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, and more. You probably already know that my #1 tip for one-pagers is to give students a template that ...
Nov 16, 2023•5 min•Season 8Ep. 239
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 to give you three day's worth of activities that you can plug and play next week to take the pressure...
Nov 14, 2023•12 min•Season 8Ep. 238
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. Instead, think about how you can grade what really shows what they’ve learned, and build in ways to va...
Nov 09, 2023•7 min•Season 8Ep. 237
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 attention to social media if they wanted to stay cool. And now they're sitting in your class, eyes ...
Nov 08, 2023•19 min•Season 8Ep. 236
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 goes up 82% in libraries that feature graphic novels, according to a School Library journal article. Thi...
Nov 02, 2023•3 min•Season 8Ep. 235
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, companies, and universities on topics like justice, impact, data analysis, communications, and lear...
Oct 31, 2023•31 min•Season 8Ep. 234
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 performance poetry, modern poems students leaned into and even loved. Melissa Alter Smith, founder of t...
Oct 26, 2023•3 min•Season 8Ep. 233
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 to increase educational equity and eliminate marginalization based on race, disability, socioeconom...
Oct 24, 2023•45 min•Season 8Ep. 232
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 involved in making new versions. Next up, you can use your whiteboard to showcase what you’re reading. ...
Oct 19, 2023•5 min•Season 8Ep. 231
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 need you. So today on the podcast, I want to share some creative options when it comes to short story ...
Oct 17, 2023•19 min•Season 8Ep. 230
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 Peoples Day this week, I think it’s the perfect time to recommend their “Thriving People, Thriving Places”...
Oct 13, 2023•3 min•Season 8Ep. 229
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 Book Love, Amanda from Mud & Ink Teaching, Delia from @mrsreganreads, Allie from @bayeringwithfreshmen,...
Oct 11, 2023•19 min•Season 8Ep. 228
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 would be a new announcement to teachers, or request to coaches, or task for advisors. It was like playing wha...
Oct 05, 2023•6 min•Season 8Ep. 227
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 ones that are right for your classroom and community. As usual, it's not about telling our students w...
Oct 02, 2023•13 min•Season 8Ep. 226
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 on supporting my enthusiasm rather than telling me what to do. If only everyone had a mentor like tha...
Sep 28, 2023•3 min•Season 8Ep. 225
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, I'll share what I learned over many years putting a strong focus on student-centered discussion in...
Sep 26, 2023•14 min•Season 8Ep. 224
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 on Travel writing were three of my personal favorites...) Learn more here: The Bread Loaf School of ...
Sep 21, 2023•8 min•Season 8Ep. 223
Have you reached for a turtleneck sweater yet? Bought one of those big pumpkins or bright purple mums at the stand along the road? Sipped your first spiced latte? It's that time of year again! As the leaves turn and we move into the flow of the school year, it's a nice time to sprinkle in a little holiday fun for Halloween. Today, I've got a creative buffet of options for you, and I hope you'll find a few you can't wait to surprise your students with next month. In this episode, we'll talk about...
Sep 19, 2023•21 min•Season 8Ep. 222
This week let’s talk a different kind of topic, asking for what you want in education. When I was five, my mom took me to a raspberry farm. I leaped out of the car, basket in hand, ready to harvest heaps of my favorite berry. Only to see a closed sign. I headed back to the car, distraught. “Well,” said my mom. “Let’s just ask if we can pick. It can’t hurt.” I watched with very little hope as she knocked at the farmhouse and made her request. Soon we were piling up berries in the sunshine. I’ve a...
Sep 14, 2023•5 min•Season 8Ep. 221
I have to admit that even though I wrote three college essays, got into college, went to college, got my graduate degree in English and taught English for many years, I never really understood the college essay until a year ago. When I listened to this workshop on this very podcast , given by two high school college counsellors and two experienced university admissions officers. Sure, I knew that the essay was a chance for kids to show off their writing skills and share about themselves. I knew ...
Sep 12, 2023•21 min•Season 8Ep. 220
This week let’s talk about the simplest audio recording tool out there for students, Vocaroo. Getting into activities like student podcasting, multigenre projects involving audio, or film projects with audio overlay can feel really intimidating. But not with Vocaroo. Vocaroo is actually a website you can visit on Chrome. In the middle of the page there's a big red button. Student simply click it and start recording. Then when they’re done, they click to download the audio file. It’s that easy. W...
Sep 07, 2023•3 min•Season 8Ep. 219
So you've heard the buzz about podcasts, and you're intrigued. You want to play an episode in your English classes, but you wonder what that would even look like? What would kids do while they listen? What would they do after they listen? Which show would be best? How would it fit into everything else you're up to? Yeah, I hear you. It's a whole new genre and you might be the first English teacher on your hall to use it. A few easy wins to help you get started wouldn't hurt! So today on the podc...
Sep 05, 2023•19 min•Season 8Ep. 218
This week let’s talk about research, and the ways it shows up across the world these days. Because I’d like to highly recommend you build some research activities into your class this year that don’t end in papers. I vividly remember my seventh grade social studies class, where we sat in groups at rounded tables trying to look cool and learned about how to take notes on a single source using a notecard. We built up our notecard stack over time, then arranged and rearranged our research into our ...
Aug 31, 2023•4 min•Season 8Ep. 217
Today on the podcast, I’m so excited to bring you the first writer ever to win three very important prizes in literature - the Newberry Award, The Kirkus Prize, and the Coretta Scott King Award - for a single book. Would it surprise you to know the first person to win all of these for one amazing book is a graphic novelist? That’s right, today we’re talking to the creator of the new Kid Series, which now includes New Kid, Class Act , and School Trip . This is a special episode designed to be pla...
Aug 29, 2023•23 min•Season 8Ep. 216
This week I want to share a super simple strategy for building more book recommendations into your classes in just two or three minute installments, book trailers . I first heard the idea of “Book Trailer Tuesdays” from Abby Gross, over at Write On with Miss G . I loved the idea right away, as a companion to First Chapter Friday or as its own unique program. But even if you’re not doing Book Trailer Tuesdays, book trailers are an amazing thing to build into your class. Maybe you have a bookmarke...
Aug 25, 2023•5 min•Season 8Ep. 215
Librarians can help classroom teachers in sooooo many ways, and classroom teachers can return the favor by reminding kids they can always go further than the classroom library to the larger collection at the school or local library, and tap into their librarian's intricate knowledge of the collection to find even more books to love. Forming a bridge between the work you do in class and the life of your school or local library will help kids be connected to book sources and experts beyond the tim...
Aug 24, 2023•15 min•Season 8Ep. 214
This week I want to share a fast-paced and fun podcast for middle schoolers, The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. It's a peabody-award winning mystery podcast, stuffed full of cliffhangers and featuring a full cast of professional actors - most of them middle-schoolers. The plot unfolds in bits and pieces as we follow a group of middle school kids who don’t quite fit in, and don’t know why their friends keep disappearing one by one. The show is frequently broken up by “announcements” f...
Aug 17, 2023•4 min•Season 8Ep. 213
So you want to share your favorite books with your students to help them love reading. Excellent! But maybe you lack the budget to keep up with their growing love of reading. Maybe you're wishing you could order about 25 different graphic novels (that waiting list for Heartstopper isn't getting any shorter) or your best Jason Reynolds and Kwame Alexander Titles keep disappearing. I hear you! These problems are only a sign that you're doing great things with your choice reading program. But what ...
Aug 15, 2023•16 min•Season 8Ep. 212
This week I want to share two quick ways to make back-to-school night in your English classroom something you can enjoy this year. In today's episode we're talking about how to take the pressure off back-to-school night with stations, and how to use QR codes to quickly and easily share anything that needs to happen online, whether that's signing up for an app, sharing a class website, or giving interested parents your Amazon class wishlist. Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Cr...
Aug 10, 2023•7 min•Season 8Ep. 211
So you've assigned a book you love (or maybe a selection of several) to your students for the summer, and soon enough they'll be back to share their takeaways. But maybe this year you want to hear from them through a form other than the traditional summer reading essay. You want to kick things off with creativity, and also push them to think beyond any internet summary and commentary they may have perused alongside the book. Today on the podcast, I'd like to share four easy alternatives to an in...
Aug 08, 2023•12 min•Season 8Ep. 210
