The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

This week I want to talk about the literary food truck project and why it's time to try it if you haven't yet! Since I designed this project many years ago, I've heard from sooo many teachers about how well it worked for them as an engaging AND analytical way to wrap up their choice reading or book club unit. I got three lovely notes from teachers this very week, and each one had me grinning from...

Did you know that in Iceland they have a special holiday tradition called "Book Flood" on Christmas eve? People gift each other books, then relax and read them while drinking hot cocoa or eating holiday chocolate. Isn't that just the best idea? I love it. This year I want to suggest you help your students have a book flood of their own, by making sure they have a great book (or two) to take home o...

This week I want to talk what to do if you're trying to help your students take advantage of the benefits of sketchnotes but they're stuck. We're going to dig into a special video series by Sylvia Duckworth called "Sketchnote Fever" and how it can help. Students often struggle at first with sketchnotes, because they feel ill-equipped to add icons and doodles to their notes if they aren't natural a...

The week before winter break can be a great time for wintery poetry. A mini-unit like this is flexible, seasonal, and easy to fit around whatever else is going on in those final (frantic? fun? festive?) days. You may have favorites of your own to incorporate, but today I just want to share three quick and creative ideas for your toolkit. #1: Winter Holiday Lipograms Ever since Melissa Alter Smith...

This week I want to share a productivity tip that has changed my life in ways large and small.  Three years ago we were all in the heart of a pandemic. My children were very young - five and eight. My mom was sick. There was a lot of pressure on our family, as there was on pretty much every family. I had been sharing teaching ideas on this podcast and by email for a long time, and it was clear tha...

Today on the podcast, we're sitting down with Martina Cahill, who goes by The Hungry Teacher online. One of her great gifts is helping middle school ELA teachers rock it with choice reading and book clubs, though I believe a lot of what she teaches can easily apply to high school too, especially when it comes to cultivating a culture of reading, trying out different forms of book clubs, and rollin...

This week I want to talk about argument, and why it sometimes seems so esoteric to kids when they learn about it in class, and so relevant when they watch it unfold on their screens.  This week a member of our Lighthouse community threw out a question - is the five paragraph essay dead ? It felt like a pretty important question for our community of English teachers, and soon got me thinking about...

When it comes to an engaging poetry unit, I believe the #1 building block is performance. There's something about watching contemporary poets stand up and deliver their work that is undeniably engaging. Kids might hate the piece they see performed. They might love it. They might feel their skin crawl watching it because they think the poet is so awkward... or get goosebumps because it so exactly d...

This week I want to talk about how one-pagers can be a powerful gateway to creative options in your classroom.  Let's start with the one-pager basics. A one-pager allows students to express their takeaways from, well, just about anything, on a single paper through a combination of words and images. A one-pager can includes quotations, analysis, key terms, imagery, special fonts, symbolic colors, a...

The week before Thanksgiving it's easy to feel a little scattered! For teachers AND students. It can be nice to take a break from your main unit and focus on some activities that still promote ELA skills but give kids something freshly engaging to focus on. Since I imagine your attention is a bit divided at the moment between lesson planning, menu planning, and maybe even packing lists, I'd like t...

This week I want to share advice I only wish someone had given me long ago - don't grade everything your students create in class.  It's easy to feel pressure to put a grade on everything students make. They often come in expecting to see a letter on top of every single piece of paper they create for you.  But ew. It's impossible to keep up, and it doesn't necessarily benefit them for you to try. ...

We've all been there. You walk into your English class, unveil your new ELA lesson plan with all the joy and care of a museum curator lifting the veil on a new Van Gogh, and your students just... don't care. They've got their own problems. Their own stresses. They decided in 4th grade they didn't like reading. In 5th grade that they "weren't creative." In 7th grade that they needed to give serious...

I want you to watch Gene Luen Yang's Ted talk called "Comics Belong in the Classroom!"  Here's why. It's a hilarious look at why comics are such a powerful medium for our students, how they accidentally got classified as a negative influence on young people (with totally false evidence) and the power they can actually wield for good - Avengers-style. I was so amazed to learn that library usage goe...

Today on the podcast, we're joined by education leader Reid Saaris. He's the founder of Equal Opportunity Schools, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that students of all backgrounds have opportunities to succeed at the highest levels. He is an Echoing Green, a Draper Richards Kaplan, and a Stanford Social Innovation Fellow, and has advised federal, state, & local leaders, teachers, philanthropies,...

This week I want to share a wonderful website and resource with you, Melissa Alter Smith's brainchild, Teach Living Poets . When I first started teaching poetry, it couldn't have been clearer to me that students needed modern poets to relate to. Though we eventually enjoyed unpacking poems like Wallace Stevens' "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," that was only because we started with a lot of per...

Today on the podcast, we're sitting down with Dr. Mark Gooden, the Christian Johnson Endeavor Professor in Education Leadership and Director of the Endeavor Antiracist & Restorative Leadership Initiative (EARLI) in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. He's got a new book out, 5 Practices for Equity-Focused School Leadership , offering five methods...

This week I want to give you a few quick ideas for using your whiteboard to help share great books with your students. First things first, your whiteboard tray. I am seeing a lot of folks making a super quick display that's really impactful by spreading books along their tray, then writing a one-sentence teaser above the book. This display is so easy to change up, and you can even get students inv...

Need a creative approach to your next short story? Or short story unit? (By the way, here are some fabulous classic and contemporary short stories if you need some). Stations can provide so many inroads, while allowing students to proceed at their own pace and based on their own interests. PLUS, they give you a chance to move around the room and help out individual students or small groups that ne...

This week I want to tell you about the most beautiful, powerful, impactful classroom posters I've seen on the internet. And they're totally free.  This isn't the first time I've talked about Amplifier Art on the podcast, and it probably won't be the last. I've even had their executive director, Emily, on the podcast to talk about their incredible wellbeing series.  But since it was Indigenous Peop...

In this podcast, discover NINE creative ways to bring Taylor Swift's music into class. Find out how to have students create their own eras, practice public speaking on song-inspired topics with song-inspired tones, build book bracelets or character playlists, practice rhetorical analysis through songs and music videos, and more.  Special thanks to ALL our wonderful guests - Ashley from Building Bo...

This week I've got a productivity tip to give you so much more focused time in your classroom.   Let's talk about email, and how often you check it.    I can still remember the exact feeling of sitting in my kneeling desk in my first classroom, watching red flags spring up in the eight different inboxes in my First Class email dashboard. No sooner would I zero out my personal inbox than there woul...

As Banned Books Week kicks off, I know not every teacher is in a position to showcase it. In some places, it's simply too dangerous for an educator to display banned and challenged books and talk about intellectual freedom with students (the Fahrenheit 451 realities are overwhelming). But for those in a position to share about this with students, today I want to give you some options. Choose the o...

This week I want to talk about getting you in front of an audience this year. My first year in the classroom I had an amazing mentor. Anne, my department chair, invited me to her house for lunch regularly. I brought pastries, she made fruit salads, and then over oatmeal-raisin scones and papaya, she listened to me talk about everything I was learning and doing. She nodded and smiled, and focused o...

There are so many reasons why a student may be quiet in class. The language may be difficult. They may need more time to think than the pace of discussion allows. They may not have been able to read because of other things happening in their lives that they can't control. They may be really shy. But there are ways to help quiet students build confidence and begin to participate. In today's episode...

This week let's talk about a unique masters program - and the one I did - The Bread Loaf School of English. Quick Details: Summer Program out of Middlebury College M.A. In English, but almost all participants are teachers, so there's a teaching angle! Campuses in Vermont, Oxford (England), and California Unique Classes and Activities (Opera, "Discovering the Imagination," and my Independent Study...