Brave New Teaching: A Podcast for High School and Middle School Teachers

Enjoy a sneak peak of the content that will be coming to you on our brand new private podcast inside the Brave New Teaching Happy Hour! You can sign up for Happy Hour here - https://www.curriculumrehab.com/happyhour Links mentioned in this episode: Episode 128 John Greene’s Crash Course - Roaring 20s , Langston Hughes Ted Talk - Paul Piff; Does Money Make you Mean? The Balance: What is the America...

Do you remember the first time you read The Great Gatsby? As one of the most commonly taught American novels, it’s likely that by now, you’ve also taught a Great Gatsby unit to your class. Because it is so widely taught, you may have gotten stuck in teaching it the same way over and over again. Well my friends, we’re here to shake that up!  Over the years, we’ve found ways to make The Great Gatsby...

As we celebrate American Thanksgiving this week, we know that we have so much to be grateful for here at Brave New Teaching! Mostly, we are thankful for you, our teaching community who continues to come back here week after week. We appreciate you so much. To keep things fun and light, we’re going to do a special episode about some of our favorite fall things at work, at home, and more. These are...

What teacher doesn’t love a good hack? We’ve all got more than enough on our plates, so anytime we can simplify a task to save us time, while still being effective in our teaching, it’s a BIG win. Today’s hack is brought to you by part four of our “The Best Thing I Ever Taught Series” - sub plans!  We’re sharing our 5-step approach to stress-free sub plans that you can use time and time again. The...

If we asked you what you get most excited about in teaching, assessments might not be at the top of your list…but it is for us! By the end of this episode, it just might be for you too.  Assessments are the star of the show in part three of our “The Best Thing I Ever Taught” series. Today we’re sharing two specific examples of favorite assessments that we have used with our students. Before you li...

How do you feel about group work? Love it or dread it? Either way, stay tuned because today marks the second episode in our four part “The Best Thing I Ever Taught” series, where we’re covering group work. You can probably tell by the title of this episode that we love group work now …but trust us, that hasn’t always been the case. In the past, we absolutely detested it. Group work was one of thos...

We’re kicking off a new 4-episode series called The Best Thing I Ever Taught . (If the name sounds like it’s inspired by The Best Thing I Ever Ate from the Food Network, it’s because it is!) Inside this series, we’ll be sharing all kinds of things that bring us joy and that we, and our students, have seen a huge return on. This week we’re focusing on gateway activities.   First, let’s define exact...

Today's episode is a re-run of one of our favorites! If you aren’t already on the dystopian band wagon, we’re fairly confident that you will be after this episode. We’ve taught dystopia for YEARS, and it hasn’t lost any steam along the way. Can you say that for other genres? So, why is dystopia as a specific genre so gosh darn exciting? Why is it something we believe should be in every single...

If you’ve been racking your brain for a way to approach a Shakespeare unit in a way that is engaging and impactful for your students, then you’ll want to stick around. This episode is a conversation between Amanda and one of her coaching clients, Kelsi. You’ll get to hear them give all the juicy details about an incredible unit that they designed together.  Kelsi initially came to Amanda for help...

Friends, it’s time to wrap up our nonfiction series that has been focused on biography and memoir. What better way to do that than with a TBR list? We’re sharing our favorite books that fit into the genre of biography and memoir, as well as some that we’ve had on our list but haven’t had a chance to read yet. Disclaimer: you are going to want to put all of these books in your Amazon card immediate...

For part four of our nonfiction series, we’re looking at using biography and memoir as mentor texts. You’ll hear how we define and use mentor texts in our own classroom. We’ll also give you some specific mentor texts that we recommend using, and our reasoning behind those texts. Since we love a good collabisode, we’ve also crowdsourced some great ideas from our colleagues and friends. They will be...

We love a good unit makeover, and today you’ll hear part of one in action! We’re going to do a makeover on a unit that Marie has taught one time so far. It uses the text, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. This unit is part of a brand new course. As many of you may have experienced, brand new course + brand new unit = flying by the seat of your pants! In other words, it’s a good time to talk through i...

We’re on this podcast for a lot of reasons, and one of them is to unpack one of the most powerful and often underutilized genres in the ELA curriculum world, and that is biography and memoir. In our last episode , we began making our passionate case for biography and memoir. If you missed it, you can check it out here .  We’re continuing that conversation today so that you can get even more excite...

Hey Brave New Teachers! We’re excited to start a brand new series that we’re putting together for you, starting with this episode. This series will lead into our newest virtual workshop (what we’ve called “festivals” in the past!) that will be held on October 3, 2022. It will be centered around nonfiction and teaching biography and memoir. Are you wondering why we’ve chosen biography and memoir? T...

Sometimes the best ideas and inspiration come from hearing about other teachers’ experiences in the classroom. That’s why I’m excited to have Ana Perez on the Brave New Teaching podcast today. Ana is a 10th year high school ELA teacher and a Jill of many other trades including poetry, Zumba, and techy resource creation. In the classroom she's a proponent of relationships over content, and out...

Today's episode marks the last in the series we are doing on classroom management. To close out the series, we're talking about a strong belief that we have here at Brave New Teaching, which is this...true compassion is accountability! We'll share what this actually means, and how you can take this belief and incorporate it into your classroom this year. Reserve your seat for The Fi...

When you think about your role as a teacher, are you trying to control your classroom, or are you trying to build a community? Our guest today, Dr. Deonna Smith is asking the tough, yet crucial, questions like this in part three of our series on classroom management! This is her zone of genius, and we couldn’t be happier to have her on the podcast to share her experience and insight. Deonna is a f...

Here at Brave New Teaching, we feel strongly about several things, one of which is creating a classroom culture that exudes trust, acceptance, and community. We believe that these things are at the heart of successful, and holistic, classroom management. That’s why in this second episode of our four-part classroom management series, we are chatting with our friend, John Rodney about organic commun...

As you prepare for another school year, how are you feeling about your classroom management? We don’t know about you, but we were raised in an age of clip charts, reward systems, and overall surface level management systems that were really creating inequitable experiences for students.  We now know that there are better practices to put in place that are equitable and responsive to all kids. Your...

Do you ever feel like the position you are currently in as an educator just doesn’t quite fit? Maybe it’s because of the grade level you’re in, the specific school you work at, or the colleagues that you work with.  Whatever the reason, if where you are in your career as an educator doesn’t feel right, you don’t have to stay there. If your passion is teaching, and you know you want to stay in this...

This episode is special for so many reasons. Want to know why? To begin, we are recording together in person!!! 🥳 We’re at the 2022 Teachers Pay Teachers conference in Chicago and it’s the first time we’ve been together since the very first time we met, (which was THREE years ago). It’s surreal to be here right next to each other after staring at each other through a computer screen for years. As...

Who doesn’t love a good makeover? Well friends, today we’re talking about giving our favorite kind of makeover - a unit makeover! Specifically, a short stories unit makeover. The reason we’re creating this episode during the summer is because we have heard from many of you that your first unit is short stories. We’ve also heard from you that this unit has not yielded much success for various reaso...

Summer is finally here, and we are here for it! Teacher summer break is truly something that nobody outside of the profession really understands. It’s a mix of emotions and if you’re anything like us, you may be battling with choosing how to spend this time. Should you focus on rest? Should you use the summer months to plan and prepare for the upcoming year so you feel less overwhelmed when it’s t...

Friends! We’re finishing up our series on collaboration today. We started this series off by talking about what collaboration is, what it can be, when it works, when it doesn't work, and what we call “lone wolf syndrome”. Today, we're here to widen the perspective a bit and talk about collaborating with the community at large when it comes to individual students, a classroom setting, and...

Welcome to our third of four episodes in a series all about collaboration! In case you missed it, in part one  episode 101 , we talked about collaborating with your teacher team (instead of being a lone wolf!). In part two, episode 103 , Erin Castillo joined Marie to share about SPED and classroom teacher collaboration.  Today, we are going to start talking about the star of the show…the kids! We&...