the ideas in culminating seminars.

The process:

           1)    Brainstorm a list of topics of interest for the clubs with the class.

Some of the topics students have featured in past clubs: 

Language and Writing, Education, The Internet and Social Relations, Crime, Mental Illness, Disasters, Political Philosophy, Psychology, Communication, Ethics, Science, Technology, etc.

In addition, pull non-fiction books from the shelves of your library and have students speed date the books in order to find a topic of interest for the the project.

          2)  Select a topic and a book.
          3)  Read the book in three-four weeks.

          4)  Collect significant quotes for argument essay evidence on Scholar Cards[1]

          5)    Meet weekly in book clubs. Students share quotes, issues, or ideas from reading.

          6)  Prepare a seminar on the topic after the books are read.  
          Student seminar preparation includes:

                a. Finding an article, Ted Talk,  or excerpt(s) from books to assign to the class. 

                b. Writing brief summaries of the arguments and ideas for the books read.

                c. Constructing thoughtful seminar questions that address key ideas and arguments. 

                d. Assigning roles to group members:  seminar leader, question leaders, & scribe.
                    The scribe summarizes the ideas from the discussion on a shared google doc.

7)  Conduct the class seminar on the topic and upload the summary to the shared google doc.

Students have paired Ghettoside with In Cold Blood, focused on introverts in a Quiet group, and considered various education issues in The Overachievers, I am Malala, and Waiting for Superman. Students use the ideas as evidence in their argument essays and it increases their bank of information for the exam.  Many students come back from the exam stating that their book club discussion made good evidence to support their arguments.  With time running close to the exam, this can be modified to a Non-fiction Article/Ted Talk Club.   I am curious to know what book or article pairings you have used in your classroom.  Please add your pairings or a non-fiction selfie to the comments below.

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[1] Scholar Pack strategy attributed to Dan Sharkovitz at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.  Student sample cached at www.mvrhs.org/englishdept/shark/Powerpoints/Phoebe%20scholar%20pack%20.ppt

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.