The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

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

September 17, 2025 14 mins

If you teach American literature, chances are you're touching on the theme of the American Dream somehow, through book clubs, a poetry unit, a look at Gatsby, or an essential question that binds together a variety of genres and perspectives. So when I received this request for our Plan my Lesson series, "How about a fun way to introduce the American Dream unit for juniors, about 36 of them," I was ready. In to...

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I worked at the cutest little bookstore coffee shop last week. In that small space, the collection had to be heavily curated, with just one or two books by popular authors and launching points for popular series books for kids. But the shop still held one full bookshelf for staff recommendations, covers out. Each employee had their shelf: "Sarah recommends....," "Tia recommends...., "William recommends...," et...

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We know employers want creative thinkers. We know creative thinking is necessary to solve the problems we see everywhere in our world. We know we want our students to learn to be more creative. 

But what does that mean exactly? Where does the science of creativity meet the cultural definition we all build for ourselves just by swimming in the 21st century stream?

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When it comes to teaching grammar, the research is clear. Drill and kill is not what we're looking for. You don't want to march through a series of grammar lessons unrelated to your students' writing and reading.

Here's what NCTE's "Resolution on Grammar Exercises to Teach Speaking and Writing" has to say about it:

"This ...

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Think of your favorite book. 

Now think of your favorite food. 

Now match those two together - your favorite book and your favorite food - into some kind of experience. Maybe you've slipped into the world of the book and you're eating your favorite food with your favorite characters.

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Have you been hooked by the idea of book clubs lately? Wondering how you can integrate book clubs with essential questions, supplementary short stories and podcasts, and everything else you're up to? Then today's episode is for you. Today's "Plan my Lesson" request comes from a creative teacher trying to blend a lot of wonderful things into her new plan for the year.

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Today's request for "Plan My Lesson" is from a teacher searching for a first week project that helps students get to know each other AND introduces a few key skills along the way. Perhaps you can relate?

Here's what she writes: "It’s time to switch up the first project I do in English 10… For the last few years I’ve had the kiddos research their first name, practici...

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If there's one thing I want for your first day of school, it's for the pressure to be off you. You've got enough to worry about without needing to pull off a 45 minute lecture that magically holds students' attention before they even know you five times in a row.

That's why for this lesson, requested for our summer "Plan my Lesson" series, our goal will be to hit al...

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A summer reading lesson is a nice chance to start off the year with a creative tone, while creating some of the norms you want to establish. For today's "Plan my Lesson" series episode, I'm answering requests from two different teachers in search of a back-to-school lesson on summer reading. One teacher's class will have read Scythe, another's The Hunger Games. Both are interested in reviewing the basics of li...

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Students need to be able to make a great argument to find success at school, and in many professions. They need to come up with an idea, find evidence, analyze their evidence, and tie it all together with a well-written bow.

Thus, for many decades, students have written essays. We've taught them to write thesis statements, organizing sentences, transitions, topic se...

There's a lot of conversation happening lately around student reading stamina. Rose Horowitch's Atlantic article, "The Elite College Students who Can't Read Books," helped stir the pot. I'm sure you've seen evidence of the same issues she brings up - that students are struggling to stay focused through books, and often come to you having read a lot of excerpts and short pieces rather than full novels. Test-pre...

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Ken Liu's short story, "The Paper Menagerie," is an easy and powerful add to your curriculum. Not only does it explore family relationships, The American Dream, and identity (themes you can easily connect to other texts as you build units), it introduces - briefly, painfully, powerfully - China's Cultural Revolution.

I'll admit I've never studied the history of comm...

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It’s a rare curriculum book that inspires NO negative comments. Ever. To hear, month after month, year after year, that a certain book turns kids into readers, ignites interest and discussion in class, hooks unengaged students like nothing else has. 

Long Way Down is one such book.

It’s a fast read, a novel-in-verse, by t...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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April 30, 2025 11 mins

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...

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