Peter Adams taught at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) for thirty-six years before retiring in 2014.

His professional experience includes tenures with the editorial board of the Journal of Basic Writing and chairing the Conference on Basic Writing (CBW) for three years. His publications include the 1994 HarperCollins Concise Handbook for Writers and Connections: A Guide to the Basics of Writing, published by Little, Brown.. His article “Basic Writing Revisited,” appearing in the Journal of Basic Writingin 1993, has had a major influence on the movement toward mainstreaming basic writers. His influential article “The Accelerated Learning Program: Throwing Open the Gates” appeared in the fall 2009 issue of the Journal of Basic Writing.

From 2006 to 2014, he directed the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) at CCBC, which he designed to improve success rates for students placed in developmental writing courses. In 2012, ALP was the focus of a major study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia, a study whose “results suggest that ALP students are more likely than similar non-ALP students to pass English 101 and to take and pass English 102.”

Professor Adams has spoken widely about ALP and about developmental education more broadly. He has consulted regularly for Complete College America. In addition, he has addressed state-wide gatherings of developmental educators in Arkansas, Massachusetts, Indiana, Ohio, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Michigan, Hawai’i, Utah, and West Virginia. ALP has been adopted at more than 300 colleges around the country. He has advised many schools as they planned to implement ALP and has conducted professional development for faculty preparing to teach ALP in more than 20 states.