The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Want to love walking into your ELA classroom each day? Excited about innovative strategies like PBL, escape rooms, hexagonal thinking, sketchnotes, one-pagers, student podcasting, genius hour, and more? Want a thriving choice reading program and a shelf full of compelling diverse texts? You're in the right place! Here you'll find interviews with top authors from the ELA field, workshops with strategies you can use in class immediately, and quick tips to ignite your English teacher creativity. Love teaching poetry? Explore blackout poems, book spine poems, I am from poems, performance poetry, lessons for contemporary poets, and more. Excited to get started with hexagonal thinking? Find out how to build your first deck of hexagons, guide your students through their first discussion, and even expand into hexagonal one-pagers. Into visual learning? Me too! Learn about sketchnotes, one-pagers, and the writing makerspace. Want to get your students podcasting? Get the top technology recs you need to make it happen, and find out what tips a podcaster would give to students starting out. Wish your students would fall for choice reading? Explore top titles and how to fund them, learn to make your library more appealing, and find out how to be a top P.R. agent for books in your classroom. In it for the interviews? Fabulous! Find out about project-based-learning, innovative school design, what really helps kids learn deeply, design thinking, how to choose diverse texts, when to scaffold sketchnotes lessons, building your first writing makerspace, cultivating writer's notebooks, getting started with genius hour, and so much more, from our wonderful guests. Here at The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, discover you're not alone as a creative English teacher. You're part of a vast community welcoming students to their next escape room, rolling out contemporary poetry and reading aloud on First Chapter Fridays, engaging kids with social media projects and real-world ELA units. As your host (hi, I'm Betsy), I'm here to help you ENJOY your days at school and feel inspired by all the creative ways to teach both contemporary works and the classics your school may be pushing. I taught ELA at the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade levels both in the United States and overseas for almost a decade, and I didn't always get support for my creativity. Now I'm here to make sure YOU get the creative support you deserve, and it brings me so much joy. Welcome to The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies!
Episodes
Trevor Noah's Born a Crime is trending, and for good reason. I'm seeing the evidence everywhere.
This spring, as I ran our curriculum book choice tournament across the high school levels and hundreds of teachers weighed in, I watched it soar to the finals in BOTH the 9th/10th category and the 11th/12th category.
Then, as summer began and I open...
I never met a short story I liked back in high school.
If I was going to read, I wanted to READ.
I wanted to get caught up in the plot, get to know the characters, inhabit the action, spend some time in another world.
I certainly didn't want to finish half an hour after I began...
Last year, at this time, I was preparing to move from Bratislava to California when I released the episode we’re revisiting today, all about the easiest way to approach the last day in ELA. And it turned out to be the most popular episode I’ve ever released, with more than 25,000 teachers tuning in.
So it seems only fitting that as the end of the year approaches once again, and my life is ONCE AGAIN in b...
A few engaging review activities for ELA come in handy around this time of year, as the calendar takes over and students pop off to random awards ceremonies, spirit events, and slideshows. Sometimes you see them for one day in a row, sometimes two, but getting in a groove is definitely a challenge!
So, in case you're in search of creative review activities that will...
When it comes to evidence in their argument papers, students have a tendency to mic drop way too soon. "Here's my evidence, BOOOOOOOM!" you can almost hear them saying. Because right after the evidence, they move on.
Oops.
That's not what we want, and I bet you've written "be sure to analyze this evidence and explain how ...
Sure, there's no one right way to write an argument paper. It can be three paragraphs, nine, or even seventeen. It can be loaded with research. It can be full of voice and personal anecdotes. It can be intensely academic, with a formal objective perspective and thirty-two sources cited with MLA.
We want our students to understand the rich palette of tools available ...
I have to admit my kids have got me fully invested in "Is it Cake?" At some point in England last year, someone begged for us to watch the show while we ate green pesto pasta on the couch after a long day of hiking in the New Forest, and I said sure.
It was the beginning of our "Is it Cake?" era.
We've gasped, we've squin...
I miss the Eras tour. Even though it hasn't been that long. My daughter is requesting Wicked songs and Katy Perry in the car all of a sudden, instead of our usual Taylor Swift-a-thon.
But I haven't forgotten the joys of the Swiftiverse. And today I want to share a prompt you could use with any poem, short story, or novel that comes from Taylor's music, specifically her approach to bridges.
Links Menti...
It's poetry month, and that means it's time for me to share as many poetry activities, poetry projects, and poetry workshops as I can muster over here!
Today, I'm going to walk you through a toolkit of creative poetry options for your ELA classroom.
We'll start with one of my favorite introductory activities for any poetry unit, poetry collage, and then go full steam ahead through poetry one-pagers, blackout poetry, great performa...
This winter, inspired by cool bookish tournament projects by Melissa Alter Smith of Teach Living Poets and Jared Amato of...
If you’re teaching Long Way Down (and ready for some Long Way Down lesson plan ideas!), let me just start by saying “YAY!”
It’s a reader-maker, an incredible book you can teach in a short time with a high impact.
Today, I’m going to be sharing some of my favorite ideas and resources for you to pair with this book. We'll t...
Today's guest, middle school teacher Susan Taylor, has repeatedly gone the extra mile to build a reading program that makes an impact. Not only does she guide her students towards the best books available, she guides her teaching network the same way, through her podcast, Wonder World Book Cafe.
Today, we're going to go rapid fire through her favorites to recommend...
If you've ever felt stymied over the fact that some of your students aren't sure how to write a thesis while others are ready to tackle counterargument, today's episode is for you.
Not so long ago, Kareem Farah of the Modern Classrooms Project was here to share the MCP vision for a differentiated blended classroom, and how it can support all learners (and all teachers!). Today, his founding partner, Rob Barnett, joins us to follow ...
It all started with 1984, as so many things do. I wanted students to see how the ideas in the book were splashed across the world around them - yes, in their magazines and ads, but also in the current events they saw on the news and the news sites covering them.
So I asked them to create collages, connecting 1984 to their lives.
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You’ve probably heard me talk about my first poetry slam. The project that became my go-to vehicle for teaching poetry every year that followed.
The book I was handed - 6 American Poets - was chock full of great poetry. Dickinson, Whitman, Hughes… but I knew that I, like every paper worth reading, would need a solid hook.
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I can still remember the faded, chipped blue print of my childhood game of Memory. The thick cardboard squares we flipped in search of pairs, thrilled when we found a match, frustrated when we accidentally revealed a match to our opponent.
I’ve played a million games now as a parent too, watching my children’s eyes light up when they rack up more matches than I do, ...
Teaching an ELA elective that you've dreamed up yourself is such a joy. Today I want to stir up some ideas together for the next time you've got the chance to put your own spin on an older course or propose a new course altogether.
So let's start with a few questions:
Would you rather take a course called "Theater" or "Co...
Like most of us, Christina Schneider didn't find teaching writing one bit easy at first. Despite her background as a journalist, putting all the puzzle pieces together in the classroom to help her students understand how to build a thesis, introduce and analyze evidence, and express their ideas felt like a pretty tough task.
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It's February, the perfect time to feature work by contemporary Black authors in your book talks, poetry clip showings, First Chapter Fridays, book displays, and bulletin boards. It's also a good time to look ahead to next year and consider whether you want to order some of these books for book clubs and whole class texts in the 2025-2026 school year.boo
Of course, I know you know every month is the perfect time to feature these bo...
How many times have you sat in a PD meeting that didn't apply to you? One where you were learning an 11 letter acronym for a strategy you'd never use, a 3 point plan for a new program that wouldn't fit with your curriculum, or a training you'd already had?
A PD meeting that was... irrelevant.
In their book, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst use one word to describe a ke...
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