When To Hold The Line?

Is it sometimes okay to double-down as a teacher and draw a firm line in the sand for students?

I have a rather unique AP Literature teaching situation.

We have an atypical sequence at our school in which AP Language and Composition is taken by seniors, so the AP Literature classes that I teach are filled entirely by juniors—and the key word there is filled, with every single desk taken up in two of the three class periods and over 100 students overall enrolled in the course. For a fair amount of these students, too, this is their first advanced course of English in high school, so the skill range and level of preparation walking into those very-full sections?

It’s quite a lot to plan for—and even more to navigate over a school year.

Perhaps this explains why, when I walked into school Monday morning last week, twenty-four hours before our scheduled peer workshop, and realized that a significant amount of students had made little-to-no progress on their King Lear synthesis essays that students had theoretically been drafting for over a week, I went through a series of myriad emotions in contemplating what to do.

For today’s post? I want to share the choice I made in that moment, the thinking behind it, and why I think “holding the line” is sometimes the right path as a teacher.

(Quick note: this framing of a post—exploring a “choice” I made as a teacher, offering contexts as well as consequences, and then reflecting on what I learned from it—is something I’m curious about using more often, so let me know if you think it works!)

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The Context

After a lot of work over the first semester of this AP Literature course at shifting towards the how of critically reading literature and building confidence interacting with different shapes and sizes of texts, the second semester of AP Literature begins with our most challenging text—Shakespeare’s King Lear—and writing task: an essay in which they construct an original synthesis interpretation that combines moments from King Lear and sets them in conversation with their choice of a 21st-century poem from a provided list.

The other shift with this writing project? Students are challenged to step outside the “comfort zone” of a predesigned, traditional essay structure and to instead be innovative with how they design the path of their essay—and to also experiment with different “risks” of sentence structure and voice while doing so.

Needless to say, all of this together asks quite a bit of students, but this year’s cohort of AP Literature students had been doing stellar up to this point, outperforming any group I had worked with yet in my career on similarly-designed assessments, so I felt quite confident that they would be successful.

The other good thing? Having designed this unit a few years back and made intentional adjustments to it each year since, the number of supports I was able to provide was substantially higher this time around—and I felt as good as ever going into the final stages of this challenging writing experience…

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The Problem

…Until I happened to check on the progress of students a day before their official peer workshop.

You guessed it: there were were a lot of blank documents. And even those that weren’t blank? Most were far from ready for the upcoming workshop.

As noted in the opening of this post, this is where all the different contexts of this particular course began juggling themselves within my head—the first semester’s success; the sheer number of students; the interruptions that made this particular unit even more difficult than previous years; the many warnings and opportunities for support that had already been offered; the exhaustion we all were feeling, myself included, with Spring Break on the nearest of horizons.

Ultimately, I realized that there were three different options that I had to choose from as a teacher in this moment before students arrived:

1. Do nothing—let students experience the consequences of procrastination, both with the workshop but also ultimately the final deadline

2. Adjust the deadline/expectations—meet students where they were, keeping my own core values pedagogically front and center as much as possible

3. Code Red—urgently update student families on their lack of progress and be very transparent about the consequences to students in class that day

(Yes, the title of this post sort of gives away the outcome, but before scrolling forward, I’d encourage you to think for a second: what choices have you made in your own classroom in similar situations? How frequently have you arrived at this impasse? What do you do when your vision for student progress finds itself adrift from the reality of the classroom?)

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The Choice

To be very clear: I am not an Option 3 teacher, particularly with the AP Literature courses I teach.

Throughout the first semester, I lean into quite-flexible policies that I believe prioritize growth—with students being able to revise formal writings after feedback, limited instances of late penalties, and a consistent priority of adjusting the classroom to meet students where they are.

However, another one of our priorities in the second semester of AP Literature is the intention of encouraging students to build upon their previous writing experiences, including their intentionality and ownership in the process. This is why this particular writing project incorporates very clear deadlines along the way, and also why the lack of progress this late into the process was so alarming.

For me, to choose “Do Nothing” was never an option—as that would be to knowingly direct students towards a negative outcome that could hurt the culture of our learning community.

And as much as I considered making some timeline adjustments to accommodate where students were at, I also recognized that leniency in this case would not likely address the underlying problem.

So with a deep sigh of many emotions, I drafted and clicked send on the above-pictured email message for all students and families it applied to—then I took a look at the clock and realized that in less than an hour the first group of AP Literature students would be walking into the classroom.

Deep sip of coffee, long look at the clock, immediate refreshing of my email inbox.

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The Results

A quieter-than-usual group of AP Literature students greeted me at the door beginning an hour later. Then, to confirm my suspicions, the whispers in the classroom were almost immediate once the bell rang and I stepped in from the hallway to join them.

“Dude, Mr. Luther emailed your parents, too?”

Strolling to the front of the room as whispers abated, I remained committed in my choice and doubled-down.

After I acknowledged that many students in the room had just had an email sent home to their families, I read verbatim from one student’s reflection (without naming the student) on their end-of-essay reflection back in November:

I didn’t plan or take it seriously enough and I low-key might be cooked.

A few giggles in the classroom, along with some sliding down in their desk chairs as many had written something quite-similar midway through the first semester—as almost every student made some type of commitment to a better process and far less procrastination on their next out-of-class essay.

Low-key might be cooked.

“Well,” I said, trying to balance something between a sympathetic shrug and a smirk, “now here we are.”

But here is what happened next:

• I spent the rest of that class period circulating the room, checking in with students individually and answers questions while they worked furiously knowing the peer workshop was the next day.

• Twenty-four hours later, the vast majority of students had a complete drafts ready to workshop with their peers—a workshop that went swimmingly well. (This also allowed me to conference individually with the remaining handful who were still behind.)

• The best news? I ended up with a ridiculously high percentage of students turning in their final drafts on time and that almost every student got to go through a full revision process rather than waiting until the last minute to finish their draft.

Oh, and I even got to begin my Spring Break by opening my email inbox to a note of gratitude for a student for the “extra push” going into the homestretch.

Talk about results, right?

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The Reflection

Now that I’m on Spring Break and midway through grading this digital stack of essays (the quality of which, I’ll add, is a marked improvement from previous years), I wanted to take some time to step back and share how I feel about this sequence after the fact—and why I feel like it matters.

1. It worked—but I think partly because I do it so rarely. Circling back with one student I also worked with as a sophomore in English 10, I asked after class what the vibe was after having sent out the family emails. Their response? “You don’t do it often but I think you needed to this time.” Key phrase, I think: “this time.” It’s not a sustainable practice to always ratchet up the urgency to a 10/10 as a teacher, particularly with punitive measures and “scare tactics,” and in a way my restraint and patience earlier in the year may have made the shift towards urgency all the more effective this past week.

2. The trust and rapport from Semester 1 mattered. A quite-frequent conversation between me and students? “Hey, Mr. Luther, I’m a bit behind on your work because I have so much in other classes and they aren’t as flexible at taking late work as you are.” This is a difficult thing to hear at times, but it doesn’t change my stance towards our classroom policies around accepting late work with minimal or no penalty, creating opportunities to revise, etc. Having that as our foundation, too, allowed me to make the shift towards heightened accountability and less flexibility for this specific project—as I had built a semester’s worth of trust with students already.

3. It’s okay to be generous towards ourselves, too. Despite the very positive results, I still struggle with all I’ve shared in this post as it feels like a departure from my own values around pedagogy. I don’t believe in late penalties. I do believe in the value of revision. Yet I also recognize our values as a teacher have to navigate the contexts we work within and, ultimately, have to serve the best interests of students. The ideals of our teaching philosophy—no matter how convicted we are—have to confront reality and compromise from time to time, and of course we’re all just people making the best choices we can for our classrooms.

To summarize: I do love the results, but I didn’t love the choice I had to make to get there—even if I think it was the right choice to make in this particular circumstance.

Additionally, this is also why transparency, I’d argue, is paramount to our practices. Transparency with our students about not only what we are doing but why—and then transparency as we reflect, individually and collectively, about the choices we make as teachers, how they turn out, and what we and others can take away from them.

Hence, this post.

The end.

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Your Response?

One of my goals in sharing this scenario is to get feedback: how do all of you navigate situations like this when students fall behind and you have to make choices about your pacing and flexibility towards them? Do you “hold the line” or do you adjust? Or, if it depends, what does it depend on?

Finally, as noted in the opening, this is a new format I wanted to try out: identifying an interesting situation/choice in the classroom and briefly walking through each stage before ending with a reflection.

Let me know how you liked this format, as I could easily see it being used for many other instances in the classroom in future posts!

(Now wish me luck in diving back into the remaining essays on King Lear and various 21st-century poets!)