Shall I reflect on Q1, pictures paint,

Reading student musings on the page,

In awe of insight under time constraint,

Imbued with wisdom, high schooler to sage.

A scholar knew the poet’s complex past,

My table leader and QL agreed,

This essay was the best we’ve read hold fast,

To their command of craft moves with such speed.

Though it be summer, learning continues,

Refining lessons for the following year,

From borrowed brilliance, reading thus sinewed,

Experience is how I’ll teach with cheer.

Thus cultivating joy with poetry,

Is my approach that I will share with thee.

Prompt

In a well-written blog post, analyze how scoring Q1 and collaborating with fellow readers shaped the teacher’s complex understanding of poetry instruction.

Response

This was my second year as an AP Literature Reader and my first year reading Q1 Poetry. Although I cannot disclose the prompt, scoring 1,000+ essays alongside fellow readers reshaped my approach for 2026-2027. My goal is to get students to trust their own thinking and find joy in crafting a compelling argument.

As an AP Literature teacher, I spent a great deal of time in the classroom dispelling a fear of poetry with help from my mentors - we started the year with Susan Barber’s “Good Bones” lesson and ended the year with Billy Collins’ “Schoolville” as a mystery poem where students assembled, titled, and discussed before reading the original, making them forever part of my Schoolsville.

Throughout the year, we started class with Poetry 180 using TP-DASTA - an acronym introduced to me by my APSI mentor, Dr. Minaz Jooma, and of course engaged with Brian Sztabnik’s Poetry March Madness- which led to impassioned arguments about “The Art of Losing” vs. “One Art”. All of this to say that on May 6th, my students felt more confident in tackling Q1 and were more fearful of Q2- which is a blog post for another day.

But after a week in Cincinnati and being moved by student writing, I arrived at a conclusion:

Students are excellent at noticing.

They notice devices. They notice shifts. They notice structure with remarkable consistency. Reading essay after essay reminded me that the challenge isn’t helping students see more- it’s helping them trust what they already see enough to build an argument from it.

As a former AP Lit scholar in 2004, I remember doing the exact same thing. As soon as Rosalind Jones, my teacher, handed out a poem, I was eager to annotate. I peppered the page with markings, thinking of myself as a detective and so proud of myself for finding similes, metaphors, anaphora, chiasmus, synecdoche, metonymy, the list goes on and on. I wanted to prove I knew the language of literary analysis, but the quantity of devices found does not often translate to a quality essay. I wrote the “poet used devices x, y, and z” but failed to link it to a complex insight or explain the relationships between those devices. I cherry picked phrases but often failed to explain the function of how it adds meaning to the piece.

Rosalind often asked “so what” to push us toward the “why” of our writing. So for this year, I’m going to challenge my students to not list devices in the thesis, but instead to look for the complexity and why it matters in the context of the poem, and in the broader context (they all clamor for that elusive sophistication point).

In the reading, before we began scoring essays, our table leader Morgan Hallabrin would ask us to ground ourselves in the poem by reading it to ourselves, and if we plugged our ears we could hear our inner voice. Slowing down to unpack the question and annotate the prompt before reading the poem gave me a stronger framework for interpretation. What was being asked of me, and what were my initial thoughts on the complex reaction to “x”, before I even read a word of the poem itself? That approach helped me find the shifts and develop an overall argument instead of beginning as a literary device detective.

As a reader, if a student was able to explain the connections and progressions throughout the poem with clear insight, line of reasoning, and strong verbs, it energized me more than a Diet Coke. And on Day 4 it happened.

Every table has that moment where an essay quietly makes its way from reader to reader because everyone wants to experience it. One such essay reminded our table what students are capable of under extraordinary time constraints and pressure. We weren’t passing it around because it earned a particular score; we passed it around because, for a moment, a teenager’s interpretation moved English teachers.

That is the kind of writing I want my students to produce. But first, they need to be confident in their ability to think. Essayer in French means “to try”, and I want my students to have the courage to try, to fail, to make bold choices, to paint with participles, to write with their voice, because their voice matters. I want them to see themselves as complex individuals and to imbue that complexity into their writing.

That starts on Day 1.

If I want students to trust their interpretations of Shakespeare, Shelley, or Smith, they first have to trust their interpretations of themselves. This year, we’re going to start with having students write about their own complexities, craft polyvocal poems about “Why I Learn” and “Why AP Literature” to realize how the study of English can and will make their lives infinitely better. By starting with their own writing before diving into the work of published poets, they’ll realize that what they possess is also elegant and worthy of study. We’ll take the poems they craft and use the CED Big Ideas and Skills to explore what they say, why they matter, and how they create meaning.

We will spend more time in philosophical and practical discussions. Before reading, students will generate questions, research them, and share discoveries. Joy comes when students realize what they’re capable of. This cultivation of curiosity will lead to strong analytic thinkers who will not only succeed in AP Literature, but life itself.

Curiosity invites students to ask one more “so what,” one more “why,” until those observations become interpretation and interpretation becomes argument. It gives them permission to linger with what they've noticed rather than rush toward a response.

After all, students are excellent at noticing.