5 Powerful Ways to Organize Your AP Literature Curriculum Map

I don’t know about you, but every year, about this time, I stop start reflecting on the year and thinking ahead to how I will do it next year. If you are not revising, you are not growing. And I am totally thinking about what I want to do differently with my AP Literature Curriculum Map next year.

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So I started thinking. There are really 5 different ways that you can choose to organize your AP Literature Syllabus and Curriculum Map. And of course, you can mix and match. But if you are new to the game (or even if you are not), you may think that the way the College Board suggests it in their Course and Exam Description is the only way. And I am here to tell you otherwise.

Things to Consider when Planning Your AP Literature Curriculum Map

As you are planning you curriculum map, you want to be sure to incorporate short fiction, long fiction and poetry. The College Board recommends and even distribution; however, it is possible to teach all the prose skills by focusing on close reading passages from longer works. For more on ways to incorporate close reading, be sure to check out this post: 5 Brilliant Strategies for Better Close Reading.

5 Ways to Organize Your AP Literature Curriculum Map

One: by Genre

Since the Course and Exam Description suggests organizing by genre, it is the most obvious choice. Organize your year by doing separate units for short stories, poems and full length works. You can begin with shorter works to build scaffolding for the longer texts. It allows you to build to more complicated works as the year progresses.

Essentially, you move through the year beginning with short stories, then poetry, then a full length work. Repeat.

Two: by Theme

Organizing the AP Lit syllabus by theme is a great way to create a sense of cohesion throughout the year. It can draw heavily on backward design which tends to be best practice. It allows you to select texts from all genres that fit together to make a whole. Theme studies can be as long as a semester (or even a year) or as short as just a few weeks.

Theme ideas:

The Evolution of the Hero
Love, Loss and Dysfunction: Relationships
The Monster Within
Power Struggles
The Meaning of Home
Doors to Understanding

Three: by Literary Movement

Another way to organize your AP Lit Curriculum Map is chronologically. College courses are often broken out by literary movement. I took courses called The Romantic Period, Modern American Poetry, African American Literature, Early American Literature and more. This would work the same way a thematic structure would work except that you would move through a mix of longer texts, shorter texts and poetry by time period.

Literary Movement ideas:

Early American Literature
Transcendentalism
Elizabethan Literature
British Romantic Period
American Romantic Period
Harlem Renaissance

Four: by Author

Another way colleges offer courses in by author study. Often these courses will spend a whole semester focusing on one or two authors. In an AP course, we can’t niche down that much, but we could easily spend time focusing a smaller number of authors for a longer time, especially authors who work in two or three genres.

Five: by Literary Lens

Organizing the course by literary lens like New Criticism, Feminist, Psychological, Ethical, etc is another way that would approach the texts by mixing and matching short stories, poems and longer texts. You choose works to address a lens or two, allowing students to circle back to other lens as the year progresses.

Planning Your AP Literature Curriculum Map

The great thing about all of these curriculum map strategies is that you do not necessarily have to do one exclusively. You could structure you map by genre but still do a thematic study when you do your longer texts. You can incorporate literary lenses at any time throughout the year. I sometime introduce the lenses using short stories as part of my second short story unit, then we use those lenses in the longer work that follows.

One of the best things about being an English teacher is that there are so many ways to structure your AP Literature curriculum map. For more, be sure to grab my 25 page guide: 5 Ways to Organize Your AP Literature Curriculum Map. In it, I go deeper into each of the styles, including the advantages and disadvantages, along with curriculum map outlines for each.