The Joys of Teaching Literature

Help your students master the complex skill of close reading with these five easy steps.  

Teachers provide many opportunities for students to prepare for an essay or exam.  We must map out the process so it's not a mystery.  

Teaching literary techniques can be difficult, and intimidating to students, but there's a way to make it fun and easy.

There are many websites that feature poetry film and poets reading their poems in front of a live audience.  Students are more likely to get interested in poetry if they can see and hear it.  

The biggest challenge ELA teachers face year to year is how to get to students to not only read the novels we assign, but to love reading them.  Here are some tips to inspire students to love reading.

Starting the year strong is easy with a few straightforward, yet challenging poems.  

What makes a great novel?  What makes it great to teach?  What boxes should it check to make it into the curriculum? 

It's easy to get upset about plagiarism and cheating, and hard to find a way to reduce the desire to gain an unfair advantage.  I'll go over seven methods to discourage cheating in your class.  

Little distractions can add up to a lot of wasted classroom time.  Here are five little routines that will help you maximize learning time and eliminate time spent on stressful paperwork stuff.   

Free literacy blocks allow students to explore a topic or question of choice on a weekly basis for a set amount of time.  It's all about freedom, choice, and curiosity.  

Students love the creative process behind everything, not just literature.  Bringing the worlds of sports, science, visual art, and technology together with the world of literature can lead to exciting conversations.  

How does it feel to graduate?  What have you learned?  What is hope?  I complete the final assignment I give my seniors at the end of the year, and this is the short audio of my video essay for The Hope Project.  

Fiction exists outside the world of history and at the same time, often gives a more accurate account of reality than textbooks.  When we discuss a novel, when is it appropriate to bring in a discussion of culture and history?

It's nice to start fresh in the fall.  Here are five small things you can do that will help you truly love teaching.  

Interpreting the meaning of a frame or shot in a movie is just like interpreting a metaphor or symbol.  This week, I'll talk about how I pair film and literature.  

It can be really fun to let students go online and choose their own adventure.  An open-ended conversation about anything and everything will inspire students to solve the world's problems.  Sometimes, it's good to let students educate themselves.  

Writing a research paper doesn't need to be a stressful experience.  I'll go over the eight things I do in class to guide my students through the writing process.  

This year, I'll do something I call "The Hope Project".  It gives my students the opportunity to make sense of the year and look forward.  

If we walk into our class excited and ready to go, our students will too.  I'll go over some things I've learned about how to be positive.  

Teaching topic by topic instead of chapter by chapter makes life easier on you and your students.  Whole-novel activities allow students to track the development of a topic through the entire story.  

When students learn about race and culture, they learn about everything.  I'll talk about teaching an elective called Racial Literacy and go over four easy ways to talk about race in your ELA classroom.  

My students worked in groups to create a short film in just one week.  I'll take you through ten tips to help your students avoid common mistakes.  

We should reflect on what works best in our classrooms more than once a year.  This week, I'll talk about how both students and teachers should reflect on how to grow and change habits on a regular basis.

Short stories are a great way to introduce the various narrators students might encounter in novels.  I'll talk about free indirect discourse, first person narration, internal monologue and all that good stuff.  

It's fiction, it's not real, but it is relevant.  I'll describe a writing assignment that forces students to think about how fiction connects to the world we live in.