The other day I found myself walking through a parking garage stairwell in Iowa City, and I realized they were using the same scent design as the local mall in Bratislava where we used to live. Half-shocked, half-amused, I climbed the cement stairs as I remembered riding the escalator through the same subtle scent cloud two years ago. The memory was visceral.

Though we don't always think about it, our sensory experiences have a strong impact on how we feel and how we work. I do my best work in a situation where I feel comfortable. In fact, I generally prefer not to work at home because step one, for me, to working at home is often to clean the entire house, put music on, light a candle, pick flowers, make tea, etc. and so I spent an hour prepping to work before I do anything.

I bet you've already put considerable time and effort into making your classroom a space where you feel comfortable and where students feel welcome. Today isn't about changing any of that; it's just about finding small places where you might be able to tune your sensory dashboard in class to make it work even better for you and your kiddos. By thinking specifically about the five senses - just like we have students do in their writing - you can find easy wins to make the workspace more welcoming, energizing, and comfortable for everyone inside.

Throughout this podcast, and all the ones in this series, I'm showcasing graphics and displays from the #evolvingEDdesign Toolkit, a vast free resource I made for you. 

You can grab it here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/evolvingEDdesign 

Please share your classroom design stories, questions, photos and ideas with the #evolvingEDdesign hashtag across platforms so we can continue the conversation off the pod!

Go Further: 

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Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides

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Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

Links Mentioned:

Edutopia Article on Fidgets

Scottish Castle Fireplace Video

Nasa Space Images Video

Fun Stanford d.School Timer for Class Work (one of many they've created!)

Sources Considered, Consulted, and Cited for this Series & for the Toolkit:

Abdaal, Ali. Feel Good Productivity. Celadon Books, 2023.

"Aesthetics and Academic Spaces." Teachers College, Columbia University Youtube Channel: Curriculum Encounters Podcast, Episode 4. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuFs4Fyk-v0Bwtuy1eQJ3JkRTeL4Sjyz4 Accessed Oct. 21, 2025. 

Chavez, Felicia. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. Haymarket Books, 2021.

Dintersmith, Ted. Documentary: Most Likely to Succeed. 2015. 

Dintersmith, Ted. What Schools Could Be. Princeton University Press, 2018. 

Doorley, Scott & Witthoft, Doorley. make space: How to Set the Stage for Creative Collaboration. John Wiley and Sons, 2012.

"Exploring Google's Headquarters in San Francisco." Digiprith Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxGqbmFf9Qc. Accessed October 13, 2015. 

"High Tech High Virtual Tour." High Tech High Unboxed Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87xU9smFrj0 . Accessed October 15, 2025.

"Inside YouTube's Biggest Office In America | Google's YouTube Headquarters Office Tour." The Roaming Jola Youtube Channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P26fDfFBx8I . Accessed October 14, 2025.

Novak, Katie. Universal Design for Learning in English Language Arts. Cast Inc., 2023.

Potash, Betsy. "Research-Based Practices to Ignite Creativity, with Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle." The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, Episode 393.

Pringle,  Zorana Ivcevic. The Creativity Choice. Public Affairs, 2025.

Ritchart, Ron and David Perkins. "Making Thinking Visible." Educational Leadership, February 2008, p.p. 57-61. https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/makingthinkingvisibleEL.pdf. Accessed October 13, 2025.

Richardson, Carmen and Punya Mishra. "Scale: Support of Creativity in a Learning Environment," 2017. Accessed through Drive with permission.

Richardson, Carmen and Punya Mishra. "Learning environments that support student creativity: Developing the SCALE." Thinking Skills and Creativity, Volume 27, March 2018, p.p. 45-54. Accessed online at https://doi-org.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/10.1016/j.tsc.2017.11.004, October 13, 2025.

"Sensory Inquiry and Social Spaces." Teachers College, Columbia University Youtube Channel: Curriculum Encounters Podcast, Episode 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtD_-k5QmOQ&list=PLuFs4Fyk-v0Bwtuy1eQJ3JkRTeL4Sjyz4&index=2  Accessed Oct. 23, 2025. 

Stockman, Angela. Make Writing: 5 Strategies that turn Writer's Workshop into a Maker Space. Hack Learning Series, 2015.  

Terada, Yuki. "Do Fidgets help Students Focus?" Edutopia Online: https://www.edutopia.org/article/do-fidgets-help-students-focus/. Accessed 4 November 2025.

Utley, Jeremy. "Masters of Creativity (Education Edition) #1: Input Obsession (Design Thinking)." Stanford d.School Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LosDd3Q0yQw . Accessed October 15, 2025.

Utley, Jeremy and Kathryn Segovia. "Masters of Creativity: Updating the Creative Operating System (Design Thinking)." Stanford d.School Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggza7df7N7Y&t=2233s. Accessed October 17, 2025.

"What is Curriculum and Where Might we Find It?" Teachers College, Columbia University Youtube Channel: Curriculum Encounters Podcast, Episode 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh_UhGATVwM&list=PLuFs4Fyk-v0Bwtuy1eQJ3JkRTeL4Sjyz4&index=1 Accessed Oct. 23, 2025. 

Imagine you and I were about to make a dinner together. Now, I bring a love of baking to our project, and a decently strong roast chicken game. But I don't want to dominate the conversation too much. "Let's make roast chicken and vegetables," I say, "and cookies." Your face falls a little. "Oh, but you can choose which vegetables we roast, and what kind of cookies - I have M & Ms AND chocolate chips."

Perhaps you love making bibimbap, tagine, paella, tacos, or BBQ pork. Maybe you've got three Ottolenghi cookbooks in your bag and you were about to suggest a middle eastern buffet followed up by your incredible raspberry jam donuts. Possibly, you spent a year in culinary school before I knew you, and your artisan pizza was legendary among your college friends.

You put all those ideas aside and dutifully don an apron, trying to look OK with the choice between sweet potatoes and carrots, chocolate chips and M & Ms.

But what if I had started the conversation by showing you everything I had in my kitchen, including my rainbow shelf of cookbooks, and asked you what you'd like to make? And how I could help? How would that feel?

Agency is a key word when it comes to education, but it's easy to underestimate its power and think of a few small choices as agency. Today, in our continuing conversation about #evolvingEDdesign, I want to think bigger and wider.

How can we give our students more agency in the classroom, empowering their creativity? Let's dig in.

Throughout this podcast, and the ones to come in this series, I'll be showcasing graphics and displays from the #evolvingEDdesign Toolkit, a vast free resource I made for you. 

You can grab it here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/evolvingEDdesign 

Please share your classroom design stories, questions, photos and ideas with the #evolvingEDdesign hashtag across platforms so we can continue the conversation off the pod!

Go Further: 

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides

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Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

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.

Are you smiling yet?

Today's "Plan my Lesson" episode is all about launching your first literary food truck festival. I recently got a note from a teacher who had listened to our episode during the pandemic about hosting an online literary food truck festival, but she really wanted to hear about how to run one in person.

Challenge, accepted.

Let's talk about a project that's a perfect add for summer reading books, book club units, choice reading finales, or even whole class novels. I've even heard from a professor who used the project for a Greek Chariot Festival to explore Greek myths (so cool!) and a teacher who used it for short stories (a great option if you're looking for a speed-version).

The literary food truck festival is just plain and simply memorable literary analysis fun, and I've just spent a dozen or so hours completely updating and expanding this free resource for you (grab it below), so let's walk through how to use it this year!

Grab the Free Curriculum for this Project: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/literaryfoodtrucks

See Photos of this Project in Action in other Classrooms: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2020/01/literary-food-truck-festivals-photo-tour.html 

Go Further: 

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Get my popular free hexagonal thinking digital toolkit

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Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

On this week's mini-episode, let's talk about my favorite online teacher tool, Canva. If you haven't signed up for their free educator program yet, this summer is the perfect time! You can explore all the design tools this wonderful website has to offer, and be ready in the fall to start using it in class. Plus, I've got a free mini course ready to help you do it. Today, let's do a quick rundown on why I think you should. 

 Did you know Canva began as a program to help make yearbook advisers' lives easier? Yep, I learned all about it listening to the founder on NPR's podcast, How I Built This.  Canva basically provides easy versions of the complex designer tools available in programs like Photoshop. Instead of spending months learning Photoshop or paying a graphic designer, people in a huge variety of positions can now just click into Canva and design whatever they want quickly and easily.

By the way, this episode is not sponsored by Canva, although I'm EXTREMELY open to a partnership, lol. 

My husband just used Canva to design a t-shirt for our neighborhood triathlon at the cabin this summer. I just used it to create mood boards for our new house. My son just used it to make a restaurant menu for his English class. Even my eight year old loves to design her own bookmarks on Canva. 

As an educator, you can use it to create hyperdocs, flashcards, posters, infographics, newsletters, certificates, club t-shirts, project models, project handouts, vocabulary quizzes, slide decks, and pretty much anything else you create for work. 

You can also gift your students comfort with the program when you guide them through using it to create research carousels, podcast covers, slide decks, infographics, press releases, review posters, and pretty much anything else they create that requires visuals. 

Canva's tools are not so different from the ones you see on Slides, except they're easier to use in designs once you get used to them. Will it take a few hours of practice? Sure. But it's so worth it! My easy mini-course will set you up for success if you'd like a hand, and I'll be sure to link it in the show notes. Canva has made a HUGE positive difference in my life as an educator, and this week, I want to highly recommend you let it do the same for you.

Grab the Canva Confidence Free Mini-Course: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/getCanvaconfidence 

Go Further: 

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You want the last day of ELA to be special, but what does that mean exactly? And who has the energy to think up this special plan when you're juggling allll the end-of-year things?

If you'd like a fast, easy solution to the last day of your ELA classes, today I'm proposing (ha ha, I just accidentally typed PROMposing) stations. Stations are an easy way to get whatever dots have to be dotted and Ts have to be crossed at the same time as you build in a few fun things and keep everything lively so the time flies. The goodbye speech can only last so long. 

Grab the Summer Reading Bookmarks: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12waoiIk0gdYMVYZPM8DnU17_RgJZhLlFKofqy2oFjM4/copy 

Go Further: 

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On this week's mini-episode, let's talk summer school. Because I know that if you ARE teaching summer school, you'd like it to be engaging. Memorable. Creative. Superfantasticaliciousexpialadocious.

But of course there's the issue of you're tired. And so are your ELA students. And maybe they're not that excited to be there.  So let's run through two quick strategies for adding oomph and engagement to July.

Here's my top suggestion - change up your texts, and provide variety. Summer school is the perfect time to experiment in English class with graphic novels, novels-in-verse, podcasts, performance poetry, graphic essays, and contemporary pieces. Get audiobook access whenever you can. Connect kids to electronic books through your local library on Libby so they can translate when needed. Run book clubs, choice reading, mini-units on compelling quick reads. 

Next, I want to suggest you try to provide real-world contexts for practicing the ELA skills you want students to develop. Develop units around blogging or podcasting, let them share research through infographics or Instagram-style carousels, dig into a Youtube unit and create video. Build your skill practice around the mediums you think are most likely to engage your students. You can teach argument through a video project in which kids recommend the best sneakers and hot chip brands. You can teach narrative through a suspense fiction podcast. You can practice rhetorical analysis by creating commercials for students' favorite video games. 

While summer school just doesn't scream fun for most kids, this is your chance to kick that narrative in the teeth. Think of it as your innovative ELA learning lab, in which you and your students will approach the learning goals in new ways that YOU are excited about. It's your chance to finally run those podcast clubs, teach that Youtube unit, and bring in that graphic novel you love. Free from the restrictions of the regular year, summer school is your chance to teach with your full creative self, and this week, I just want to highly recommend that you do!

Go Further: 

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As the sun rises a little earlier each day and the cherry trees in our neighborhood fill with fruit, our three years in Europe are coming to a close. With only a few weeks left of this European family adventure, I find myself thinking back over all that we've seen and done and learned.

Highs like winter paddleboarding in Barcelona, nighttime tobaganning in Slovakia and hiking by herds of sheep along the south Coast of Wales together. Eating dark chocolate gelato with whipped cream in Rome and caramelized banana oatmeal in London. Watching Croatian fireworks explode above our balcony on New Year's Eve and Hungarian light shows at the Christmas markets in Budapest.

Lows like croup in Nuremberg and COVID in Split, Scarlet Fever in Tuscany, a broken arm in Spain and a CAT scan in an Austrian emergency room. Lows of loneliness that could creep in unexpectedly, anxiety that could catch hold in that moment when I'd realize just how little backup was behind us if we hit a rough patch.

So here we are, getting ready to say goodbye, and I just wanted to share a little of this life abroad. Maybe you're thinking of coming overseas yourself, or maybe you've tuned in a bit to our adventure, and you're interested to hear how the story ends. Today on the podcast, let's talk about the good stuff, the medium stuff, and the tough stuff.

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Today I want to talk about a fantastic podcast for you to use in class if you teach Shakespeare. With dozens of intriguing episodes like "Shakespeare and Game of Thrones," "Shakespeare and YA Novels," and "Pop Sonnets," The Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast, by the Folger Shakespeare Library,  is a great way to bring in modern connections and relevancy to whatever play you're studying. Today I'll give you a quick rundown on four fun episodes, and then I hope you'll go exploring on your own to find more episodes that could help your students make connections between your chosen Shakespearean text and modern life. 

In "Akala and Hip Hop Shakespeare," Akala explores how the rhyme and rhythm of Shakespeare as well as the deep meaning  relates to the same components of hip hop. He talks about the traditions of music flowing out of Africa and into the diaspora, and also brings up questions of who education is for and how Shakespeare came to be associated with elite society. 

In "Shakespeare and YA Novels," two novelists talk about how they have used Shakespeare's work to inspire their own, and how they felt connecting themselves to someone so renowned.

In "William Shakespeare's Star Wars," one author  explains how and why he came to rewrite the Star Wars series in Shakespearean language. Bet you didn't see that one coming! 

And in "Pop Sonnets," a popular online writer shares the story of how he came to rewrite pop songs as Shakespearean sonnets. And spoiler alert, they sure did become a sensation! 

When integrating episodes like this into class, try giving students a sketchnotes template to provide a little loose structure as they listen. Let them know how you'll be using the text moving forward, so they have a reason to pay attention. Maybe it's going to lead into a writing activity, a silent discussion, or a mini-podcast project of your own! 

Shakespeare can sometimes feel far away to students, but Shakespeare Unlimited helps bridge the gap. That's why this week I want to highly recommend you hit follow on their feed and see what wonders you discover. 

Links Mentioned:

Explore the Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast: https://www.folger.edu/podcasts/shakespeare-unlimited/  

Go Further: 

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Choice reading can sometimes feel like an out-of-reach dream. I recently heard from a busy teacher who wrote, "I love choice reading, but squeezing it in can be tough!"

Yeah, I get that. There's so much going on in ELA.

In today's episode, we're talking about how to squeeze more choice reading moments into your busy schedule. Even if you don't have time to hand over 10 minutes in class for reading regularly, you can still build your choice reading program with quick-and-easy additions like these.

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Today I want to talk final exams, and specifically, one I've really enjoyed giving when I had the leeway to skip the sit-down exam. If you don't have to involve any Scantron sheets in your final, you might love it too, so let's dive in. 

Maybe you've seen some of the great graduation speeches floating around the internet - maybe you even analyze some of them with your students when you're teaching public speaking or rhetorical devices. I haven't had time to dive in yet, but I hear good things about Jason Reynolds' speech at Lesley University and Taylor Swift's at NYU. 

But for this project, the wisdom that will be on offer won't come from celebrities. Nope, instead, your students will take the podium and give their own graduation speeches, based on the wisdom they can pull from what they've read in your class. 

Have your students look back at your texts and themes  in the context of three out of the following four main ideas.  

How literature helps people understand their own lives.

How literature helps people understand the lives of others and empathize with other people.

How literature makes it easier to understand history.

How literature illuminates issues of morality.

This little bit of structure makes it a lot easier to organize their final speech. What I love about this is that what we're really asking them is: why do we read? Why did this class matter? For me, that's a really important way to end the year, and I love hearing what they say. 

I suggest you have your students present their speeches during the exam period. Meet outside somewhere, like the baseball bleachers, or reserve the library or a special room if you have that option. Then either have all the students read their speeches or divide into groups and have them read to their small groups. I like to give them a listening handout for this day, in which they nominate the best speeches and defend their nominations. 

When it comes to exam time, I'm all for trying something that better reflects the goals of your course than a multiple choice exam. Whether it's a graduation speech or something else, this week I just want to highly recommend that you reach out to your admin and request this option, if you don't already have it! 

Go Further: 

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Do your students think of the revision process as a combo of spellcheck and Grammarly? Tend to peer edit by scrawling a compliment and circling two sentences that are missing periods?

Yeah, they're not alone. Honestly, I didn't really get the revision process as a student either. It sort of felt like I wrote the paper I was going to turn it in, then I'd "polish" it a little by fixing any tiny surface mistakes so I could turn it in.

Students are busy people, juggling family, friends, sports, classes, jobs, the college admissions process, and a complicated world of digital social life that we probably only barely understand.

So unless we can really spell out the revision process for them, they're likely to think the pretty good paper they felt they wrote in the first place is pretty good enough to turn in.

That's why today on the podcast I'm going to offer you four blueprint options for helping them do better. Choose the one you love, or try all four.

Before we get started, I want you to know that I'll be running Camp Creative, The Easiest Roadmap to Student Podcasting, in June. Inside this (free) and fun PD, you'll get access to the best models, easiest tech, and complete curriculum to get you and your students started with podcast projects. Everything arrives by email, so even if you're busy the week of June 10-14, you can catch up whenever you get a chance. It just takes 10 minutes a day to go through the materials

Links Mentioned:

Snag your Copy of the Revision Challenge Cards:  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/125AkbMNA_52WdNxbF2ryvc44UUOi5WOwkFF6CG45BvI/copy 

Grab the Peer Editing Guides: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2018/11/the-ela-teachers-quick-guide-to.html 

Go Further: 

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

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Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

Today I want to talk about a subject I'm sure you've thought a lot about - how much are you willing to do for your job? And what do you do when you've hit your wall?

I want to start by taking you to the dusty steps of the duplex I shared during my first year of teaching. It's dusk, and I'm crying. I recently won the award for excellence in new teaching at my school, receiving many hugs and congratulations, as well as a raise and kind compliments from my head of school. I should be feeling great, right? I had discovered so much that year in my quest to engage my 10th and 11th graders - how to run Harkness discussions, hold poetry slams, launch play performances, find the gold on the teaching shelves of the Los Angeles Public Library. I had given it everything, and truthfully it had given me a lot back.

But I was thinking of quitting. 

Utterly exhausted, I sat on those steps wondering if I could possibly continue in a career that took this much. Could I continue to work from 7 am to 10 pm? Could I continue to think about my job everywhere - in the car, with my friends, at the beach? Could I find love and family if I was always in my classroom, the dorm, or coaching on the tennis court? 

Wiping my eyes, I ran up those dusty stairs and into my office to find a piece of paper. I made a list of 23 rules for myself. The boundaries I would have to hold if I wanted to continue in the career I loved. I took everything else off my bulletin board and put the rules in the middle. 

Then, I stayed in teaching. And though honestly I'm not sure I was ever better at it than that first year when I made it my whole life, I found that my boundaries helped me enjoy my work as a creative teacher for many years.

Until one night almost a decade later. It was nearly midnight and I had had THE WORST day. Up early to prep something or other, then racing from class to class all morning before taking my advisees out for a special lunch that had been requested by my residential life boss which made me late for a lunch meeting with my 10th grade honors students participating in the portfolio program that had been requested by my academic boss. Then more classes, coaching, a school dinner, an evening of working in the dorm and I was home at 11 with some work to do for the next day. I stared and stared at my computer screen as the rage built up in my mind and eventually led me into my email inbox to open a note to my head of school. 

You can probably imagine it. I kind of wish I still had it. I just let allll my feelings out, which isn't very common for me. I woke up to a response inviting me to a meeting right away. 

My rage having subsided a bit, I felt awkward when I walked into that wood-paneled office in the administration building. Nothing helps you tap into how you really feel better than a 16 hour workday, and I told my head of school I wasn't sure I could really capture it all again. He laughed a little awkwardly and said the email did a very good job. We talked for a while, and in the end, he took a huge part of my spring workload off my plate. 

OK, so these are two very different stories about the same thing. Hitting the wall. Thinking about leaving the profession. I can't pretend to know all the circumstances you're facing right now, but I'm seeing a lot of folks in our community struggling. If you're hitting a wall like I have, for reasons of your own, see if you can tap into your feelings and try to create a pivot point. 

It could be personal - like my list of boundaries. Maybe instead of quitting, you radically change how you grade, refuse to give up your prep period, stop agreeing to join committees, only check email twice a day, and commit to taking weekends off. 

Or it could be a line you ask to draw in the sand with your boss - like my midnight letter (though I suggest you approach it more coherently than I did). If you need a change, is it possible you could get one through a letter or a very serious conversation with someone at your school, rather than a new job? If you want to stay but you're thinking of leaving, is it at least worth a try? 

I want to see you enjoying your creative classroom and loving your work, and I know there are a whole lot of societal factors making that really hard right now. If you've hit a wall that can't be overcome, I get that. Maybe you want to transfer your amazing skills to another path. But if you want to be in the career you're in, but you too have cried in your own version of the dusty stairwell and questioned everything at the end of your own version of the unbelievably overwhelming day, maybe there's a step you could take toward change. And this week I just want to highly recommend that you take it. 

Sign up for Camp Creative Here:  https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/camppodcasting2024

Go Further: 

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

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Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

With exam season coming up, you're probably looking for some creative ELA review activities.

Whether your school requires that students sit a traditional exam, or you have room for something like the graduation speech final or another type of final project, it's helpful to look back over the big concepts, themes, and texts you've covered as the year draws to a close.

So what options do you have besides printing out a 20 page review packet and giving students time to study it? A lot, as it turns out. Today we're going to explore five of them, in hopes that you'll find a match that feels just right to you.

Before we get started, I want you to know that I'll be running Camp Creative, The Easiest Roadmap to Student Podcasting, in June. Inside this (free) and fun PD, you'll get access to the best models, easiest tech, and complete curriculum to get you and your students started with podcast projects. Everything arrives by email, so even if you're busy the week of June 10-14, you can catch up whenever you get a chance. It just takes 10 minutes a day to go through the materials!

Links Mentioned:

Grab your Copy of the Review Quiz Game Here:  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1s2HlNyX8Zh9_WYnJsZmTgbbLvGjewzhDnAn8aPgXg2U/copy 

Sign up for Camp Creative Here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/camppodcasting2024 

Go Further: 

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

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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.

Here's what she writes: "Hi, Betsy! I am a huge fan and avid listener! As a teacher who is nearing retirement, I found myself in a slump. You've been an inspiration! I have completely changed my curriculum for next year (we are mid-process in curriculum writing). For the first time, all of my classes are completely novel-based using lit circles. I have selected five titles for students to choose from each quarter, with plans to supplement like crazy with nonfiction pieces, TED talks, podcasts, etc. I have created an overarching essential question for each semester to tie all the pieces together. It's a bit overwhelming, but I am super excited to get started! Any ideas you have specific to lit circles would be much appreciated! And if I can figure out a way to intertwine genius hour, I would be thrilled 😊"

So today we're diving into this wonderful creative planning process. We'll start by looking at a big picture structure that can help support all these wonderful pieces while creating consistency throughout the term, then dive into a single day in the life lesson for balancing all of these elements.

Book Club Warm-Up Examples:

Book Club Activity Examples: 

Genius Hour Curriculum Examples:

Tune in to episode 291, "When Genius Hour Works:" https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2024/04/when-genius-hour-works.html 

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Launch your choice reading program with all my favorite tools and recs, and grab the free toolkit.

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Today, I want to highlight a useful tool Amanda Cardenas shared earlier this year on the show called The Sesame Street Quiz. It's so versatile, so fun, and so helpful that I feel it deserves a show of its own, so here we go. 

Amanda has already shared with us how these work, back in episode 267.

Here's a quick review: 

A Sesame Street Quiz gives students four items. Three are connected and one is an outlier. For example, if you're reading Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby, you might give students the options: Daisy, Jordan, floating, red. Which three are connected and why? Which one is the outlier and why? Amanda lets kids use their book and notes as they respond.

Now, think about this idea of a Sesame Street Quiz. It's a great way to check in and see which kids are doing the reading, and understanding the reading. But how else might you use it?

It could make a great bellringer or discussion warm-up. Have students make their decisions alone or with a partner, justifying their choices. 

It could make for an intriguing way to review before a final exam. Invite students to consider the key texts of the term, and choose which ones go together and which is an outlier.

It could lead into a fascinating one-pager assessment, with kids creating a visual representation of the three that group together and integrating quotations and analysis in their own words of why those three link.

It could be a helpful exit ticket, to see how well students digested the material from the lesson if you've been deep diving into a text.

I bet you can think of lots more uses as well! But however you use it, this week I just want to highly recommend that you give a Sesame Street question a try ASAP. 

Related Links: 

Episode 267, with Amanda Cardenas: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2024/03/so-your-students-arent-doing-the-reading-heres-help.html 

Explore more of Amanda's work: https://www.mudandinkteaching.org/  

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Have you ever wished you could get students excited about genius hour, then immediately wondered what you'd do if half of them couldn't think of a topic? Well, today on the podcast, creative teacher Melissa Moser is here to talk about one of her favorite electives to teach - Genius Hour, and exactly how she sets students up for success - even the ones who just don't know what passion to pursue when it comes to a passion project.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I think you're going to love all the specifics Melissa shares.

Ooh, and real quick, if you're wondering what I mean by genius hour, I'd like to suggest you hit pause and go back to episode 122, The Ultimate Guide to Genius Hour. You'll enjoy this amazing case study so much more once you understand exactly what it means to give your students the time and space to study their own greatest interests in a genius hour project. OK, let's dive in!

Links from Today's Episode:

The Ultimate Guide to Genius Hour (Episode 122)

The Genius Hour Curriculum

Information about The Lighthouse

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Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you're new to the show or a long-time listener, I'm so glad you're here for this week's mini episode. Today, I want to share a fun visual trick for helping students vary their sentence structure. 

I never really thought about sentence length until I was writing professionally. Sure, I knew to avoid run-on sentences, how to wield a semicolon, and what an appositive could do. But really it was when I realized I wanted to vary my sentence LENGTH in the articles I was writing for other websites that I started playing with structure more. 

I wanted punchy moments.

I also wanted long, detailed stories that could twist and turn through the text, capturing my reader's imagination with sensory imagery and vivid descriptions.

The combination of both led to more exciting writing with more varied types of structure. It's not that I went into a line thinking "I want to use an appositive, three commas, and a semicolon here." It's that I was trying to write a long sentence after a short sentence, so I experimented.

There's an easy way to guide students to do the same thing. I call it "Shaped Stories." Simply create a handout or slide with a photo at the top, and a big black rectangle down below. Then add white rectangles on the big black one, each a space for students' sentences going down the page, and make the white rectangles different sizes. Leave a tiny rectangle where a sentence will have to be just two or three words. Then add a wide, tall one where a sentence would have to be complex to fill it. Then try medium-size, and so on and so forth down the page.

When you invite students to set a story inside the picture prompt at the top, ask them to fill each box completely with their sentences. Show them your example, and feel free to review a few types of sentence structures that might help them out. 

When it comes to varied sentence structure, shaped stories are an easy (and fun) hack for helping students practice. That's why this week I want to highly recommend you take a peek at the visuals in the show notes for inspiration and then give it a try. 

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Book talk podcasts can provide gentle choice reading accountability, target presentation of knowledge and speaking skills, and build a library of book recommendations for future students.

Not bad, right? Today on the podcast I'm going to walk you through how to launch a book talk podcast with your students, and why it will be fantastic.

Example Script:  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Aj__-O8kwEJTXr_-3o7AU9B15sSQYIIFyn-cy-HSkUQ/edit?usp=sharing 

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Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you're new to the show or a long-time listener, I'm so glad you're here for this week's mini episode. Today, as earth day inches closer, I want to share a favorite find, Amanda Gorman's video poem "Earthrise." This beautiful poem could fit in so many different places in your curriculum, so let's talk about them.

First of all, let me tell you a bit about this poem, which of course I'll link in the show notes. It's shared on Youtube by The Climate Reality Project, and it's from five years ago, before Amanda Gorman stormed the world scene with her inauguration poem. It's a performance piece with video footage of Amanda and of the world intermingled as the tells the story of the first astronaut to see the world from space, then connects the way he saw the earth rise with the idea that we can confront the issue of climate change and make our own individual positive impacts and see our own earthrise. It's a lovely, inspiring call to action which acknowledges this big, weighty issue without making things feel hopeless.

I can think of three ways you might use this poem which I'll share here.

First, you could use it as a springboard to a project about influence, and what it means to be an influencer. Amanda Gorman uses her social media profiles, her performances, and her poetry to lend strength to causes she cares about. In a social media-driven world, she stands out as a youth icon who continuously searches out ways to use her influence positively. You could look at examples of her influencer work and her cause-driven poems and have your students create projects related to the nature of influence and what types of influencer they want to be influenced by.

Second, you could use this poem as a springboard for a video poetry project. Whether your students create their own original pieces or create a video around a poem they love, this is a chance to use their voices and their visuals to bring out the meaning behind a piece. Teach them the 3 second rule, that the angle or shot almost always changes every 3 seconds in professional video, and have them spot it in "Earthrise." Then let them create a poetry video of their own, using the techniques you identify together in Gorman's piece. 

Third and last, you could use this poem as a springboard for a call-to-action poem. Have students consider the issues that matter most to them. Have them analyze how Gorman builds energy and hope in her poem with her literary and performance choices. Then have them use it as a mentor text to create their own poem calling people to hopeful action to make a difference in the issue that matters to them.

This one piece is, of course, the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Amanda Gorman's work. This week I want to highly recommend you check it out as a wonderful starting point, and perhaps it will lead you down a lovely rabbit hole of her work and all the many ways it could fit into your curriculum. 

"Earthrise" by Amanda Gorman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwOvBv8RLmo 

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It's never a bad thing when your classroom innovation lands you at a press conference with your state's department of education!

That's what happened to today's guest, Erica Kempf. She decided to try out the project-based-learning unit I designed about the ethical use of artificial intelligence, and along the way she and her students made it their own and became the go-to sources for AI in their district.

They learned a lot in the process, and I'm so excited to have Erica here to share her story with you. Before we dive in, just a heads up that you can grab the free PBL AI curriculum set that Erica and her students used right here. So if you get inspired as you listen, you can download this unit for yourself and give it a try!

Grab the Full (Free) PBL AI Unit Here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/aipbl 

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Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you're new to the show or a long-time listener, I'm so glad you're here for this week's mini episode. Today, I want to talk about a much-debated subject - when it comes to choice reading, what counts and what doesn't?

If you've been here with me for long, I bet you can imagine that a lot of books were involved in the early life of my own children. They had tiny themed board book displays before they could roll over, and we were a constant at our little local library. But after their baby years, my two kids' reading paths diverged, wildly.

My son's path has been like mine. He went through epic series after epic series, hit the children's classics, and is now deeply entrenched in wonderful fantasy books that he reads to himself every night, unless he's not feeling well, in which case he plugs in an audiobook. 

My daughter's path, not so much. If I had a quarter for every time I've offered to read to her, tried to hand off a book I was sure she would love, or invited her to read with me and gotten turned down - very politely - I could probably book us into Club Med for the weekend. 

Helping her become fond of books has been an eight year project, and lately I feel like I'm seeing it happen. But it's been VERY heavy on three formats, and they happen to be much debated as "real" reading - graphic novels, re-reading old favorites, and audiobooks. 

For my youngest, becoming a reader has meant listening to soooooooooo much Junie B. Jones and Ramona. It has meant reading all 18 of the hilarious graphic novel series, The Bad Guys, and suddenly announcing that it was "Better than eating candy." It's meant careful tiny steps forward with print text, one page at a time,  in books about subjects she absolutely loves, like young girls discovering their magical connection to elemental horses.

Without the re-reading, the audiobooks and the graphic novels, I'm pretty sure I'd still be getting that polite smiling "no thank you, Mama" everytime I reached for a book. 

It can be hard - believe me I know - to see a kid re-read an old book or plug into an audiobook - when you really want to see them explore new titles and improve their print comprehension. And I'm all for encouraging students to keep trying a lot of different things, and even to read two or three books at a time - maybe an old favorite, an audiobook, and a little bit of something new and challenging. I often have this pattern going in my own life.  But this week I just want to highly recommend that we remember, all books are part of the journey to becoming a reader. Rereading, graphic novels, and audiobooks might just be a student's gateway to a lifetime of reading.

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We're about to dive into an elective that combines Beowulf, The Hobbit, Ursula Leguin, graphic novels, and contemporary YA! What holds all these threads together? That's what repeat guest and creative teacher Caitlin Lore is about to tell you as we continue our series on creative electives across the country. Get ready for the big reveal in just a moment.

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Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you're new to the show or a long-time listener, I'm so glad you're here for this week's mini episode. Today, I want to talk about Youtube, and how we can use students' love for it to our ELA advantage. 

One of my goals for this year is to create the curriculum for an elective based on Youtube. I've recently watched my son go through the transition from watching Disney Plus and Netflix in his chill time to watching exclusively Youtube creators. He learns magic and parkour skills from them, watches them unbox things he loves, and generally would rather be subscribing to their channels than being entertained by the billions of dollars behind the entertainment industry. He's already made the first video for his own channel, and he was willing to work through a LOT of frustrations as he tried to figure out the problems of audio, angle, lighting, script, theme, file size, and everything else required. 

I'm sure you've seen this same interest in Youtube in student after student. 

So what does that mean for us, as educators? There's an incredible hook here for our students. I'm thinking about a Youtube elective (or unit) that looks at so many ELA skills that matter in our students' communication, through the lens of video. Hooks. Closings. Making an argument. Sharing research. Interviewing. Documenting. I'm imagining projects like short documentaries, time lapses, mini profiles, travel videos about your local community, PSA videos about issues kids care about, video versions of college essays or performance poems. The 21st century skills are EVERYWHERE, no matter what topics you and your students choose to dive into.

I could go on and on and on, and maybe later, in another episode, I will. But for now, I just want to highly recommend that we consider Youtube an ally in our teacherly quest to help kids see just how relevant ELA is to their real life lives. You only have to look as far as the National Geographic, New York Times, and White House channels to know that Youtube plays a highly significant role in communication today. 

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Welcome to the author spotlight series at Spark Creativity.

In this series, you'll hear from authors sharing their work directly into your classroom. So sit back and listen in. Today we're hearing from Nancy Tandon, reading from her book, The Way I Say It.  

Nancy has worked as an elementary school teacher, a speech-language pathologist, and an adjunct professor of Phonetics and Child Language Development, all of which helped plant seeds for stories about awesome kids doing brave things.

Her debut middle grade novel, The Way I Say It (Charlesbridge, 2022) was an American Booksellers Association Indies Introduce and Indies Next pick as well as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.

My hope is that you'll play this episode to your students on an upcoming Friday, sharing the guiding sketchnotes handout below with them so they can jot down their key takeaways as they listen.

Grab the Novel-Specific Sketchnotes Sheet: Click here

Play it from Youtube for your Students: https://youtu.be/CE6UDEl9p5Y 

Learn more about author Nancy Tandon: https://nancytandon.com/ 

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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, practicing basic research skills, as well as us getting to know them and them doing some self exploration. I want a similar caliber project, but on a different topic."

So our goal for the lesson is to introduce key elements for a project that will give students a chance to share something important to them as you build community, learn and practice basic research skills, and get them adjusted to a key platform (in my opinion) for the school year, Canva. As usual, it's a struggle for me to pack it all into one lesson, so feel free to spread this over several depending on how much time you have in your period!

Take the Free Canva Confidence Mini-Course: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/getCanvaconfidence 

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Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you're new to the show or a long-time listener, I'm so glad you're here for today's edition of "Highly Recommended." Today, let's talk Ken Liu's short story, "The Paper Menagerie," one of the best I've ever read.

"The Paper Menagerie" might also be the only scifi short story I've ever read. Did you know it won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, and the World Fantasy Award? It can bring a new genre to your short story unit, add a layer to a scifi unit, or fit right in with any unit on coming of age or the American dream, and it's available in full text on the Gizmodo website if you aren't able to get Liu's book right now.

I just read it again and as usual, it had me crying. It's both the story of a boy and of his mother, how they understand each other and how they don't. She comes from China, speaking no English, to marry and together they have a baby. As the baby grows, his mother makes him beautiful Origami animals that come to life for him. He loves these animals, and sees little point in the plastic toys of others. But one day he makes friends with a neighbor and realizes that he, and his animals, are different. So begins a journey in which he leaves his animals, and his mother, behind in his wish to fit in more as an American.

I won't spoil the ending for you, but years later he discovers his mother's story written into the pages of the paper animals, and he has it translated aloud to him, leaving the reader with a powerful and heart-wrenching ending.

This story is powerful, painful, lovely, and literary. This week, I highly recommend you follow the link in the show notes and read it for yourself, because I really think you're going to want to use it in class.

The Lighthouse $1 Trial is Open until the end of Friday, March 22nd: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/springopen

Read the Full Text of Ken Liu's "The Paper Menagerie": https://gizmodo.com/read-ken-lius-amazing-story-that-swept-the-hugo-nebula-5958919 

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You know how we feel here at Spark Creativity about Book PR. Basically it's the best. We're all about bookish posters, displays, podcasts, guest readers, First Chapter Fridays, book trailer Tuesdays, and book tastings. If it helps kids get excited about books, we're all in!

Recently I saw a lovely post over in my Creative High School English Facebook group from a teacher who hosted a Bookface competition, and it reminded me of just how much I love this idea! Bookface isn't new, but there's a reason it keeps on resurfacing. It's amazing! So in this quick episode, let's dive into what Bookface is and how you might use it as a vehicle for building reading enthusiasm. Of course, it's a fun visual strategy, so I hope you'll take a look at the show notes to see the examples I've created for you to share with your students as well.

Grab the #Bookface Student Guide Here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/bookface

The Lighthouse $1 Trial is Open this Week:  https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/springopen 

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Today, let's talk about March Madness, and how to harness all that awesome enthusiasm to get your students excited about poetry.

Last year I worked with Melissa Alter Smith from #teachlivingpoets to create a March Madness bracket for The Lighthouse, and I learned a lot from her in the process! This is such a fun and easy way to bring more voices into your curriculum and help kids see a lot of different sides of poetry. 

You can set up your poetry bracket on your white board or on Google Slides. Then you fill it in with poetry that you love. You can mix together classic poetry, performance poetry from The Button Classroom-Friendly Youtube channel, readings by contemporary authors that you find online, or favorites from Def Poetry Jam. There are so many options! You can get fancy and have poems face off initially that cover similar themes or are from similar outlets, or you can just randomly scatter in poems and see what happens.

All you need is a few minutes a day to read or play the two poems of the day in the classes that participate in the tournament. You can just have students close their eyes and raise their hands to vote, or you can build some writing and argument into it by having them rate the poems and defend their scores. Either way, keep track of the votes in each class and at the end of the day, move your winners forward in your tournament bracket. 

By the end of your tournament, your students will be used to how this all works and it really should just take a few minutes a day that hopefully everyone will be looking forward to.

Need a few poets to get you started? Take a look at Harry Baker, Amanda Gorman, and Sarah Kay for a start. Or check out the poetry bracket Melissa has created on the Teach Living Poets site or, if you're in The Lighthouse, the one that she and I built in the Teach Living Poets section. 

A March Madness poetry bracket is such an easy way to integrate more poetry from many voices into your curriculum and, of course, get more student buy-in for it! That's why this week I want to highly recommend you give it a try.  

Learn more about The Lighthouse: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/C4Z236

Teach Living Poets March Madness Bracket: https://teachlivingpoets.com/2023/02/26/march-madness-poetry-bracket/ 

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Remember when research projects involved stacks of books and notecards? Yeah, me too. But we all know research has changed. I recently finished a couple of pedagogy books for English teachers - one by Angela Stockman on designing inclusive spaces for writers, and another by Katie Novak on Universal Design for Learning in the English classroom. And beyond the many wonderful ideas I took away from them, I was also struck by the variation in the sources they referred to.

Sure, they cited texts.

But they also cited Ted Talks, telephone calls, online articles, online compendiums, and more.

Their information came from a digital rainbow of sources.

Our students naturally work the same way.

As digital natives, they've grown up with the whole online world at their fingertips, and their natural first line of research is probably not a book. So how do we direct them through the research process, given the incredible variety of possible sources available to them?

That's what today's quick episode is about.

Important Links:

The AI PBL Unit: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/aipbl 

John Spencer's Article, "Research is Critical in Design Thinking": https://spencerauthor.com/research-in-design-thinking/ 

Make a Copy of the Research Process Infographic Handout: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1C6gVB8WQi3KVgsxbFhhZz_Hs4lLPD8DFN5U4NvfHojA/copy 

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Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you're new to the show or a long-time listener, I'm so glad you're here for today's edition of "Highly Recommended." This week, I want to make sure you know just how amazing the Google Translate App really is. 

Living here in Bratislava, and traveling around Europe with our family, we are constantly confronted by languages we don't know. On Street Signs, parking signs, parking tickets, frozen pizza cooking instructions, directions for using new toys on Christmas morning, mail that lands in our box, and so much more. Which is why we really couldn't do without our Google translate app.

At first we stared at the strange text and painstakingly tried to type it into the app. But then we discovered the camera feature. Did you know you can pick any two languages in the app, then take a picture of the first and instantly see it translated to the second? 

You can also speak into the app in one language and see your words typed out in another. Or hold the camera up to someone you want to understand and get their words translated. 

It's an incredible tool, and one I use constantly in my everyday life. 

For your emerging bilingual or trilingual students, Google Translate can be a huge lifeline. They can quickly hold their app camera over handout instructions, printed writing prompts, or classroom posters and see it in their own language. They can take a picture or screenshot and have the translation available for the rest of the class. And of course, beyond the app, they can plug large sections of text into Google Translate online to help them better understand a podcast transcript, close reading passage, or news article. 

Google Translate can help your students keep up with your content and express the complexity of their ideas as their second or third language skills catch up with their thought processes. That's why this week, I highly recommend you add it to your phone and get familiar with it. It doesn't take long, and it could make all the difference to some of your students (and perhaps their parents come conference time, too). 

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Today on the podcast, we're sitting down with Amanda Cardenas to talk about a very big question. A huge question, really. What can teachers do when students aren't doing the reading? And is reading out loud the majority of our texts the answer? Spoiler alert, we both can completely understand how this would seem like the answer, but in the long run, we don't think it is. 

Amanda and I are going to share a lot of ideas, and I'm hopeful that if you've been feeling stuck in a situation where kids aren't reading and lessons aren't working, you'll find some helpful possibilities for shifts you might make to help. We're getting into approaching unit design with an inquiry lens rather than a text-coverage lens, checking in with open-book Sesame Street quizzes, breaking up reading assignments in new ways, and planning the day-to-day of units without worrying about which exact pages students may have read the night before. It's a lot of exciting stuff, so let's dive in!

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Let's talk about some of the best summer PD options out there for English teachers. 

First things first, I've got to tell you about my personal favorite summer ELA PD experience of all time, the one my husband still jokingly refers to as my "smoothie grant." One summer, my school had money left from its PD budget, and invited teachers to apply for small, simple ways to produce something helpful to their work over the summer with a little bit of funding. I applied for a budget to go get a smoothie each morning in June and sit and read and design curriculum at my favorite beach cafe in Los Angeles for an hour or two. I still remember how fun it was to sit on the balcony after rollerblading the beach at sunrise, listening to the surfers walk by, drinking my apple pie smoothie as I reread the Odyssey and thought about how to rewrite the 9th-grade curriculum. It was the perfect way to add a regular bit of work to my summer and feel like it was fun to do. If your school has a budget for summer PD and what you really want to do is work on curriculum, consider getting creative with a grant like this. 

Next on my list I want to mention the National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute series. These cool programs take place all over the United States, giving you a chance to travel to interesting places, dig deep into their culture, and collaborate with colleagues from across the country. This summer they'll have Grand Coulee Dam: The Intersection of Modernity and Indigenous Cultures in Spokane, Freedom Summer: 60 Years Later in Jackson, Shakespeare and Digital Storytelling in Decatur, and quite a few more.  My husband attended one of the institutes on civil rights years back and remembers it as being absolutely outstanding. 

I consistently hear from people who have found the National Writer's Project summer workshops extremely impactful, so that's next. If you're interested in diving deep into the teaching of writing, I'd look up your closest National Writing Project site and see what they have on offer.

If you're looking for online ELA options, you might explore the on-demand workshops from Facing History & Ourselves, or the free online course available from the National Museum of the American Indian, "edX Course: Foundations for Transforming Teaching and Learning about Native Americans," or of course, Camp Creative, the summer PD I run each June (topic to be revealed soon!)  

Finally, I'll give a quick nod to the Exeter Humanities Institute, a weeklong workshop all about the discussion method, Harkness. I attended this institute after my first year of teaching English, following a month-long experiment in each of my classes to use only Harkness as our method of discussion. I learned SO MUCH that week, and it really influenced me as a teacher on a fundamental level. I never used any other discussion method after that, because I just couldn't imagine NOT using Harkness. Look into the method before committing to a week to go deep with it, but if you find it's a good fit at your school, this week of PD will be an incredible boost to your ability to help your students shine through the method. 

Of course, self-care, family time, and travel are all also great ways to renew your strength and creativity this summer as well. But if you're looking for a quality English teacher PD experience, these are some of my favorite options, so I highly recommend you follow the links in the show notes and check them out!

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PD Links (as promised!):

National Endowment for the Humanties Summer Institutes

The National Writing Project

The National Museum of the American Indian Online Courses

Facing History and Ourselves On-Demand Learning

The Exeter Humanities Institute

Lately I've been thinking a lot about electives.

Electives I want to design, like one about Youtube creation and one about Taylor Swift, and the amazing electives teachers in our community are designing and teaching around the world.

So of course I'm really excited that today on the podcast we've got the first show in a new series about creative electives. My hope is that this series will bring you inspiration for new electives you can propose or new units you can teach, modeled on your favorite parts of other people's electives, within your current courses.

I'll be interviewing teachers about some of their favorite electives - what they are, what they accomplish, and how they do it.

On today's show we're diving into an interview with Amanda Beal, a creative teacher in Northern Minnesota. She's going to be talking about a powerful elective for the world today, when we are so divided and yet so fearful of talking about the issues that divide us. I'm going to let her reveal the name and nature of this elective in just a moment - so stay tuned. 

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Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you're new to the show or a long-time listener, I'm so glad you're here for today's edition of "Highly Recommended." This week, I want to suggest you take the plunge and help your students create a tiny podcast. 

The first time I rolled out a podcasting project was with my tenth-grade honors students. Our humanities team had decided to create a project connecting the English and History curriculum for the students' honors Humanities portfolio, a new program we were trying. None of us really knew how to podcast, though we probably all enjoyed the occasional episode of This American Life. After all, this was thirteen years ago and podcasts were just taking off.

Nevertheless, we asked our tech team for help, figured out a program our students could use, and then launched the project.

Our students blew us away. 

I think it's important to remember that kids are often interested in exploring beyond our skills with tech. The answer to any question is generally just a Youtube search away. 

That's why in my mind it's worth the risk of assigning a project you might not be 100% confident in. Learn alongside your students. Try assigning a 2 minute podcast - it could be a book review, a bit of research, an opinion on a current issue, a chance to teach a life skill or profile a career, or whatever fits your curriculum. Let kids know they can record the whole thing using the big red button on the Vocaroo website, OR they can explore other options they might be interested in. See what happens. 

I've heard from so many teachers who've seen great success with their podcasting projects. Communication today extends far beyond the written word, and kids are eager to develop their media skills, so today, I want to highly recommend you spend just a couple of days on a tiny podcast project, and see where that leads you.

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Want to learn more about student podcasting? You might like this free, easy roadmap to student podcasting. 

Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

Ahh, the hum of fluorescent lighting. The slightly stained carpeting. The copier that is almost-if-not-already-out-of-paper. The dirty coffee cups. It's no secret that at many schools, the common teacher workspace isn't exactly inviting. No one really seems to be in charge of it, no resources really seem to be allocated toward it, and no one has time to care. (If that isn't the case at your school, AWESOME! And if that's because of you, that's so cool!)

But lately I can't help but ask... what if? What if the community workspace for educators had a tad more in common with those unique co-working spaces I see on Pinterest? Or those cool start-up offices with bagels on the counter and ping pong tables that pop up on Netflix sitcoms? Or the legendary work campuses of tech companies like Google and Youtube?

What if teachers actually enjoyed working in the faculty room/teacher room/copy room at your school, because it was.... like.... NICE?

When I saw a Facebook question in Creative High School English the other day from an administrator asking how they could do something nice for teachers, my mind turned automatically to this space - I'm going to call it a faculty room from here on out.

Ever since reading Ali Abdaal's book, Feel Good Productivity, in December, I've been leaning into my usual proclivity for creating pleasant environments since apparently feeling good where you do your work makes you more productive.

I don't think it would take much to overhaul many faculty rooms into a pleasant space to help create community, make teachers feel more supported, and even inspire more innovative pedagogy. In today's episode, I'm going to share a range of ideas - some of them free, some of them low cost, all of them mainly requiring someone who cares enough to ask for a small budget, gather a few colleagues to help, and get started.

(Someone like you.)

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Make your Copy of the Podcast Posters:  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1spsn3iz9fxHkJiK3oxEIq8mdbbD7RvT4qxZCDM-Qkv8/copy

Make your Copy of the Pedagogy Posters: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/15RS-QhBuju2_YlkUOui8ruFgyLKndTyYythU-jcRuX8/copy 

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 all the day-one must-dos while also building community and keeping things engaging and low-stress. This is your chance to start connecting with your students and helping them feel comfortable in your classroom, while at the same time showing them what your class is going to be like.

Grab the Syllabus Templates: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/free-syllabus-templates 

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Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides

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This week, I want to suggest you let your students design an escape room.

Escape rooms are, in the iconic words of Zoolander, so hot right now. And they have been for years. Students love them! Who wouldn't want to learn while exploring mysterious clues and piecing together puzzles? 

The problem is, they take a little bit of forever to create. We've already talked about this quite a bit on the podcast! 

But you know what they say (and yes, it's based on the research), students elevate their learning when they teach.

So why not turn things around and have the students design the escape rooms? They'll have to thoroughly understand the material they're trying to share in order to embed it into clues and puzzles for their peers.

I've created a digital template your students can customize to create their own escape rooms on any subject matter you want them to teach each other. Just follow the link in the show notes to pick up this free resource.

Escape rooms are a flexible and fun way to learn, so that's why this week I want to highly recommend you give them a try, with your creative students leading the way! 

Grab the Student Escape Room Templates here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/escaperoomkit 

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So you want your students to get better at something, but drill-and-kill is clearly not the answer. Been there, done that, didn't like it. So what's a creative teacher to do?

Today I'm going to pull an example of a grammar skill and walk through five different ways to practice it without those groans you dread. While the skill I'm zooming in on may not be the exact one that's your focus right now, you can apply these five different strategies to pretty much anything. I'm hopeful that by the end of this quick show, your mind will be buzzing with new ideas for tackling the next skill your students need help with.

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This week, I want to share a great way to tie rhetorical analysis into the upcoming Superbowl. 

First things first, we know this Superbowl has a hilarious additional wrinkle, in that the world is excited to watch not only the game, but Taylor Swift attending the game. That extra detail may help more students be interested in a Superbowl-related activity this month.

So let me explain this rhetorical analysis one-pager activity (by the way, link to this free resource is in the show notes).

The activity focuses in on two incredible Superbowl performances of the past - one by Whitney Houston during the war in Iraq, and one by Amanda Gorman during the pandemic. Each performance is uniquely tied to its context, providing students the opportunity to examine rhetorical situation in a way that will really help cement its role in understanding rhetoric. Rhetorical situation can often be more confusing for students than the basics of ethos, pathos, and logos.

You can have students choose either of the performances, based on their preference, and then work on the one-pager template to explore the speaker, audience, and context of the performance in three of the sections and then the rhetorical appeals in the heart of the paper, paying attention of course to ethos, pathos, and logos. 

These powerful Superbowl performances past are a perfect way to help kids understand how tied rhetorical appeals are to their context, and it will make for a fun lesson connected to what's happening in the world at the moment. That's why this week I want to highly recommend you follow the link below to grab this free resource and try it out. 

Grab your copy of this Superbowl Rhetorical Analysis Activity here: https://spark-creativity.ck.page/b5d2366aaa

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Welcome to the second episode of the author spotlight series here at Spark Creativity!

In this series, you'll hear from authors sharing their work directly into your classroom. Today we're hearing from Matt de la Peña reading his short story "How to Transform an Everyday, Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place of Higher Learning and You at the Podium," from the collection, Flying Lessons.

Stay tuned throughout the year to hear from many more wonderful authors, including Victor Pineiro, Payal Doshi, and Nancy Tandon. You can also check out the first episode in the collection, featuring Megan E. Freeman reading from her novel-in-verse, Alone.

Today we're hearing from Matt de la Pena, reading from his short story "How to Transform an Everyday Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place of Higher Learning and You at the Podium," from the collection Flying Lessons and other Stories.

Matt de la Peña is the New York Times-bestselling, Newberry Medal-winning author of seven young adult novels (including Mexican WhiteBoy, We Were Here and Superman: Dawnbreaker) and five picture books (including Last Stop on Market Street and Love).

Matt received his MFA in creative writing from San Diego State University and his BA from the University of the Pacific, where he attended school on a full athletic scholarship for basketball.

My hope is that you'll play this episode to your students on an upcoming Friday, sharing the guiding sketchnotes handout below with them so they can jot down their key takeaways as they listen. This short story is utterly fantastic, one of my favorites of all time to share with students!

⭐​ Grab the Sketchnotes to go with this episode:  https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mxNfVE710zqUkfb8iGBjZGIA9A2aldz71E3VwNkf4do/copy  

⭐​ Project the Youtube version for your students in class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iajc4RH28Pg 

⭐​​ Learn more about Matt de la Peña and his work: https://mattdelapena.com/

This week, I want to share a quick way to help make your next discussion better.

The next time you plan a discussion in class, start it off with this quick warm up.

Invite every student to write an open-ended question about the reading or the current book at the top of their notes. Then ask them to pass their notebook to the left and let their neighbor respond for a minute. Then have them pass again. The next neighbor reads the question, the response, and then responds to both. Maybe do it two more times. Now pass all the notebooks back.

As you begin your discussion, invite someone to ask a question they responded to to the group. They won't be taking much of a personal risk, asking someone else's question. And you know at least two other people have given it some thought at this point. Your class is now primed to talk about the questions on everyone's mind, since every question on paper has already received some serious thought from several people. When discussion begins to fade on the first question, invite the next. 

I usually use warm-ups like this with a student-led discussion format called Harkness. So students know that I am not going to dive into every silence to rescue the group, and they ask the questions on their own. If you're curious about that method, shoot me a DM on Instagram @nowsparkcreativity and I can do another show about it if you want. 

I've repeatedly found that 5-10 minute discussion warm-ups make all the difference in creating a richer and more active discussion, so that's why this week I want to highly recommend that you give one a try! I'm sure you'll think of lots more ideas once the concept of a warm-up becomes built into your routine. 

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We've been talking this month about the paper pile. The work bag shadow. The stack of essays you just might have taken to the ice cream social/Superbowl party/beach vacation/bar/hospital...

Today I want to share a strategy I honestly think every teacher can use to save time on grading and actually help kids improve their writing more.

This episode is going to be quick and, if you decide to try it, impactful. I'm not going to go on and on, because you'll quickly get the idea and then I'd rather you use your time to go IMPLEMENT.

We all know there are certain errors that come up time and time again. If you teach middle schoolers, you've probably used margin space in about a thousand papers to explain again the idea that they need to connect their evidence to their point, making the argument clear.

If you teach older kids, perhaps you've walked around the be-sure-your-thesis-is-arguable block so many times you could write the commentary in your sleep. And then there are the little things, like writing in the present tense, how to cite quotations, and using precise language instead of making mention of "things" and "stuff."

What I want to suggest is that you never re-write the fixes for these common errors in the margins of students' writing again. Instead, I want you to create a hyperdoc featuring each of these errors and their fixes to refer your students to whenever they make one, and feel free to get as glitzy as you want with color coding and linking and imagery and models.

🔴​​ Maybe they'll see a colorful infographic you've designed to show the elements of an arguable thesis.

🟠​ Maybe they'll have a chance to click on a screencast video of you walking through a model where a student's thesis was not arguable and explaining what the student needed to do to fix it.

🟡​ Maybe they can read four types of model introductory paragraphs (that ChatGPT will be happy to help you write if you don't have student models from the past) introducing theses that ARE arguable.

🟢​ Maybe they'll see a linked video from one of the many excellent University Writing Labs walking them through the process of making sure a thesis is arguable.

🔵​ Maybe they'll see ALL of this. Because you'll be able to create this and add to it over the years as you find new resources, giving it more and more depth as an incredible tool to help your writers.

I made you a template and some examples in Canva (try it on for size with this link).

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This week, I want to tell you a story about pancakes.

You might know I love to cook and bake. My instagram stories feature enough pan-banging cookie demonstrations, bread-baking Sundays, and chocolate donut dipping and sprinkling to show my secret food blogger tendencies. So of course, I have a treasured pancake recipe, and my family loves a good weekend pancake morning.

But here's the thing, pancakes take a little bit of forever. Especially these. And I don't always feel like making pancakes for two hours on a weekend morning, even though I do love making food.

So a couple months ago when my son asked me to make pancakes, and I just didn't feel like I had the hours to give, I suggested that he make them. At first he was a bit stunned.

"Me? Make the pancakes?"

But I said I would teach him how to do it and make them with him, if he would learn the process so he could start making them. 

So that's what we did. I showed him the recipe, helped him find all the materials, and guided him through it. Everyone loved the pancakes, and we all showered him with compliments. A couple days later, he made them again, and I only helped with egg cracking and butter melting. More compliments. More joy for him. He started making pancakes to warm up on school mornings. He asked to make them for dinner when his grandparents were visiting, and the grandparents loved them. Soon he was cracking his own eggs, and I didn't even need to be in the vicinity of the kitchen anymore.

So why am I telling you this? Well, for almost every teacher and parent I know, time is the great struggle. How to do it all? And sometimes that means letting things go, even if you know you're good at them and maybe they even feel like a part of your identity.

Is it possible you could teach student volunteers to make beautiful book displays in your library each month? And that those students might actually feel really proud and pleased with the job?

Might you be able to empower student leaders on a team that you coach to plan part of practice time, give pep talks, or help set up or clean up practice equipment?

Might you be able to let go of something in your household that your children or partner might be good at too?

Maybe you want to try student-led discussion via the Harkness method, rather than trying to spearhead it every day yourself. 

Every time I see my son eating the lovely pancakes he makes, I have to smile to myself. While no one is now complimenting "Mama's pancakes," I love to see him feeling good about what he can do and I'm happy to have the time for other things. That's why this week, I want to highly recommend you ask yourself what kind of pancake project can you launch? (That has nothing to do with pancakes). 

So I wonder, is there something you can turn into your own personal pancake project?

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I'll never forget the "C" I got on my first English paper in college. I was walking across the quad in the warm eucalyptus-scented California air when I confidently pulled my paper from my bag to look at the comments. The day suddenly slid into grayscale as I saw my grade.

After a lifetime of "A" and "Great job" written at the bottom of every paper, fresh from winning the English award at my high school awards night, I was totally unprepared for the many, many scrawled notes about the problems in my paper.

I walked into class the next day in a daze, and listened to my professor as he went into a terrifying but effective rant. Apparently I wasn't the only freshmen to confidently turn in a paper that wasn't nearly complex enough.

His speech has stuck with me.

"Your rough draft," he said at one point. "Is a chair."

He scrawled an incredibly messy chair on the whiteboard for emphasis.

"And you have to take that chair," he sputtered. "And build a boat!"

We students glanced at each other, a little overwhelmed.

A boat?

Today I want to talk about the chair and the boat, and some of the process that happens in between. Because let's face it, most kids (high school me included) really struggle to understand the work that happens between ROUGH drafts and final drafts. And it's perhaps the most crucial part of the writing process.

The strategy we're going to dive into now, self-editing stations, can help scaffold editing for  your English students, saving them from falling into the usual traps, allowing you to intervene on behalf of key writing improvements you're trying to help them make BEFORE they turn in their work, and ultimately, saving your commenting time for only the most important personalized suggestions.

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This week, I want to share a quick resource to help you celebrate Black Artists and Authors in your classroom next month. 

Last year I started a project to create heritage displays you can use in your classroom throughout the year for special months like Black History month, Women's History month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, Pride month, and more.

Each display has a colorful header and a series of interactive posters featuring artists, creators, activists, and authors. Students can read the bio and scan the QR code on each poster to go learn more about the featured person.

February's display features Zora Neal Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Amanda Gorman, Jason Reynolds, and more.

It's a super quick display to put up - you just print out the pieces and put them up on some colorful paper on your bulletin board, door, or hallway. I'd love to share this free resource with you and help you get ready for Black History Month right around the corner! Then you can snag some books featured in the display to put up on your windowsill, along the top of your shelves, and along your whiteboard tray, and you'll be ready to rock. 

Easy, right?

Here's the link to grab this free resource: https://spark-creativity.ck.page/93cae16cef 

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I recently polled our community on Instagram about the paper pile. Because let's face it, it's a huge part of an English teacher's life. How many papers will you assign? How will you grade them? When will you grade them? These become defining questions. I heard from teachers who have graded papers at an ice cream social, at the bar, at a Superbowl party, in the emergency room, in the delivery room, in a parent's recovery room at the hospital room, at the beach, and more.

I certainly remember the folders of papers always weighing down my bag from my teaching life. And I remember grading past midnight.

I'm sure you can relate to all of this. But more than ever lately, are you asking the same question as me? DOES IT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY?

The teaching profession has suffered through many difficult challenges of late, and the teacher shortage is the newest on a long list. I see many colleagues leaving the classroom or thinking about leaving, and while I know there are many factors, the crush of grading still feels like one of the biggest.

After all, there would be more time to creatively deal with planning, admin tasks, differentiation, parent communication, and everything else if English teachers weren't trying to find four or five hours a week to stare down the paper pile.

So today I want to suggest something, just my two cents. I think it would be better to dramatically change the way you grade to give yourself back time, than to be pushed out of the classroom by your paper pile, or made miserable by it. I think this is a conversation we need to be having honestly with our colleagues, and I hope this podcast might lead you to bring it up with your department if you feel you can. 

Today on the podcast I'm going to share six ideas for taking back some of your grading time, and then in several upcoming episodes I'll be going deeper with some of these strategies.

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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 literature as a springboard into the year.

So how can we capture students' interest, review some key basics, like symbol, theme, and the hero's journey, give students a chance to show their understanding of the text, and establish a positive, creative tone for the year in a class period?

Let's give it a shot together. One of my teacher requesters today is teaching on a block schedule, so we're going to go ahead and plan a longer period. If you're NOT teaching on a block schedule, feel free to split this plan over two class periods.

Go Further: 

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

Launch your choice reading program with all my favorite tools and recs, and grab the free toolkit.

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Welcome to the first episode of the author spotlight series here at Spark Creativity!

In this series, you'll hear from authors sharing their work directly into your classroom. Today we're hearing from Megan E. Freeman, reading from her book, Alone. Stay tuned throughout the year to hear from many more wonderful authors, including Matt de la Peña, Payal Doshi, and Nancy Tandon.

Megan E. Freeman attended an elementary school where poets visited her classroom every week to teach poetry, and she has been a writer ever since. Her bestselling novel in verse, ALONE, won the Colorado Book Award, the Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont children's book awards, is an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, and is included on over two dozen "best of" and state reading lists. Megan is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet.

My hope is that you'll play this episode to your students on an upcoming Friday, sharing the guiding sketchnotes handout featured below with them so they can jot down their key takeaways as they listen.

Grab the sketchnotes handout here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ox4NNN9SZOG2oR1AQsHxyf0txLrrcR81gFP1sLbsIo0/copy 

You can find the text of the first 60 pages of the book available free on Overdrive.

If you'd like to project this episode on Youtube with an image of Megan and her book to give kids a visual as they listen, you can find it here. 

Megan E. Freeman attended an elementary school where poets visited her classroom every week to teach poetry, and she has been a writer ever since. Her bestselling novel in verse, ALONE, won the Colorado Book Award, the Massachusetts, Maine, and Vermont Children's Book Awards, is an NCTE Notable Verse Novel, and is included on over two dozen "best of" and state reading lists. Megan is also a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, and her poetry chapbook, Lessons on Sleeping Alone, was published by Liquid Light Press.

An award-winning teacher with decades of classroom experience, Megan taught multiple subjects across the arts and humanities to students K-16, and she is nationally recognized for presenting workshops and speaking to audiences across the country. She studied theater and dramatic literature for many years, earning degrees from Occidental College and the Ohio State University. 

Megan is a member of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, Northern Colorado Writers, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, Columbine Poets of Colorado, and Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She is an Impact on Education Award winner, a National Writing Project fellow , a Fund for Teachers fellow, and a member of the Colorado Poets Center. She used to live in northeast Los Angeles, central Ohio, northern Norway, and on Caribbean cruise ships. Now she divides her time between northern Colorado and the Texas Gulf Coast.

Visit her website here.

This week, I want to share the daily planning routine that is working better for me this year than anything I've ever done. 

Figuring out how to approach time when it seems that there is never enough can make a big difference in how you feel about your day, and that's why I think a simple thing like a planner routine that feels really helpful is worth sharing. I've recently been digging into productivity for The Lighthouse, and I listened to Ali Abdaal's wonderful book Feel Good Productivity and took James Clear's masterclass on building habits. They both helped me understand why my planner routine works well for me, and why I think it can work well for you too.

At the start of this year, I knew I wanted to incorporate a few new things into my week, but I didn't want them to feel overwhelming. I wanted to drink more water after years of ignoring it, try to create a gratitude practice that felt simple and doable, and really focus my energy on work projects that I care about. Little by little, I figured out how to help myself with all of these things with my 5 minute planner routine at the start of each day.

The first thing I do when I see the column with my new day is to draw six little water glasses down toward the bottom, and fill in the first one since I'm newly motivated to drink a glass of water the moment I come downstairs to the kitchen. This also reminds me to fill my water bottle and put it by my desk. If I'm going to take a walk or do kettlebells for 20 minutes that day, I put that next to the water with a little checkbox to remind me.

Above that I draw three colorful hearts and write in three things I'm grateful for that have happened lately. Though I don't write a lot, I try to think carefully and specifically about what was so meaningful about these things so I really put my focus there. 

Then I go up to the area where I write my plans for the day and I pick out ONE really important thing I want to get done and I write that first. That is what my focused work time is going to go to, the very first thing I'll work on with my freshest uninterrupted energy. It's the thing I absolutely want to make serious progress on by the end of the day. It is never, ever answering emails. 

After that I write in other priorities, trying to keep email down a few rungs of the list, because I don't want email to drive my work energy for the day. I like to check it once and clear it out as much as possible, and then move on. Honestly, I almost never check off all of the other priorities from a single day, but I work my way down and get through what I can when I have focused work time. 

Finally, I add all my meetings, family commitments, and errands into time slots throughout the day. I try to brain dump whatever might worry me in the back of my mind, so I know everything is there for me to do throughout the day and there's nothing else to keep track of.

After five minutes, I'm done and I have my day lined up in a way that feels clear and good to me. I've assigned different tasks to different parts of the day, prioritized what is really  important to me, and set myself up for success with new habits that matter to me. 

Whatever your priorities are, taking five minutes at the start of the day to intentionally block your time, choose a key task to work on, and build in new habits you're trying to focus on in - as James Clear suggests - an easy and obvious way -  can help make them happen! That's why today I want to highly recommend you consider a plan for your planner in 2024, and maybe even swipe mine. 

Go Further: 

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

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Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

Today on the podcast, we're sitting down with Abby Gross from Write on with Miss G, who has become known for her thriving reading program and the wonderful tools she has developed to support other teachers with their own reading programs.

After spending the first part of her career teaching high school English, Abby unexpectedly fell in love with teaching middle school ELA. With her switch to the middle came a new goal of creating a community of readers and helping all of her students find books they enjoy. For the last four years, she has built a classroom library and independent reading program from the ground up, watching her readers flourish with choice, time,

The co-author of a guidebook for teachers, Keeping the Wonder, and a picture book for young readers, The Magic of Wonder, Abby is committed to fostering joy in learning and literacy. In addition to being an advocate for independent reading, Abby is a big believer in the power of curiosity and student-centered learning. support, and good books.

I enjoyed our conversation so much - this is truly a value-packed episode. I think you'll love Abby's practical, doable (and fun) advice for building more reading and book PR into your weekly routine. Get ready for quickly actionable tips on building strong Book Trailer and First Chapter programs, creating book posters and brochures, selecting and organizing your classroom library, and rolling out fun hybrid book tastings on the regular.

When she's not teaching, you can find Abby creating resources, blogging on writeonwithmissg.com, hanging out on Instagram, presenting workshops for Keeping the Wonder, and reading.

Check out her blog posts on Why You Should Try a Book Tasting, 10 Ways to Use Book Recommendation Posters, and Book Trailer Tuesday: How to Hook Students on Books in 3 Minutes to go even deeper on this subject. And be SURE to grab her FREE Book Trailer Tuesday Links for the Entire Year.

Go Further: 

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook.

Come hang out on Instagram. 

Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you!