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Hello parents and guardians!
When my son started school, I learned quickly that school was always “fine” and they did “nothing” every single day!! It wasn’t until his second grade teacher had a blog that I learned all kinds of great things were happening in his classroom. So, this is my attempt to help you see that we are doing “something” and things are usually better than “fine”. I’ll probably update once a month, and I’ll always email to let you know! We have begun our study of language and rhetoric by practicing the skills of close reading and analysis of a variety of texts. Students have read everything from song lyrics to children’s books to op-eds to Ralph Waldo Emerson essays. With every text, we’ve examined three things:
I’d love to have your students lead you through an analysis of a commercial or an editorial you've read! They should be pros at it by now. We are finishing up this analysis unit and will build on our newfound analytical skills by adding argumentative writing to the mix in mid-October. At home, students should be working on adding entries to their vocabulary and contextual pool sections of their notebooks. They could also be reading their independent novels! They should never have more than thirty minutes of homework a night for AP Lang, but they should always have 30. If they tell you they have "nothing" to do, ask how their notebook entries are coming along! Sometimes those get forgotten by busy students. What’s in the Gradebook? If you’ve been monitoring Schoology, you’ll notice many assignments are listed as only worth 3 points in the “Formative Practice” category. These are practice only and do not count toward the students’ grades; however, they are incredibly important! If you see many 3s, you can rest assured that your student is doing his or her work in a timely fashion and performing proficiently. They will likely do well on future assessments. If you see mostly 2s, your student is only partially proficient and might need to ask more questions or see me for some help in AA. 1s indicate that the student attempted the assignment but definitely needs more help, 0s mean the student did not attempt the practice. Now that we are ending this unit, you’ll start to see larger assignments in each category. For example, today students participated in a graded discussion for 100 points in the Speaking and Listening category. Next week they will do another short, analytical writing assignment that will appear in the writing category. Please ask your students to share what they’re working on with you. I think you will be impressed with their sophisticated thinking. Have a great month! I’ll check in again at the end of October.
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Hello parents and guardians!
When my son started school, I learned quickly that school was always “fine” and they did “nothing” every single day!! It wasn’t until his second grade teacher had a blog that I learned all kinds of great things were happening in his classroom. So, this is my attempt to help you see that we are doing “something” and things are usually better than “fine”. I’ll probably update once a month, and I’ll always email to let you know! AP Seminar started with a thematic study of wealth, poverty and all things related to money. We read all kinds of different texts and examined the arguments the authors were making in those texts. Students also chose longer, nonfiction texts (hopefully you are seeing them reading those at home!) to supplement our discussion of wealth. We are using these readings to help us learn to break arguments apart and evaluate evidence. In the last two weeks we have moved into practicing for our first College Board Performance Task. Students are writing a 1200 word informative essay on a topic of their choosing. After they complete those essays, they will join with 3-4 peers to pool their information and create a team presentation. Final drafts of essays are due next Wednesday and presentations will be in two more weeks. Students will have opportunities to conference with me about their writing in class this week Thursday and Friday and next week Monday and Tuesday. After next week Wednesday, I hope you'll be hearing about their team presentations! If you're really lucky, they may share those with you. They are often very fun to watch. Please encourage your students to space out their work on the essays! We have talked many times in class about how to work in small chunks so as to avoid the dreaded “all nighter!” If you can reinforce that at home, I’d appreciate it. What’s in the Gradebook? If you’ve been monitoring Schoology, you’ll notice many assignments are listed as only worth 3 points in the “Formative Practice” category. These are practice only and do not count toward the students’ grades; however, they are incredibly important! If you see many 3s, you can rest assured that your student is doing his or her work in a timely fashion and performing proficiently. They will likely do well on future assessments. If you see mostly 2s, your student is only partially proficient and might need to ask more questions or see me for some help in AA. 1s indicate that the student attempted the assignment but definitely needs more help, 0s mean the student did not attempt the practice. As we move into October, you’ll start to see some larger assignments in Schoology as well. For instance, tomorrow I will enter the Research Conference assignment. Students walked me through their annotated bibliographies and answered questions about their research process. Most students did very well on this assignment. I encourage you to talk to your student about this research assignment. They did some fascinating work. I hope you have a great October! I’ll check back in at the end of the month. Hello, parents and guardians! I haven’t checked in for awhile, but I wanted to let you know what we are up to in AP Seminar. Students have completed their essays for the second performance task--a 2000 word Individual Written Argument--and have moved on to developing the presentation (6-8 minutes) of that argument. This Thursday we will do initial run-throughs of those presentations, and then students will have until next Wednesday (April 24), to practice.
The more you can do to encourage your students to practice for you this weekend, the better!! Very few students want to practice, but they’d all benefit from it. There’s something about practicing a presentation out loud that completely changes the game. It’s not fun, but it’s necessary. If they won’t practice for you, encourage them to practice out loud in front of the mirror, or for a younger sibling, or even the dog!! We will video presentations all day Wednesday, April 24, and then upload the videos and the papers the following day. Many of you have already had a chance to read your students’ papers, but if you have not, now would be a great time to offer to read those as well. Students have had lots of practice giving and asking for feedback from one another. You may want to ask them what you should be looking for as you read; they should be able to give you a specific focus! Attached here are the rubrics on which both pieces (the essay and the presentation) will be graded. There is also a rubric for the Oral Defense section of the task. Students will be asked two questions (sample questions here pages 54 and 55) and scored on their ability to answer. What happens when we’re done? The kids are hoping that the answer is NOTHING, but, unfortunately, we still have more to do! The week after our presentation filming will be spent preparing for the End of Course exam on May 7. For this 2.5 hour exam students will read and analyze a number of sources. They are ready for this; they’ve been doing it all year. After that exam, we will shift gears a little toward phase two of the AP Capstone program, AP Research. The pace will slow down and be much more relaxed, but we will start mining our curiosities and determining research focus areas for senior year. As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I’ve been so impressed by how well they are handling these large tasks, but sometimes you see something different at home. If you’re concerned about your student’s progress, please do not hesitate to reach out. Have a great weekend! Hello parents and guardians!
We are halfway through the Performance Task portion of the AP Seminar course. Last week students filmed their Team Multimedia Presentations and this week we will upload those presentation videos (and the Individual Research Reports that go with them) to the students’ Digital Portfolios for scoring by the College Board. I was very happy with all of the performances and I’m confident that they’re all doing very well thus far. Over the long weekend, students began reading the stimulus materials for the second, individual performance task. They will be generating research questions based on those materials, writing a 2000 word argumentative essay based on their research, and then filming a 6-8 minute individual presentation. They’ve done this before and I know they are ready; however, this is a task where I’m asking you to help me out! Spring gets busy and schedules get crazy very quickly. The independent nature of this project is an extra challenge for some students, so I’m hoping you can help me impress upon them the need to self monitor. Beyond the research, writing and presentation skills they will gain during this project, I think the ability to tackle a large independent project and manage their own timelines is perhaps even more important for their futures in college. I will do my best to gently nudge and not-so-gently nag if necessary, but I hope you can help as well. The more they talk about what they’re doing and share their progress, the more likely they are to avoid the dreaded all-nighters in April. Here are some important dates to keep in mind: March 11: Annotated Bibliographies due
Have a great evening! Hello, everyone!
I hope exam week is not too stressful in your homes. AP Seminar students have just completed a major chunk of their official AP coursework: the Individual Research Report. Per College Board Rules, I am not allowed to provide specific feedback on their drafts; however, after reading them all this weekend, I can say confidently that all of the students are well on their way to high quality papers to submit. Today in class students were given a summary of the notes I took while reading their papers this past weekend. I gave them a list of questions to consider as they do their final edits. If they will let you, it would be great if you could read those papers and discuss those questions with the students! I know some of them are very hesitant to share their work with their parents, but if they’re willing, I think you will enjoy reading their research thus far. Starting next week, we will shift into the group portion of this part of the assessment, the Team Multimedia Presentation. Students will be working with 2-3 other students to prepare an 8-10 minute presentation in which they will argue for a solution to a problem their team has identified. In past years, we have invited parents to come and critique those presentations prior to videotaping our official College Board submissions. Unfortunately, the students’ busy schedules are making that impossible this year! We will not be doing an evening practice session with parents invited this year. We are working on doing something similar during the day and asking teachers to give the students feedback instead of parents. When we get the day figured out, I will let you know the times. If you can sneak away from work or home and join us mid-day, we would love to have you! Going forward into next semester, you should start to see your students working on the big pieces of our College Board assessments. I will be putting many small check-in assignments in MiStar. These are my way of communicating to you about your student’s progress on those big assignments! If you start to see zeros popping up, it means we need to figure out some ways to help get your student back on track. For many, they are motivated by the high stakes nature of the assessments, but some struggle with the independence of tackling big projects. Roughly, you should see: Early February: Lots of work (perhaps with a group) on the Team Multimedia Presentation Late February/Early March: Independent research question development and lots of research Late March/Early April: Students will be writing their Independent Written Argument essays (about 2000 words).This is a big task and I hope you will ask them about their progress often! Late April: Lots of work on the Independent Multimedia Presentation (hopefully they will practice for you at home!) Hope you’re all staying warm! As always, please let me know if you have any questions.  Well, they survived the IWA process! They would probably say “barely” but I would say they nailed it. Yesterday, students turned in their final drafts of their Individual Written Arguments, a 2000 word research based argumentative essay. I think they were skeptically proud of themselves. Proud they’d finished the essays, but skeptical about the quality. I tried to help them understand that that’s exactly where they should be right now! This was a first attempt at a pretty challenging type of research and writing. We spent the hour reflecting on what we had learned from the process and these were the tips they came up with for themselves:
We posted these two posters on the back wall and will return to them often next semester when they are working on their performance tasks that “count” for the College Board assessments. Obviously, I haven’t graded them yet, but I know these will be solid pieces of writing because every one of the students was thinking like a writer. Ultimately, that’s my goal in this class. Students need to see themselves as writers who are making purposeful choices about how they’re crafting an argument. What evidence should I include? How should I order my claims to make this argument compelling? How does my word choice impact my audience? If all the stars align and I can stay on task, those essays will be back in the students’ hands with feedback by early next week (the week of December 10). In the meantime, we will be working on the second piece of Mock Performance Task #2: The Individual Multimedia Presentation. Students will take their essays and turn them into a 6-8 minute persuasive presentation. We will spend all next week working on those presentations in class. Students with a busy schedule should probably be doing some preliminary work on those presentations this weekend. If they are working hard in class and staying focused, the goal is for them to be ready to start practicing the presentations on Wednesday evening. Please start pestering them to practice for you!! They won’t want to, but they need to. At the very least, make them practice in front of a mirror or for an audience of supportive stuffed animals. The IMPs will be presented (and videotaped!) in class the week of December 10. At the end of that week, students will do some timed, in class writing. Most of our work in AP Seminar is on process writing, but throughout the fall semester we have been sprinkling in some practice with timed writing to prepare for the End of Course exam. You will see that reflected in MiStar as “EOC A” or “EOC B”. On Thursday and Friday of that week, students will have a chance to try those two tasks again and potentially replace a low score with a higher one. Finally, the week before break will be spent brainstorming and creating groups for our first--real!--Performance Task. Students practiced this one back in October; now we are doing the real thing. They will work in groups to research a problem area from many different perspectives. Students will write an individual research report (IRR) about those findings. Then, they will pull them all together to make a group argument for how that problem area should be addressed (Team Multimedia Presentation). You can save the date right now for Wednesday, February 6. Students will be performing those team presentations in the evening for--hopefully!--an audience of parents. I have found that parents give excellent feedback and this practice really benefits the students. Over break, the students will not have any official homework. Some students may choose to get a jump on their IRR research, but others may choose a complete and total break. I’m fine with either choice and we will talk about how to think that choice through in class! Sorry so long, but I know that the next few weeks will get very busy very quickly so I figured it was easier to just give one longer update when I had the time. Have a wonderful holiday season! Wow! This fall is going at warp speed. I blinked and we are days away from Thanksgiving. I will be out Thursday and Friday of this week presenting at the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Houston, Texas. I wanted to give you an update before I leave.
Students are now knee deep in a mock Performance Task 2. This is practice for the PT2 we will do in the spring that will count as 35% of the students’ AP scores. Performance Task 2 has two main components. 1. An Individual Written Argument. This is a 2000 word, research-based argument. Students have developed research questions based on a bunch of different thematically linked texts we have studied in class. We’ve spent a number of days researching and refining those questions to make sure they are leading students to solutions. Their essays ultimately need to argue for a solution to a problem they’ve identified. All students should be at the writing stage at this point. They have been encouraged to share their writing outlines or plans with me digitally by tomorrow so that I can give feedback. Please encourage your student to take advantage of that opportunity!! I know that if I required that they turn in plans, the vast majority of them would. HOWEVER, this is a great moment for them to practice the academic maturity we talk about all year. We have talked about spreading out work, using time wisely, etc. Now is the time to show that they can!! Please remind them that this type of practice is important so that they can handle these kinds of big projects on their own in college. The week before Thanksgiving will be spent in one-on-one conferences about their papers. The more they have written, the better feedback they will receive. Papers will be due November 27. If you'd like to see the rubric for the scoring of the papers, please ask your student to share the document on Google Classroom with you. 2. An Individual Multimedia Presentation. This is a 6-8 minute presentation of the student’s solution. It is very similar to the presentation they did earlier in the year--it’s just solo instead of with a group. Students will work on these presentations when we return from Thanksgiving break. If you can convince your student to practice for you that week, that would be wonderful! I hope you have a restful Thanksgiving! Please let me know if you have any questions about this large project. Hello parents! My updates have been too infrequent this year; I’m sorry for that! At conferences last night, three different parents mentioned that this was the only way they know what is going on in class! Since your students aren’t filling you in, it sounds like I need to be more regular.
We just finished our first major assignment: a mock version of Performance Task One.This had two components. Students wrote a 1200 word independent research report and then teamed up with 2-3 peers and pooled their research to create an 8-10 minute presentation. I was very pleased with their final products and hope they share them with you. Grades for those assignments are in MiStar. Based on their performance, I think they are well on their way to being prepared for the official Performance Task that we will begin in late December. Our next big unit started Monday and we are working toward a mock version of Performance Task Two. For this unit, I am giving students a wide variety of “stimulus materials”--poems, classic and contemporary essays, graphs, news articles, etc. All of the stimulus materials are centered on the overarching theme of Monsters (it’s almost Halloween, after all!!) and how we monster-ize things that we do not understand. We are spending lots of time talking about fears of the unknown and how misunderstandings about different groups or issues can create problems in society. So far, the students have impressed me with their thoughtful, mature discussions of some very controversial issues (for example: mass incarceration, immigration, transgender rights). Please encourage them to continue this! We talk a lot in this class about respecting opinions, listening with an open mind, and assuming positive intent. Beyond our work in AP Seminar, my hope is that students will leave my class with skills that enable them to participate in productive discussions with people from all walks of life with diverse opinions. What should you be seeing at home? Reading! Students are doing a lot of reading of various texts over the next two weeks. All of this reading is intended to get them thinking and activate their curiosity. Ask them to tell you about their reading! Challenge them to share their opinions with you. In about two weeks, they’ll need to choose an independent research question that grows out of all this reading. The more they talk and think over the next two weeks, the easier that will be. Have a great weekend! Hello!
We have been incredibly busy in AP Seminar, and I wanted to catch you up on what we are doing. The more you are “in the loop” the more you can (hopefully) help your students think through these big projects and how they might best manage their time. This week students have been finishing up their independent research for their first project. I have been blown away with the quality of thinking and research from the students! They are pushing themselves and each other to break down some incredibly complex topics. I encourage you to ask them about their research. Students met with me one on one for a research conference. They shared their annotated bibliographies with me and talked through their research process. These were graded conferences and you will see those grades reflected in MiStar by Friday afternoon. A score of 100 means the student was prepared with multiple, high quality, academic sources and was able to speak thoughtfully about how those sources addressed their research questions. Students with lower scores should be able to explain to you what they need to do to improve. If they can’t, please encourage them to speak to me. Next week we will be diving into turning that research into an Individual Research Report (IRR). Students have seen a sample, high scoring essay. I’ve also posted a screencast of me reading and explaining the key points of that sample on Google Classroom. This is a big writing task and I have encouraged students to think about how they might break that task apart into manageable pieces. This is often very difficult for students because their natural inclination is to wait until the night before it is due!! We talked about schedules and commitments and Homecoming and I encouraged the students to think about how they might balance everything and still stay sane!! Please ask them about their plan. I am hopeful that constant reminders will keep them from having long nights of writing at the last minute. Research essays will be due next week Friday, so you should see consistent writing all week long. If you're lucky, you might get to read a draft. Have a great weekend! We are finally ready to dig into our first research project!
This week your students will be forming groups for their first Mock Performance Task. All fall we will practice the skills necessary to complete the College Board Performance Tasks they will do later in the year as their official AP assessment. These "mock" performance tasks are the perfect opportunity to learn, make mistakes, and try again. For this task, students will work in group of 4-5 students. Each group will have a research f area and each student will focus on a specific element of the area. For this task, we will all work on research areas related to our unit theme of Money. For example, if students wanted to zero in on the impacts of money on the public education system, group members might focus on different elements of the research area:
Students will do individual research and write an individual report of their research findings. Then, they'll reassemble as a group and pull it all together into one cohesive presentation that makes an argument about how we should address a problem they've identified. It's a big, overwhelming task. Not only do they have to tackle some pretty advanced research, but this is their first chance to start working on group dynamics and holding one another accountable. The best way for you to help is to ask lots of questions at home! Encourage your students to talk through their confusions about their research. If they're struggling with group members, help them think through how they might approach their peers in mature, direct ways. And always, always, nudge them to ask for support and help when they need it!! I'm here to guide them through this big task, and the more they're willing to ask for help early and often, the easier it will be. This weekend your students should be blogging about potential topics for their research and reading their small group books. If you're lucky, they might share those blogs with you. Have a great weekend! |
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