Initially, we created structured reading assignments to help our AP Literature students come to class better prepared for discussion (“Read the book and come prepared to discuss” was not our finest planning, but we were new to AP!). As we moved toward a flipped classroom model, we used guided reading questions to guide all our students (AP, PreAP/honors, and standard-level) through their texts.

Rather than selecting short stories for high school students that confirm their understanding of plot structure, suspense, and foreshadowing, we found it most effective to challenge students’ assumptions with short stories in which an author’s use of an unusual plot structure directly contributes to our understanding of the work’s theme, as it leads to meaningful discussions and revelations.

We came to believe we had an obligation to provide our students with what we call a “cultural toolkit.” What authors (for better or worse) once presumed to be a common body of knowledge is increasingly less common: Greek and Roman mythology, the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, and even fairy tales written by the brothers Grimm, not Disney.

We’re sharing the guidelines we’ve developed for our remarks for student performance, both as a result of completing many forms ourselves and from seeing the feedback, useful and not so useful, provided at years of meetings.

Shifting how we were teaching writing to prioritize our focus on the paragraph rather than the essay was a gradual one for us, largely because we felt guilty not always assigning full essays, but the more we saw the benefits and the more we saw how we could apply our work with the paragraph to our work with essay structures, the more willing we were to shift our focus.