AP Language and Composition shouldn’t be the only place where students learn certain skills. In fact, these skills are so important, they should really be spiraled down into all of the grade levels leading up to Lang. Here are my top four recommendations to consider in your vertical articulation in your English Department.

Raise your hand if the first unit of your school year is a short story unit with figurative language terminology review? Yes? This is unit one in thousands of English classrooms and this makes me wonder…if they’ve done this so many times, why aren’t they experts? How is it that by unit 2, the next time we encounter an example of personification, they’ve forgotten the term altogether?

The thought process here is logical: provide terms, provide definitions, provide examples, practice, practice practice = learning has succeeded. But we see this doesn’t actually happen. So what’s not working?

Keeping rhetorical analysis fun isn’t easy, but here’s a simple idea that requires no extra work on your end. Handprint or five-finger analysis is a memorable and creative way to analyze an argument and you can easily customize this organizer to fit any season or text you are studying.

These are 12 fresh, new ideas for shaking up your American Literature curriculum: from essential questions to literary food trucks, take these ideas to change up how you’ve done things in the past.

Teaching grammar shouldn’t happen in isolation. Here is one Padlet-based lesson idea for teachers to practice grammatical concepts by writing and revising captions of various pictures.

A curse. A desperate staff of household appliances and fixtures. One dinner. How will rhetoric move the needle?

You guys.  This is the first time in over a decade of teaching that I’ve gone through a stack of papers saying, “Yes!  Yes! YESSS!!!!” I’m so proud of what’s been accomplished that I’m just dying to share with you how to make this happen in your own classroom.