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
This week Iâm thinking about those moments when the system collapses. Your toddler wakes up at 3 am and stays awake until 7. Your careful planning for a poetry slam explodes when you feel a sore throat lurking the day before and you get one of those icky awful chills on your way out to the parking lot. Your partner has to work overtime when you were counting on him to do dinner and bedtime while you graded 100 papers a...
Ever struggle to get students to stop talking? Keep their phones put away? Stay focused during the lesson? Stop whispering during an assembly? Engage with the classwork? Classroom management can sometimes feel like death by a thousand distractions.
Todayâs guest can help.
Claire English is an experienced Australian secondary English teacher and senior leader, specializing in supporting students with complex social, emotional and me...
In todayâs short episode of âHighly Recommendedâ, Iâm here to tell you itâs time to try a poetry video project! Harness studentsâ excitement over the creator economy and the survival of TikTok and get them interpreting poetry through a medium that only keeps getting MORE relevant to communication today.Â
First things first, letâs talk mentor texts. There are some VERY cool poetry videos online that take th...
So you want to give the nod to the season, but you also want to make sure all your students feel included. Good for you!
I've been privileged to see the holidays I celebrate centered in The United States for much of my life, but I've also had a lot of opportunities to see what it's like beyond this glow.
I've lived in fou...
Welcome to day five of gratitude week here at Spark Creativity. Today, on our final day, weâre looking back at an interview with my friend Angela Stockman about how to get started with her innovative writing makerspace concept. She is a force of creativity, hope, care, and innovation in the education world, and Iâm g...
Welcome to day four of gratitude week here at Spark Creativity. Today weâre looking back at an interview with Dave Stuart Jr. about how to help fight apathy in the classroom. Iâm grateful for Daveâs hopeful voice in the world of education, and glad to share his ideas with you today.
Welcome to day three of gratitude week here at Spark Creativity. Today weâre looking back at an interview with Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison BriceĂąo about just how important it is to provide students with diverse books and choice in their reading experience. Iâm grateful that they took the...
Welcome to day two of gratitude week here at Spark Creativity. Today we're revisiting a popular interview with Dr. Sarah Fine, whose insightful work around deeper learning I am so grateful to be able to share with you. She crisscrossed the nation in search of the places and programs where students were t...
This week Iâm thinking about how grateful I am for this incredible community - all the creative educators around the world who have tuned into an episode, shared an idea with a colleague, joined me in conversation as a guest, written a review, or sent in a question. Thank you!Â
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In todayâs short episode of âHighly Recommendedâ, I want to recommend an article I read at Edutopia this week, because itâs chock-full of the research you need to support conversations at your school about grading less. Changing the culture of grading in our ELA classrooms wonât just benefit teachers, it benefits students too. So today I want to share two highlights from the article, âWhy Teachers Should Grade Less Fr...
If youâre a teacher in a Title I School, you need to know about First Book Marketplace.
Iâve heard about it in passing so many times, and this week I decided to dive in and figure out how it works. And boy, does it work.
Today I just want to walk you through how this site works so that you can start taking advantage of it...
This week, I want to talk about Sunday nights. If youâre struggling to figure out how you can be a good partner, parent, person, and teacher, and it all seems to come to a head on Sunday nights, I want to offer three ideas. Iâm not saying I can solve the teacher work-life balance issue that plagues our profession in one short episode, but I hope one of these ideas will help you feel more free to follow your instincts t...
Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neill get plenty of spotlight on the ELA curriculum stage. And sure, it's well-deserved! But they aren't the only incredible American playwrights to pick up a pen in the last century. If you're looking for some contemporar...
This week I want to share a fabulous resource I recently discovered, a website full of short video models for acting games you can use in class.
The first time I taught a play in class, I sure wished I had more theater background to help my students act out the scenes. Luckily, I was able to connect with a creative theater professional to come and visit my classes for a few days. Soon she had them playing ...
My son and I love a few certain characters from the books we've read aloud over the years. Gum-Baby, from Tristan Strong, Boots, from Gregor the Overlander, Maniac Magee. For my daughter, it's Junie B. Jones and Ramona from their named series collections. For me, it was always Anne (of Green Gables) I returned to growing up, and Jo from Little Women. Oh, and of course, Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.
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Grading discussion can feel like juggling cats. How can you be present in a class discussion while also trying to grade thirty peopleâs comments? But over the years, Iâve tried three methods that that have worked for me without causing too much strain. I call them the bump, the challenge, and the chart. In todayâs mini-episode, Iâll walk you through all three so that the next time you feel you need to give credit where...
Weâve all been in a discussion hurtling off the track and into the canyon, far, far below. Chances are, youâve been in this type of discussion as a student AND as a teacher, and itâs no fun in either scenario.
So how do we prevent it?
And what do we do if itâs already happening and glaze is washing over our studentsâ eyes...
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.Â
So I have real sympathy for students who become discussion dominators. Though on the outside, this appears to make them successful students, itâs really just as important...
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 weâre diving deep into student-led discussion, specifically setting up...
Today weâre 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. Iâve 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 canât talk about class dis...
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