• Course: English Language & Composition
  • Dates: June 4-7
  • Participant Letter
  • Instructor: Valerie Stevenson, San Diego City Schools, San Diego, CA, email - valeriestevenson@cox.net

    • Valerie Stevenson has taught English including AP English Language and AP English Literature for more than twenty-five years to all grades from 7th to college freshmen and sophomores. In addition to her work as a classroom teacher at Patrick Henry High School in San Diego, California, she has been a team leader, department chair, resource, and mentor teacher for the San Diego Unified School District. As a very active College Board consultant, Valerie is an experienced reader for the AP English Language exam, a veteran workshop, AP Annual Conference and Summer Institute presenter. In 1997 and 2000, Valerie was selected for National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) summer seminars. She is a National Board Certified Teacher in Adolescent/ Young Adult English Language Arts. Valerie chairs the Education Committee and serves on the Board of Directors for the Preuss School, UCSD, a sixth through twelfth grade public charter school dedicated to prepare low-income, urban students to be the first in their families to go to college.

  • Included:
    • Materials & Textbooks
    • Lunch & Snacks
  • Emphasis:
    • Essential Skills & Strategies: an overview of the nuts and bolts of AP English Language and composition including successful basic strategies, ways to organize the course, and pacing guides.
    • Key Concepts of Rhetoric: understanding the fundamentals of rhetoric in order to make informed curriculum choices.
    • College Board Resources and Materials: become familiar with resources to support students and teachers, the CB equity and access policy; and ways to implement and build an AP program.
    • Teaching Writing and Writing Management in AP English: methods for instruction, feedback, and management of timed writing; the AP scoring guide and grading; handling the paper load; successful strategies for on-demand and multi-draft, process writing; presentation of a semester writing project for the rhetorical modes of development.
    • Passage Analysis and American Literature: the “arch method,” a fundamental methodology for prose passage analysis; successful strategies and activities for using American literature to teach AP Language; increasing the level of nonfiction text; nonfiction reading assignments and projects; teaching strategies that strengthen close reading skills.
    • AP Multiple Choice: types of questions, test-taking strategies for students, question-writing strategies for teachers, practice tests for participants.
    • Teaching Argument and Persuasion: “Everything’s an Argument”; logic fallacies; reframing argument as “inquiry” and “exploration”; successful strategies and classroom activities.
    • Researched Argument and the Synthesis Essay: Latest information about the relatively new synthesis question; sample prompts and student essays; methods and strategies for teaching synthesis skills; how the “new skill” appears on the multiple choice test.
    • Working with the AP Exam: background on the AP test; what readers look for; strategies for student success; read, score, discuss student samples; learn to score like an AP reader.