The AP exams end, the proctors tell students to log out, and for a brief moment, the room exhales. That one day in May has really come and gone. Then comes the question: Now what?
Watch the accompanying webinar with Dr. Brandon Abdon here:
If you teach AP English, you already know the answer isn’t simple. Some of you (depending on where you teach) have maybe a week or two before the end. Others are left still staring down five, six, even eight weeks of school with students who feel like they’ve already crossed the finish line. If you’re teaching seniors, then that feeling is even worse. The range is wide, but the challenge is shared: how do we make this time meaningful without turning it into just another period of pressure?
The good news is that this stretch can be one of the most flexible, creative, and genuinely joyful parts of the year. With the exam behind you, you can shift from performance to exploration, from assessment to curiosity, from compliance to engagement.
I have kept notes from some teachers I have had the pleasure of working with over the last year or so and, with their permission of course, included their ideas here. What follows are those ideas grounded in that shift—low-stakes, student-centered, and designed to remind everyone why these courses matter in the first place.
"How do we make this time meaningful without turning it into just another period of pressure?"
After the exam, I tell my students: “We’ve spent a year studying rhetoric. Now let’s go find it where it actually lives.”
I give them a simple task: document rhetoric in their everyday lives for one week. That might include:
The loose nature of this works during the exam weeks because their schedule is already so messed-up. Students collect 5–7 artifacts and annotate them, but not formally, not with rubric pressure, but with curiosity. I ask them to notice:
At the end, they present one artifact in a quick, informal “show and tell.” The tone is conversational, not evaluative. What’s powerful here is transfer: students begin to see rhetoric as something alive, not just something that happens in timed essays.
This works whether you have three days or three weeks. Scale it up or down. The key is shifting from producing rhetoric for a grade to noticing rhetoric as a habit of mind.
We’ve spent months doing argument as a structured academic form (which I maintain is necessary for a number of reasons). After the exam, I loosen that structure but keep the thinking.
I let students choose something they actually care about, but with a twist: they must choose the medium first. Options include:
Then they build an argument suited to that medium. No formal thesis statement required. No five-paragraph expectations. But I still ask them to think rhetorically:
Students workshop informally in small groups, more like creators than students. The result is often more authentic than anything they wrote all year.
The low-stakes nature matters. I grade lightly (or sometimes not at all), focusing instead on reflection: What did you learn about argument by making this?
By May, my students are incredibly good at writing AP essays and incredibly limited by that skill set. So we spend our final weeks breaking it on purpose.
I let them pair up or get into groups no larger than 3 or even work alone, then I give them unconventional prompts:
Students laugh at first, but then something shifts. They start to see the constructed nature of what we’ve taught all year. They recognize that the AP essay is a genre and not the genre. And they start to see the different ways they can use what they have learned beyond just essays.
This is where real learning happens. Not in perfecting the form, but in understanding its boundaries.
I do a mix of whole-class and limited-choice novels all year, but after the exam, it’s each student making their own choice. I create a curated list—contemporary fiction, short classics, novels in verse, memoirs—and let students choose. Throughout the year, if I mention or students mention a book (or a film/show that I know has a book) then I add it to the list. I also talk up this moment all year… “when we get to what you actually want to read after the exam, then…”
The only requirement:
We structure class like a book club:
No quizzes. No essays. Sometimes I’ll ask for a short reflection or a creative response, but the emphasis is on reading as a lived experience, not an assessed task. To unify the discussions, we do focus on big ideas and common themes so that students can address how their novel addresses that or how it might if it did. This gets into some really smart speculative discussions that often motivates others to read classmates’ books.
What’s striking is how many students rediscover reading here. After a year of analysis, they finally get to ask: Did I like this? Why?
We spend the last few weeks exploring how literature changes across mediums. Students pick something we read during the year or something new and explore its adaptations (if there are any):
Then they create their own adaptation of a scene. It might be:
The focus is on interpretation as choice:
Students begin to see analysis not as something you write about literature, but something you do with it.
This is one of the most practical and appreciated uses of post-exam time. Seniors are about to enter a new writing environment, and many of them—even strong AP students—don’t fully understand what that shift entails.
Keep it low-stakes and direct:
One of the most useful activities I’ve seen is a “college writing survival guide” created by the students themselves:
This frames the end of the course as a bridge, not a finish line.
The weeks after the AP exam don’t need to feel like an afterthought. They also don’t need to carry the same weight as the months leading up to the test.
This is a rare window:
Whether you have five days or five weeks, the goal isn’t to extend the AP course but it’s to release it a bit. To let students use what they’ve learned in ways that feel more human, more flexible, and often more memorable.
In many ways, this is where the learning becomes visible—not in timed essays or scored responses, but in how students read, write, notice, and think when the stakes are finally low.
And that might be the most important work we do all year.