Remember in elementary school, how some kids were so excited to answer a question that they would wave their hand back and forth in the air, lifting ever so slightly from their seat? The Hermione Grangers of 2nd grade. Yeah, that was me. So I have real sympathy for students who become discussion dominators. Though on the outside, this appears to make them successful students, it’s really just as important for them to adjust their approach to group dynamics as it is for students who are completel...
Oct 24, 2024•23 min•Season 9Ep. 338
Welcome back to our ongoing discussion series. If you missed the first two episodes, covering five types of discussion worth trying and introducing the Harkness method for student-led discussion , you might want to pause and go back to the last two episodes before continuing with this one. Today we’re diving deep into student-led discussion, specifically setting up a structure that will let you be successful. I’ll be sharing both highlights from what I learned at the Exeter Humanities Institute ...
Oct 22, 2024•29 min•Season 9Ep. 337
Today we’re talking about a model that influenced every discussion I ran in my classroom from my first year to my last, across grade levels, years, and countries. I’ve run hundreds of Harkness discussions - terrible ones, experimental ones, pretty ok ones, good ones, and absolutely incredible ones. Today I want to tell you how Harkness discussion changed the way I see group dynamics and why I can’t talk about class discussion without centering this model. I want you to try Harkness, or some spin...
Oct 17, 2024•9 min•Season 9Ep. 336
Discussion. Theoretically it’s the bread and butter of the English classroom, but sometimes it feels like all crusts and crumbs. How can you get students excited to talk about voice and theme, metaphor and symbolism, when they have a million other things going on? How do you inspire them to dive in together to the ways that literature illuminates life and life speaks back to the page, when they’re already nervous about speaking up in class and afraid they’ll look bad in front of their friends? I...
Oct 15, 2024•18 min•Season 9Ep. 335
The late afternoon sun filtered through the windows of our tiny English department office as I ran in to grab the papers I’d just printed. As I waited for them to finish, I examined the old books stacked on the shelf above the printer, brought to our school in Bulgaria by another ex-pat teacher many years ago, judging by the dust. One caught my eye - William Zinsser’s guide to writing nonfiction - On Writing Well. I snagged it with my papers and headed upstairs. Little did I know, I had just pic...
Oct 10, 2024•4 min•Season 9Ep. 334
Want to teach a multigenre essay project? Good! Our students see story splashed across so many platforms these days. Video, audio, visuals, and words all mixed up together in a daily swirl. Understanding how to tell a story across mediums is a highly relevant skill for students, and one they can quickly see the relevance of every time they switch on their phones or pop in their airpods. Enter, the multigenre essay project - a chance for students to tell a story of their own through multimedia de...
Oct 08, 2024•16 min•Season 9Ep. 333
Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You sit down to write a rec letter after a long fall day of teaching, meetings, coaching, and everything else on your plate. Maybe it’s 9 pm and you’re trying to remember all of Erica’s shining moments from the last three months. But they’re a bit jumbled together in your head with your grocery list, your toddler’s sle...
Oct 03, 2024•4 min•Season 9Ep. 332
It's no fun announcing an argument paper and being met by groans. If your English students have arrived at your class afraid of essays, you're not the only one. And we all know, buy-in matters. When students are confronted with a task they're horrified by, it's hard for them to access their skills and motivation to do their best work. So what are you supposed to do when you hit the groan skid? Today I want to talk about some on-ramps and side paths to the argument highway. Visual tools and moder...
Oct 01, 2024•16 min•Season 9Ep. 331
If you’ve ever felt like you were stuck in a rut doing the same thing day after day, I’ve got a quick mindset shift to help. I do NOT want you to give up on whole class novels, so let’s talk about how to make them work. In theory, whole class novels are the bread and butter of the English classroom. But if you struggle to get students to read at home and you’re finding the daily routine of covering a few pages every day a total slog, I hear you. You might have heard me talk about this with Amand...
Sep 26, 2024•5 min•Season 9Ep. 330
Do you have old books lying around taking up space in your classroom? Books no one is ever going to read again? Recently in our Facebook group, Creative High School English, a fun visual thread erupted all about bookish page displays. So in today’s one minute idea-isode, I want to suggest you try one. You’ll clear space on your shelves, help the earth with your reuse/recycle mentality, and end up with a stunning display. Here’s how… Start by pulling the pages out of some old books. It will feel ...
Sep 24, 2024•3 min•Season 9Ep. 329
On this week’s mini-episode, I want to tell you about a one week unit that has never failed to produce incredible results from my students. I’ve done it with 10th graders and 11th graders, honors students and their counterparts, American students and Bulgarian students speaking English as their second language. And I’ve loved it every. Single. Time. Wow, it’s kind of fun setting up all this suspense, but as you know, Thursday episodes are quick, so we better hop to it. The one week unit I’ve lov...
Sep 19, 2024•4 min•Season 9Ep. 328
Let's talk about dystopia book clubs, a compelling unit option for ELA. I taught my first dystopian fiction, 1984, to tenth graders in Bulgaria. They had very strong reactions to the way Orwell portrayed communism, since Communist rule had existed in their family's living memories. For some, Orwell nailed it. Others, outraged, clearly thought he was slandering their country's history. For everyone, the line between fiction and fact in the text felt blurry. Perhaps because of its intensity, its e...
Sep 17, 2024•24 min•Season 9Ep. 327
On this week’s mini-episode, I’d like to challenge you to get your students set up on Canva and help them get comfortable on the platform with a simple assignment that will give you a great fall display, literary travel posters. Have you seen PBS’ The Great Read posters, which are available for free download on the PBS site? I’ll link them in the show notes. They’re fabulous. Each poster invites the viewer into a literary world. “Join Don Quixote on an Epic Quest” is overlaid on a lovely backgro...
Sep 12, 2024•3 min•Season 9Ep. 326
Video is everywhere in communication these days, including on Reels, TikTok, and Youtube, where our students are. Building creative video projects into ELA can help leverage students' interests in these platforms toward building skills in research, storytelling, speaking, and building an argument. Not to mention skills within the genre itself, which are bound to come in handy in many fields. So today let's dive into video in ELA. We'll cover the best tech platform for straightforward editing, an...
Sep 10, 2024•21 min•Season 9Ep. 325
On this week’s mini-episode, let’s talk about how to build an audio assignment in early in the year without feeling intimidated. Maybe you joined me for Camp Creative last summer and you’ve got alllll the student podcasting background, or maybe you’re new to the topic and feeling a bit wary. Either way, this episode is for you! Let’s walk through how to add a short audio assignment to your fall lineup that paves the way for more complex assignments later on. First things first, you don’t need to...
Sep 05, 2024•5 min•Season 9Ep. 324
We moved this month, and it wasn’t one of your quick moves. We did one of those once, from one cabin to the one next door, carrying our furniture and baskets of stuff across a soon well-worn path through the woods. But no, this one was an international move across four flights and nine time zones, with some of our stuff going by shipping container across the Atlantic, some by moving truck across the U.S., and some by plane with us. And then there was the cat. Anyway, I’ve been meeting a lot of n...
Sep 03, 2024•8 min•Season 9Ep. 323
On this week’s mini-episode, I want to talk about learning names, and my easy trick for mastery. It took me many years, but finally, after a year in which I had a Kalina, Karina, Ekaterina, and Katrina, I figured out a plan that really worked. I hate not knowing students’ names. It stresses me out, big time. Maybe you’re the same? The worst is when I think I know someone’s name and then it’s actually someone else’s name, so I feel like I betrayed them both. So finally, after about five years of ...
Aug 29, 2024•5 min•Season 9Ep. 322
Jason Reynolds' website headline reads "Here's What I Do: Not Write Boring books." How great is that? As with everything he does, he seems to be speaking directly to the young people he's always trying to reach. There's a reason The Library of Congress chose him as the national ambassador for young adult literature. Last year I created an Instagram series all about Jason's incredible work, and different ways you might use it in the classroom. But I've heard from a number of folks who aren't on I...
Aug 27, 2024•20 min•Season 9Ep. 321
On this week’s mini-episode, I’m sharing the coolest discussion warm-up I’ve ever learned, which I picked up at the Exeter Humanities Institute one week after my first year of teaching and the same week that I met my husband. You’re going to love it! As you know if you listen to the podcast much, my favorite discussion method is called Harkness, and it was first invented and pioneered at Phillips Exeter Academy. If you’re interested in diving deep with Harkness, there are several past episodes y...
Aug 27, 2024•4 min•Season 9Ep. 320
The first time I really understood what flow meant I was barefoot in salty sand, building a beach sculpture in Mexico alone in the sunshine. Two hours seemed to disappear in moments as I gathered water-smoothed scraps of painted tile and bright shells and arranged them into swirls and towers underneath the cliffs. Take a second here and ask yourself - when do you feel that amazing feeling, where you are completely immersed in the thing you are doing so the rest of the world falls away? When do y...
Aug 20, 2024•38 min•Season 9Ep. 319
On this week’s mini-episode, I want to give my answer to a question I see all the time in our Facebook community, Creative High School English, and it’s this: What’s the best way to spend a teacher budget? So let’s dive into five great options. . Classroom Poster Printing Over the years I’ve seen a lot of wonderful classroom poster creation from fellow educators and artists across the world. And they look beautiful in framed 8 1/2 X 11. But what if you took your digital download and went bigger?...
Aug 15, 2024•6 min•Season 9Ep. 318
Today I’d like to share one of my favorite episodes from the Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast archives. In this special episode, I invited five creative guests to give their take on impactful classroom design. This back-to-school season felt like the perfect time to share it again. I’ll be back with a full episode on Thursday, but at the moment I’m in the throes of a 6,000 mile move with my two kids and our cat, and my office is basically a giant pile of boxes. So please forgive the change in ro...
Aug 13, 2024•19 min•Season 9Ep. 317
On this week’s mini-episode, I just have a very quick idea for you and it’s this. As back-to-school hits, it’s easy to immediately become isolated in your classroom. You’ve got a million to-dos for your space and your students. But the school year is going to feel better if you feel connected to the teacher across the hall, the teacher next door, and the teacher upstairs. Know what I mean? So this week I want to recommend that you host your department for something this back-to-school season. An...
Aug 08, 2024•4 min•Season 9Ep. 316
Back-to-School season is the perfect time to set up your reading program for success throughout the year. Heading into the school year with a well-organized library, a plan for routines like First Chapter Friday and Book Trailer Tuesday, a kickoff book tasting, an appealing book display, and a regular time to read will help so much in inspiring your students to read for joy throughout the year, and hopefully for the rest of their lives. Lately I've been thinking about a well-run reading program ...
Aug 06, 2024•19 min•Season 9Ep. 315
On this week’s mini-episode, I want to answer a question from our community about lesson planning. Here it is: “How do you plan? I’m struggling to put together a series of lessons that culminate into a bigger assignment. For example, if I want my students to end up writing a persuasive essay, what would I plan to prepare them to write it? Do you go with a theme? Make it part of a novel study? I’m struggling!” OK, this is a big question, but I’m ready for it. In today’s episode, we’re digging int...
Aug 01, 2024•7 min•Season 9Ep. 314
Maybe you've heard the story of how I almost quit teaching on my first first day of school. Despite the fact that I had spent three months preparing moment-by-moment lessons for fall. Despite the fact that I was wearing my super cool white embroidered top from Bass and carrying my first ever leather shoulder bag. Despite the fact that I had asked all my friendly, talented and kind new colleagues what I should do on the first day. I totally blew it, big time. And I want better for you. I want you...
Jul 30, 2024•13 min•Season 9Ep. 313
On this week’s mini-episode, I want to share my top strategy for taking the pressure off you while delivering a great experience for parents on back-to-school night, stations. Back-to-school night, like the first day of school, can be a stressful time. You’re trying to get a lot of information across quickly, and it can feel like the only way to get that accomplished is by talking fast and furiously for the eight or so minutes you have with your rapidly moving parents. A colorful presentation th...
Jul 25, 2024•6 min•Season 9Ep. 312
If I told you the ELA elective we’re about to dive into has an “awkward party” unit, would you believe me? Well, it does, and I can’t wait for you to learn about it and start planning an awkward party lesson of your own. Today on the show, we’re continuing our creative electives series with veteran teacher Lisa Blake, who's been teaching for 33 years in Northern California. She's built a life skills elective to give her students confidence in how to learn new skills, not just to teach the skills...
Jul 23, 2024•17 min•Season 9Ep. 311
On this week’s mini-episode, I want to answer a question from our community about reading in class. Here it is “ Hi all. Next year my middle school will be implementing a 45-minute every-other-day reading block for all students. All teachers (ELA or not) will be required to cover the class. I am wondering…what you do with it…” In today’s episode, I’m going to weigh in on how I would use a gift like this. If you give kids time to read in class, hopefully you’ll find some helpful ideas in how you ...
Jul 18, 2024•6 min•Season 9Ep. 310
What would you do if you had nine weeks to help ELA students imagine the real-world use of ELA skills? Inside the unique elective wheel program at Lisa Jones' school, students explore each discipline for nine weeks before moving onto the next. To show them literacy in action, Lisa has crafted an elective with three real-world projects to help them imagine how they might use their ability to communicate across modern mediums. Listen (or read) on to dive into these three real-world projects with u...
Jul 16, 2024•11 min•Season 9Ep. 309
