The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

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/     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! 

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   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! 

  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.  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!      

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    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!   

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    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!

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    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!   

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.   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! 

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. 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!   

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.  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! 

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/    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! 

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    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! 

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    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!   

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/  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!   

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    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! 

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).    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! 

  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!   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!   

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, let’s talk about some of the best summer PD options out there.  First things first, I’ve got to tell you about my personal favorite summer 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 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, 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 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!   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!    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.  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! 

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.   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.  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.)   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!  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