It’s no secret that we love all things planning. And a full year plan for teachers is the dream: no blank squares on the calendar, no guessing how long things will take, no sinking feeling when you realize you [educated] guessed wrong.
But access to a helpful full year plan for teachers varies a lot. Some districts provide a pacing guide. Some textbook publishers do, though in our experience, these are laughably idealistic. Maybe you joined an experienced PLC with a plan of action. Yay! That will save you some time and stress. Sometimes, however, you’re on your own.
Is a blank slate exciting? Sure, most of us love the idea of getting to teach whatever we want. But it’s also super overwhelming: we have plenty of ideas but no framework to slot them into. This was our situation when we first started teaching AP Literature: plenty of resources, plenty of ideas, but how to make it all work together was up to us.
In recent years, the College Board has started providing a full year plan for teaching AP Literature in their Course and Exam Descriptions. This is a helpful resource, but, as we all know, it’s hard to create a one-size-fits-all timetable that works for everyone. When we looked at the suggestions, we realized our students, many of them former English Learners, wouldn’t be able to keep up with the fast pace recommended in these guides.
As we’ve interacted with teachers across the country, we’ve seen that we’re not alone. Many teachers, especially those who are new to teaching AP Literature, feel overwhelmed when their students can’t keep pace with the College Board, and we’ve seen many teachers panic as they fall behind, wondering how others structure their class to get everything in. Spoiler alert: You can’t get everything in.
So, we thought we’d share the yearly lesson plan that worked for our 14 years teaching AP Literature (with, of course, some tweaks and improvements along the way). We know one-size-doesn’t-fit-all, but if you need a starting point to latch onto or, like us, have students who are eager but underprepared for a college-level literature class, we hope our framework makes the planning process just a little bit easier for you. (And reminds you that any full year plan for teachers is only a recommendation, not a requirement . . . even if it comes from the College Board.)
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A Completely Doable Full Year Plan for Teaching AP Literature
Our district structured the school year into two semesters with three grading periods each, so that’s how we organized our units. While we’re providing an overview of each unit below, if you’re looking for the nitty gritty specifics, we’d be happy to share a day-to-day calendar. Just email us at [email protected]!
Unit 1: Introduction to AP Literature
Our students weren’t prepared to jump straight into the meat of AP Lit. Not only did many of them need a review of the basics of literary analysis, but the majority of our students didn’t have the cultural or literary background assumed as a given by many Western writers. We found that spending the first six weeks helping students build their literary and cultural toolkits was time well spent.
We found Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to be an excellent first novel: it’s high-interest and accessible, and McCarthy’s rich use of language offers ample opportunities for students to practice what they’re learning about symbolism, theme, allusions, and more. Students read the novel as we worked through the introductory activities below, then we spent a week discussing it before using it as the basis for our first essay.
Building Students’ Literary and Cultural Toolkits
We integrated a variety of activities designed to ensure students had foundational knowledge that would help them succeed in the course.
Introduction to Interpretation: We introduced the skill of supporting interpretations with evidence using Norman Rockwell paintings. It was a fun way to introduce a challenging concept, and because it is based on visual texts, students find it less intimidating and tend to experience success quickly.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor:Thomas Foster’s helpful guide introduces students to common literary symbols, allowing them a peek “behind the curtain” to see how literature professors interpret texts. We assigned weekly quizzes to hold students accountable for their reading, but since then, we’ve created an escape room activity as a tool for exam review we wish we’d had enough time to create while we were still in the classroom!
Writing Effective Theme Statements: Because theme (or, as the College Board likes to call it, “the meaning of the work as a whole”) is such a central concept when teaching AP Literature, we made sure all students had the same understanding of this often misused term. We used Pixar shorts to help students write theme statements that met our six guidelines for an effective theme statement.
Biblical and Mythological Allusions: To ensure our students were familiar with common Biblical and mythological allusions, we gave them a list the first week of school, assigned a few review Kahoots, and administered a matching exam at the end of the grading period. It was a simple and straightforward way to give students a leg up on the literature they’d read in our class and in college, putting them on equal footing with peers who grew up familiar with the Western literary tradition.
Introduction to Analytical Writing
Once we finished reading The Road, we worked through our one process essay of the year. We introduced Q3 (also known as the “open prompt”), reviewed how to write thesis statements, emphasized the importance of organizing the essay chronologically, provided guidelines for writing an introduction and conclusion, and introduced the 5C paragraph format we would require students to use throughout the year. We also reviewed MLA guidelines for integrating, punctuating, and citing quotations with a student-friendly guide we referred to frequently.
Miscellaneous
As we wrapped up our introductory unit, we found this was the most effective place to spend a couple days discussing college essays. We also took a few days to introduce Pride and Prejudice, which students would read independently over the next six weeks.
Unit 2: Introduction to Prose
We took a skills-based approach to organizing our year. In part, this is because it’s how our textbook was organized, but we also found that our students needed the opportunity for focused practice with specific literary devices. When we first started teaching the class, we devoted about a week each to plot and setting, characterization, point of view, symbolism, and irony; however, we eventually found it more beneficial to slow our pace and focus on quantity over quality, reading fewer short stories but adding in more close reading assignments and a longer introductory unit (described above).
short story recommendations
Short Story Unit: Students start with a review of the key literary devices relating to prose, and then we assigned two separate pairings of short stories (Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” for the first pairing; Alice Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” for the second). Students read the text and completed a study guide, we spent a few days discussing the text as a class, and then students took a brief quiz.
Multiple Choice Practice: We regularly assigned students multiple choice passages from previous AP exams. We spent one class period discussing helpful strategies and approaches, and then over the course of the unit, we assigned five practice passages. Every grading period, we offered an after school session where students could come and review the practice passages and their errors with their peers for extra credit.
Close Reading Practice: Because we wanted to provide students with regular feedback and practice writing literary analysis but could only grade so many essays, we started creating close reading assignments on Actively Learn where students would read a shorter passage and respond to literary analysis questions using the 5C paragraph format. We required them to stick to the 5 (sentences) in the five Cs to practice being concise, and while they found it a frustrating requirement, we were pleased with the improvements in their writing. These close reading assignments were a more manageable way for us to provide feedback on students’ writing and analysis and give them the opportunity to revise. We did two of these assignments during the unit.
Prose Prompts: We also assigned students to write two released prose prompts (Q2) during the unit, both timed and in-class. Because we had done the process essay in our first unit and the two close reading assignments, some years we found students could be successful without directly teaching them how to tackle this prompt. But more often than not, we needed to do a little extra work with our prose prompts. We walked students through breaking down the prompt to make sure they really understood what was being asked of them, reviewed how to close read the text to best address the requirements of the prompt, and finished up with an outline of how to structure the essay.
How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay
From analyzing writing prompts to a literary analysis rubric, this unit has everything you need to help your students make sense of the Q2 prose essay.
Many students really struggle to recognize irony in literature, which often leads them to the complete opposite interpretation of a text than the author intended. Because the College Board does occasionally address comedy on the exam, we wanted to ensure our students had some practice with it.
Pride and Prejudice: While our main reason for assigning Pride and Prejudice was to ensure students had the opportunity to wrestle with a long text and challenging language (something they were more inclined to do in October than in March), it laid a foundation for the more explicit work we would do with comedy and satire at the end of the grading period. We focused on comparing the novel’s different couples to determine what Austen has to say about marriage, an approach that worked well with our students and gave them a starting point for generating a theme statement. Students read Pride and Prejudice independently (and answered Guided Reading Questions) during the previous grading period, so once we wrapped up our introduction to prose, they were ready to discuss the text. We also assigned two essays—a Q2 analyzing one of the proposal speeches and a Q3 at the novel’s end—as well as a novel review flip book and a multiple-choice test to hold students accountable for the reading.
Comedy & Satire Unit: We followed Pride and Prejudice with an introduction to satire and comedic devices (using the “Modern Warfare” episode of Community as our reference text). Students then read The Importance of Being Earnest and watched the 2002 film version before engaging in discussion of what, exactly, Wilde is satirizing. Our discussion was less structured for this text, with students completing group assignments examining what Wilde treats as trivial and what he treats as serious in a variety of categories. While in some ways, Wilde’s text hits many of the same points as Pride and Prejudice, we found this helpful, as it required less teaching on the social customs and attitudes toward marriage. Assignments included, as always, Guided Reading Questions, a multiple-choice exam, a novel review flip book, and a timed Q3 essay.
Multiple Choice Practice: Over the course of the unit, students completed another five practice multiple-choice passages, sometimes individually and sometimes in a group. As in the previous grading period, they had the opportunity to review those passages in an after-school session at the end of the grading period for extra credit.
Semester Final: For their semester final, students completed two released multiple-choice passages and a test on prose and comedic literary devices, which combined definitions and application using the texts we read throughout the semester. While in an ideal world, students would write a timed essay, we finally accepted that the turnaround time (typically less than 24 hours) on this was too much for us and stuck to the multiple-choice exam, making the end of the semester go just a little bit smoother.
Unit 4: Introduction to Poetry
While our students certainly hadn’t mastered everything there was to understand about prose, we found that they needed much more practice with poetry, so we devoted most of second semester to it.
Macbeth Preview and Introduction to Poetic Devices: For the first week of the semester, we assigned students to read and answer questions about Leon Garfield’s prose adaptation of Macbeth to familiarize them with the story before they read the original text independently as we focused on poetry in class. Students also completed a study guide for the chapter introductions in their textbook to familiarize themselves with the terminology of poetry. At the end of the week, we modeled how to complete the study guide we would use throughout the unit.
Poetry Analysis and Discussion: While we experimented with different strategies over the years, we found it most effective to assign two different “chunks” of poetry to students, spending about two weeks on each. In each chunk (one had five poems, the other had six), students completed study guides and engaged in class discussion about the poems, completed a close reading practice on Actively Learn or wrote a response to a sample Q1 prompt, and took a quiz on the poems we discussed. Sprinkled throughout were an additional three multiple-choice practices.
Macbeth: We ended the unit (and started the next) with discussion of Macbeth, a natural fit for a unit on poetry. While most years, we followed our traditional structured discussion format (and students completed their usual Guided Reading Questions, novel review flip book, and Q3), we had to improvise during distance learning. Students worked in discussion board groups to do two separate writing assignments—a close reading of a soliloquy and a theme analysis paragraph. Had we continued teaching AP Literature, we would have made a permanent place for those assignments, as the process was incredibly valuable for our students.
Unit 5: Drama and Poetry, Continued
We began our final grading period before the AP exam by wrapping up our discussion of Macbeth, and then we returned to poetry, assigning more challenging poems than we had assigned in the previous grading period.
Poetry Analysis and Discussion: Following the same format as we did in the previous grading period, we assigned six poems, which students discussed and took a quiz on. They also wrote a timed Q1 response and completed seven practice multiple-choice passages (twice in groups).
Things Fall Apart: Our last novel of the year was Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. We found this to be a good “right before the exam” text. Not only was it relatively straightforward and easy-to-read at a time of year when many students are burned out, but it is a text students can do a lot with on their own, giving them a boost of confidence right before the exam. It didn’t hurt that it followed Macbeth, allowing us to talk briefly about Okonkwo as a tragic hero. As always, our unit included Guided Reading Questions, structured discussion, a novel review flip book, a multiple-choice exam, and a timed Q3 response.
Sound Devices Unit: Sound devices, particularly rhythm and meter, pose a tricky conundrum when teaching AP Literature. On the one hand, there is occasionally a question about them on the AP exam; on the other hand, it takes a lot of work to understand them well, and as the old saying goes, “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” Steph created a week-long unit to introduce these devices using music and interactive activities, and she taught both our classes that week (since she had 12 years of music experience and Kate would have been happy to scrap the whole thing). We always made sure to tell students that if they got it, great! They had another tool in their toolkit. If it wasn’t working for them, however, they could still do a great job on the exam, but at least they had some exposure to the terminology. And we made them all swear they wouldn’t write about sound devices in an essay since these devices are more like icing on the cake than devices that carry the meaning of a text.
Poetry Final: We wrapped up our unit (and the formal instruction part of the year) with a literary terms exam focused on poetry and one last Q1 or Q2, depending on which one that year’s students needed more practice with.
Exam Review: We usually only spent about a week reviewing for the AP exam, largely because AP Lit is a skills-based class, and there’s not much you can “cram” at the last minute if you haven’t been developing your skills all year. We always reviewed literary devices and class novels, and we practiced selecting a novel with a variety of Q3 prompts since that’s what students must do, and often panic about, on the exam. Other activities were based on what our students needed or requested that particular year.
Unit 6: After the AP Exam
For many years, we had an entire grading period left after the AP exam; once our district switched to an August start date, however, we only had a few weeks left. We tried a variety of activities over the years to allow our students the “break” they needed from heavy-duty literary analysis while still holding them accountable for their time in class (and giving them an opportunity to boost their final grades).
Like we said at the top, there’s no one-size-fits-all full year plan for teaching AP Literature. While our basic skeleton remained the same for our entire 14-year-run in the AP Lit classroom, the details evolved over time: we never taught the class exactly the same way from one year to the next. But we hope that sharing the strategy that worked for us gave you some ideas and, most importantly, a sense of relief knowing that you can improvise on the College Board’s unit guides and still have a plan that works.
You don’t think we’re only sharing our outline here, do you? We’ve put together a bundle of three essential materials from our Intro to AP Lit unit: our allusions list, Kahoots, and matching test; a literary terms list, Kahoots, and matching test; and our How to Read Literature Like a Professor unit, complete with study guides, quizzes, and an escape room review activity. Save yourself some planning time and help your students get their year off to the right start with these time-tested materials!
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