The challenges that come with writing an AP Language Synthesis Essay are stacked, one being a need for contextual knowledge. Students’ motivation to score well might be just the incentive they need to address it.
The plan is under way! My kids have already been reading 100 pages of an independent nonfiction book per week since September. That’s external to the course though, which means I don’t have a lot of control over its efficacy. But with our second “contextual pool article” of the year in the hands of students, we tried a new approach to the reading and annotations that are required of them before quiz day.
The goal of these independent annotations is to require the students to engage deeply with an article that is probably MILES outside of their usual wheelhouses. If we can imagine the “contextual pool” as a visual metaphor, the subject of these articles doesn’t just take them out of the shallow end of the pool and out to the diving board. It pulls many out of the pool, walks them a few hundred yards down the street, and throws them in the ocean.
But I’ve also given them some floaties and swim lessons: We talked about the genre of the piece–a review of a film by a film critic that is actually using the movie in question to examine the entire genre of horror and its use of heavy-handed metaphor–and then we talked about what compelling evidence would look like in an argumentative piece like this. I also reminded them that such a piece is likely to suggest to them some perspectives they may disagree with–a different way of activating prior knowledge called “augmented activation” that helps students engage with challenging new material.
They’ve also learned a lot about how to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary, allusions, tone, etc. So they’ve had a lot of work to do. But this is the beginning of my work as well. The results of this quiz (coming next week) will give me a good measure of how successfully this skill set has prepped them to deal with challenging texts. We will also be revisiting frequently missed questions. That discussion will be formatted in terms of their contextual knowledge–what information about the text, its discipline, its structure, or its evidence was missing from your understanding?
Which is good, because very soon we’ll be on to our central project for my plan: The Synthesis Essay. This task from College Board requires them to examine 6–7 sources (are we still doing this joke?) and then synthesize an argument from their varied perspectives. There’s a timer involved, but even without that this is hard work for my kids: The sources are wide ranging in perspective, genre and even medium. Political cartoons, statistical tables, graphs, op-eds, government documents…the possibilities are limited only by the document’s ability to be formatted into a pdf!
Normally we’d treat this collectively (take some time with each source and figure out what perspectives fit together–you have 20 minutes!). But this year we’re going to do a slow run through a model set of sources first. For each one we’re going to engage in the same process as with that contextual pool article. What type of piece is this? What discipline does it come from? What does that tell us about what to expect of it? Since they all have a perspective, how are arguments defended in this particular area? What counts as evidence in an op-ed versus a political cartoon?
The AP Lang curriculum provides me with a natural advantage in asking them to engage in this sort of meta work regarding a given article. The rhetorical situation is their first step in examining any piece of text, so I’m going to suggest to them that this simply takes that work one more step backwards in order to view the overall nature of each text.
One goal here is for them to see why not all evidence is created equal. But that’s the course goal. The other goal is related to my Teach Blue problem of practice: To help them understand that they need more knowledge of various fields and styles of writing in order to truly master not only an argument within a course, but a richer understanding of anything they engage with in the real world. The Synthesis Essay is perfect for this because the topics are always wildly specific: One of the most commonly used models released by College Board asks them to consider eminent domain, a concept few of them have ever heard of.
This gives them an incentive to engage in strategies they might otherwise ignore–the strategies I want them to internalize as learners. Instead of diving right into a full essay, I’m going to ask them to just outline an argument and thesis–what’s your position and what sources would you utilize to defend it…and why. With some table chatting and some modeling and some jigsawed debating about the value of one source over another, we should be able to establish some knowledge about how to engage with sources from different fields and how to evaluate new knowledge in those fields in ways that enrich their contextual knowledge more quickly.
The steps that follow that big adventure (the activities I just mentioned will basically rewrite my entire three week Synthesis unit) will depend on how well all of this goes. If my kids show a deep capacity for this sort of thinking, I hope to press the issue into those independent reading books and also into some other genres of writing we’ll revisit later (argument writing for the exam asks them to generate their own evidence–a perfect place to test all this new knowledge-collecting they’ve been trying to do).
If it turns out to be a slow and painful process (note how I’ve already turned the wheel of the vehicle towards this path even though it’s quite a ways down the road) then I would hope to make some of these activities recursive and apply them to future independent article quizzes and other coursework until they hopefully internalize their value. This will be the real test of my plan: Building contextual knowledge really doesn’t happen by accident or as a side effect of just being around information. It requires a sustained purposeful effort from the learner, and that’s what this plan is attempting to build. See you next semester!