A Practitioner’s Perspective on Teaching AP Comparative Government and Politics

Authors

• Edgar Díaz, Utah State UniversityFollow

Keywords

AP Comparative Government and Politics, Teaching and Learning Cycle, disciplinary literacy, writing instruction, secondary education

Abstract

In this paper, I share my perspective and experiences as an Advanced Placement (AP) Comparative Government and Politics teacher during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. To engage students with the content and strengthen their literacy skills, I adopted the Teaching and Learning Cycle (TLC), a pedagogical framework for scaffolded instruction, in combination with technological tools. This article includes a sample lesson plan illustrating how the TLC was implemented in an AP Comp Gov course to support students’ content understanding and their ability to express their ideas through structured, purposeful writing. My goal is to highlight practical strategies for effectively teaching both government content and academic writing skills, with the hope that other teachers will find these approaches useful and apply them in their own classrooms.

Recommended Citation

Díaz, Edgar (2026) "A Practitioner’s Perspective on Teaching AP Comparative Government and Politics," The Great Lakes Social Studies Journal: Vol. 6: Iss. 1, Article 6.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25035/glssj.06.01.06
Available at: https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/glssj/vol6/iss1/6

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.25035/glssj.06.01.06