Teaching AP Literature Novels: Our Go-To Unit Plan

We recently took a look back at the AP English Literature and Composition Course and Exam Description (CED), a 178-page guide to help AP Lit teachers plan their course. 79 of those pages provide suggested unit plans, which is an immensely helpful resource.

But it’s also overwhelming.

Throughout these nine units, AP Lit teachers are expected to cover a “variety of texts by diverse authors from a variety of time periods ranging from the English Renaissance to the present” (117). Talk about a daunting task.

One particularly challenging decision is how to teach your selected AP Literature novels. On the last of three essay questions on the exam, students must write about a novel or play of their choice, so AP Literature novels are an essential component of the class, and we want our students to have multiple options.

In our standard-level courses, many of us devote 5–6 weeks to a novel unit or novel study, especially if we only cover one or two long texts over the course of the year. We guide students through the reading and engage them in multiple activities designed to capture their interests and help them connect to the story. 

But we don’t always have this kind of time for our AP Literature novels. We need to efficiently move through 4–6 (or more) novels without sacrificing student engagement and understanding, while at the same time creating opportunities for students to practice with short stories, poems, and plays.

In navigating this challenge, we found it helpful to follow a similar routine for each of the AP Literature novels we discussed. Sure, there were some variations, but the basic structure was the same, and we found it an effective way to balance everything we needed to get through. As promised in our full-year plan for teaching AP Literature, we’re sharing it in hopes that it gives you an idea or two.

But First, Context: We Assigned the Entire Novel at Once

When Kate attended her first AP Summer Institute, her instructor recommended having students read the entire novel before beginning discussion.

Steph was surprised at first: after all, her AP Lit student experience followed the typical “read a couple chapters, take a quiz, listen to your teacher explain the reading, rinse, repeat” model.

But the approach made sense: we need our students to connect their analysis of the novel to its larger themes. It’s hard to see what those themes might be and which details most directly point toward it when we don’t yet know how the novel ends.

By having students read the full novel first, we had more productive discussions and saved time: students read the novel outside of class while we used our class time for short stories and poetry. You’ll want to provide scaffolding (discussed below), however. Asking students to merely read and “come prepared for discussion” is, for many students, a recipe for disaster!

Pre-Reading: Introducing AP Literature Novels

In our standard-level courses, pre-reading activities are essential. We want to grab students’ interest and make them excited (or maybe just not opposed) to read the novel.

But these are, unfortunately, the kinds of time-consuming activities we can’t always make space for in AP Literature. We reserved these activities for texts that we knew students would need essential background information to understand or that we knew students would be especially intimidated by.

Examples:

Guiding Students Through the Reading

When we first started teaching AP Literature, we assigned students to read the novel on their own and come to class on the due date prepared for discussion. If you’ve been teaching for any length of time, however, you can probably guess this didn’t work well, even in an AP class. Not all students read the novel, and few students understood it.

Even after discussion, students’ essays were full of generalities because they didn’t have a strong enough understanding of the text to lean on specific details. We realized that many of them who did read the novel were just reading; they weren’t reading with purpose and certainly weren’t picking up on many of the details they needed to conduct a thoughtful literary analysis.

So we started assigning guided reading questions to go along with each novel. We intentionally selected these questions to focus on parts of the novel we wanted students to notice. Even if students only read the parts of the novel that they needed to answer the questions, they were engaging with parts we planned to discuss. Requiring students to use textual evidence for each question meant they also had more familiarity with specific details of the text, and it provided opportunities for them to practice integrating, punctuating, and citing quotations correctly as well as writing appropriate context and commentary.

This approach dramatically improved the quality of our discussions and students’ final essays. Sure, there were still issues, but most students came to class with a basic understanding of the details of the text.

It’s tempting, by the way, to ask all the questions you can think of or find. But what we realized, probably too late, is that it works best if you limit the questions to 25–35 (depending on the length of the text), focusing on what will be most relevant to the analysis you’ll be doing in class.

But what about students who still struggled to get through the text on their own?

Again, if you know students, you know they’re prone to procrastinate, so even if we gave them 4–6 weeks to read a novel and complete the guided reading questions, many of them waited until a few nights before the assignment was due to begin, reducing the quality of their work.

For a while, we tried breaking the novel into chunks and making students turn in their guided reading question in sections. This made a big difference in their completion of the assignment, but checking those assignments created a ton of work for us. We eventually settled on providing students with a reading schedule, reminding them every day where they should be while not checking the work until the end.

We also started offering office hours as students read the novel. Once or twice, depending on the complexity of the novel, we hosted an after school session where students could ask questions and get help with their guided reading questions. The students who came found it helpful and got support in working through the novel before submitting graded assignments. It also encouraged some students to start reading early enough that they could attend the office hours and at least follow the discussion if not ask questions themselves.

Finally, we knew that students wouldn’t all get the guided reading questions right on their first attempt, particularly for some of the more challenging texts. We wanted to hold students accountable for preparing for discussion, but we also didn’t want to penalize them when they were still learning. So our approach was that if students completed the full assignment on time, they could revise and resubmit the assignment at the end of discussion before we graded it. Many students started bringing their guided reading questions to class and making notes on them during discussions, leading to final responses that were, in some cases, quite well-developed.

Holding Students Accountable: The Reading Quiz

We all know that if students are going to read outside of class, there has to be some sort of assessment to hold them accountable for that reading. Even the guided reading questions don’t guarantee that our students will actually read the novel.

For many years, our reading assessments required students to respond to short-answer questions, and many of them did poorly on these assessments. Over time, we came to believe that we were doing students a disservice by asking them analysis questions before discussion (not to mention, we were creating way too much grading work for ourselves), so we switched to a traditional multiple-choice assessment that included character identification, quotation identification, and reading comprehension questions.

Many of the test questions were based on guided reading questions (and quotations) students should have addressed while they were reading, but we also made sure to throw in a few extra test questions for those students who only read enough to complete the assignment. If the book had a movie version, we tried to toss in a question or two that tripped up those students who watched instead of reading. Did this mean all of our students read the actual book instead of relying on the Internet? Of course not. But it at least kept them from getting a perfect score, and that was a result we could make our peace with.

The Heart of the Unit: Structured Discussion

For each AP Literature novel (or play), we created a PowerPoint presentation that incorporated a series of discussion questions (many from the guided reading questions but not always) that we worked through over the course of a week. For each question, students discussed in small groups first, and then we called on students to share their thoughts with the class.

Afterward, we reviewed our prepared notes for each question, particularly useful for challenging questions that we anticipated students wouldn’t fully get on their own.

These discussions were students’ favorite part of the course: they were rich and engaging, and we enjoyed working through the text with students, hearing their ideas and helping them wrestle their way to a correct, or at least plausible, answer. And there was usually a lot of laughter. We actually really missed these during distance learning when we had to figure out alternatives using discussion boards. 

At the end of each week of discussion, we had students work in pairs and triads to craft a theme statement for the novel. We wanted them not only to wrestle with this challenging task in preparation for their final essay but to hear one another’s themes, helping them to recognize that complex texts have multiple themes. This approach also allowed us to provide feedback on theme statements without adding to our grading pile.

Digging In Further: Close Reading Activities

We didn’t always have time for additional activities, particularly for relatively straightforward texts like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (which we squeezed in right before the AP exam). But for some of our longer, more challenging novels and plays, we felt it was important to get students back into the text, especially if we had done more of the heavy lifting during discussion.

Here are a few of the activities we particularly enjoyed over the years:

Pulling it All Together: The Flip Book

Our final assignment for each of our AP Literature novels was a flip book that not only helped students review the novel before the essay and consider how its literary elements worked together to convey the theme but also created a study guide for them to review at the end of the year in preparation for the AP exam.

The flip book, described in detail in another post, had six pages: setting and point of view; theme; internal and external conflicts; characterization; plot; and literary devices. All of the information they included had to relate to their selected theme, helping them focus on important elements and see how it all tied together to accomplish a purpose.

Assessing Student Understanding: The Timed Analytical Essay

Our final assessment for each of our AP Literature novels was a timed analytical essay. We used released College Board prompts for the third free response question, usually providing students with up to four options to choose from. These essays were written in class, partly to practice the timing for the exam but mostly to cut down on plagiarism.

End of Year Exam Review

When reviewing for the AP exam at the end of the year, we encouraged students to review their flip books, and we had them participate in a couple activities to practice selecting which novel would be the best fit for a prompt. Whether we did “Open Prompt Speed Dating” or the “AP Lit Awards,” these activities were quick and easy ways to help them prepare for the one part of the test they could, in fact, prepare for ahead of time.

Teaching AP Literature novels doesn’t have to be complicated. Following this same routine helped us and our students know what to expect, and it helped us cover the essentials of four novels (and two plays, which we treated the same way) while still making short stories and poems a regular part of our curriculum.

If you’d like to implement some of the activities discussed here, you can purchase our flip book activity (includes digital and print versions). While not directly related to the novel units described here, our literary analysis bundle includes helpful beginning-of-the-year tools to prepare students for the analysis of all types of literature. It includes 115 literary terms, 90 common Greek and Biblical allusions, and a How to Read Literature Like a Professor unit guiding students through the nonfiction text and culminating in a fun escape room.

You can also get access to the rubric we used to grade our guided reading questions by joining our Free Resource Library.