Back on May 29th 2002, I finally graduated from Brown University with two graduate degrees in English and education. It was a proud moment, but I wasn’t able to celebrate for very long.
The following day I had an interview for a job in Providence, Rhode Island in a school that I really wanted to teach in. It was designated as being a school in need of improvement and my mentor teachers encouraged me to be of utmost service and accept a challenge.
The principal and superintendent stopped me in mid-sentence and said they were going to cut to the chase. What they needed was for a teacher to teach the gamut – a remedial course for students who failed 11th grade ELA and an AP teacher for sections of Language and Literature.
Welcome to your rookie year of teaching! And to boot, the day before classes were to begin, I learned that I was teaching 9th grade honors as well.
Four preps … yikes … and two of them being AP.
I’m the type of guy who is uber-prepared for everything. I get super anxious when I feel clueless and in the dark. So, given this, I signed up for an APSI and my district assigned me to work with a mentor teacher.
On September 7th when the kids rolled into my classroom, I was ready to go.
The first two weeks went very well. In Lit. we studied Oedipus and in Lang, we were working with Plato’s Republic and Thoreau’s Walden.
And like you … we got to the end of the units … and essay time.
Now what?
I was clueless.
In those early days of my career, I invented three templates that can be used across the expository modes and I have honed them over the past twenty years.
They work.
I’ve witnessed hundreds of students and even hundreds of teachers reap the benefits of these templates.
On September 11th at 11 a.m. EST via Zoom I am hosting a two-hour intensive that I am calling AP Strategies For Success.
In realizing that many of you would want to dive in much further than this session, I decided to bundle the intensive with my self-paced course which gives you access to my Masterclass Library and Alternative Grading Program.
In a nutshell, here’s what this bundle looks like:
· A live, two-hour professional development intensive hosted on Zoom that will fully orient you to my groundbreaking templates, heuristics, and alternative grading methods
- The Self-Paced Masterclass Course which includes ten instructional video lessons that will demonstrate for you how to implement the three templates of the syllogistic method as well as the declarative and inverted thesis into your classroom practices
- Detailed instruction on how to build your student writers from the ground up while equipping them with the necessary tools of grammar, punctuation, and syntax in order to cultivate rhythm, flow, and voice
- Detailed instruction with plenty of exemplars and models on how to apply the templates to each of the expository modes (literary analysis, rhetorical analysis, synthesis, argument, persuasion, research)
- In-depth instruction teaching you my “Bob Ross” approach to implementing my unique and effective templates of the syllogistic method as well as the declarative and inverted thesis
- 1-Year access to a growing library of 150+ video writing workshops (similar to the Free Fundamental Writing Workshops) that will take you step-by-step through the process of implementing the three methods I am going to teach you using the relevant literature and/or expository mode you are teaching to
- Access to over 150 professional PowerPoint presentations that walk you through how to use my highly effective writing methods that can be customized and used as a powerful guide and teaching tool in the classroom
- Access to 40 alternative grading methods that will alleviate the burdens and demands of grading essays and enable your students to grow and mature as writers
- Test prep writing workshops for both AP Literature and AP Language dating back to 2015 to the present
- A complementary copy of my textbook Teaching Teachers How To Teach Writing to serve as a further point of reference
If you would like to learn more about this event, please reach out or visit my webpage at http://teachinghow2write.com/advanced-placement-strategies-success/
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