Brave New Teaching: A Podcast for High School and Middle School Teachers

How do you feel about group work? Love it or dread it? Either way, stay tuned because today marks the second episode in our four part “The Best Thing I Ever Taught” series, where we’re covering group work.You can probably tell by the title of this episode that we love group work now…but trust us, that hasn’t always been the case. In the past, we absolutely detested it. Group work was one of those things that led to over planning, too much management, and way too much grading. Fast forward to today, and we’re happy to report that student collaboration is one of the main pillars of our teaching practice.We’re going to give you specific examples of group work activities that have worked brilliantly in our classes. One of them even involves students creating a podcast episode! We hope that these ideas give you some new ideas as to how you can incorporate group work that is engaging for your students and builds classroom community (without adding more work on your end).SHOW NOTES: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode124Download your FREE Gratitude Bell Ringers here: https://www.curriculumrehab.com/gratitudeFollow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

We’re kicking off a new 4-episode series called The Best Thing I Ever Taught. (If the name sounds like it’s inspired by The Best Thing I Ever Ate from the Food Network, it’s because it is!) Inside this series, we’ll be sharing all kinds of things that bring us joy and that we, and our students, have seen a huge return on. This week we’re focusing on gateway activities.   First, let’s define exactly what a gateway activity is. It has everything to do with what we do here at Brave New Teaching - essential questions and an inquiry-based curriculum design. More specifically, a gateway activity is the activity at the very beginning of a unit of study that gets your student buy-in. It introduces students to the topics being covered, and gets the chatter going about the essential question for the unit.   We are both sharing the details of the best gateway activities that we’ve each taught, one with a Gatsby unit and the other with a Shakespeare unit. This conversation will let you in on the process of planning these gateway activities, and hopefully you can see that there’s no set procedure for this. It takes brainstorming, and it gets a little messy, but that’s how the best ideas come to be!   If you have any questions after listening, we want to hear from you! Send us a message with questions or comments @bravenewteaching on Instagram. If you want more support with using gateway activities, we invite you to join us in Curriculum Rehab.   SHOW NOTES: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode123   Follow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

Today's episode is a re-run of one of our favorites! If you aren’t already on the dystopian band wagon, we’re fairly confident that you will be after this episode. We’ve taught dystopia for YEARS, and it hasn’t lost any steam along the way. Can you say that for other genres? So, why is dystopia as a specific genre so gosh darn exciting? Why is it something we believe should be in every single ELA classroom? We couldn’t even begin to count the reasons, but to begin, it helps kids understand the society they are growing up in. More importantly, it allows them to begin to build their own options and questions around society. How cool is that? Today we’re making three solid points on why dystopia is something you need to get behind. Tune in to hear us dive into each of these points: 1. Dystopia is always relevant 2. It’s popular and engaging…hello Hunger Games! 3. It has limitless possibilities  Dystopia Workshop: https://www.curriculumrehab.com/dystopia SHOW NOTES: bravenewteaching.com/episode61Mentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

If you’ve been racking your brain for a way to approach a Shakespeare unit in a way that is engaging and impactful for your students, then you’ll want to stick around. This episode is a conversation between Amanda and one of her coaching clients, Kelsi. You’ll get to hear them give all the juicy details about an incredible unit that they designed together.  Kelsi initially came to Amanda for help because her English course was extremely standards-based and focused on teaching for mastery (aka, drill, drill, drill for state testing).  She was struggling to create units that made sense, but were also purposeful and met her students’ needs and interests.  A Shakespeare unit was coming up and Kelsi desperately wanted to find a way to teach it in an innovative way. So, her and Amanda came together to create a unit that paired Macbeth with Long Way Down, by Jason Reynolds. Not to spoil anything, but…the results were magic.  In comparing the two texts, they came up with an engaging essential question that was perfect for Kelsi's group of Sophomores. Inside the episode, Kelsi shares the step-by-step specifics of how she structured this unit, which routines she implemented, and how she assessed her students’ learning.  Check out the show notes: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode121 Follow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

Friends, it’s time to wrap up our nonfiction series that has been focused on biography and memoir. What better way to do that than with a TBR list? We’re sharing our favorite books that fit into the genre of biography and memoir, as well as some that we’ve had on our list but haven’t had a chance to read yet. Disclaimer: you are going to want to put all of these books in your Amazon card immediately. You’ve been warned, so don’t send us your bill! If you ask us, filling up your book shelves with these titles is well worth the money. If you haven’t listened to the rest of this nonfiction series, be sure to check out episode 116, episode 117, episode 118, and episode 119. These episodes really reiterate why you should lean into the possibilities of what this genre has to offer.  Register for our virtual workshop on teaching biography and memoir: https://www.curriculumrehab.com/biographyandmemoir Check out the show notes to easily access all of the text recommendations on our list: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode120 Follow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

For part four of our nonfiction series, we’re looking at using biography and memoir as mentor texts. You’ll hear how we define and use mentor texts in our own classroom. We’ll also give you some specific mentor texts that we recommend using, and our reasoning behind those texts. Since we love a good collabisode, we’ve also crowdsourced some great ideas from our colleagues and friends. They will be sharing their favorite biography and memoirs to use as mentor texts, how it provides a powerful teaching moment, and what students can do with that mentor text. Register for our virtual workshop on teaching biography and memoir: https://www.curriculumrehab.com/biographyandmemoir Check out the show notes to hear all of the mentor text recommendations mentioned in this episode: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode119 Follow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

We love a good unit makeover, and today you’ll hear part of one in action! We’re going to do a makeover on a unit that Marie has taught one time so far. It uses the text, Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. This unit is part of a brand new course. As many of you may have experienced, brand new course + brand new unit = flying by the seat of your pants! In other words, it’s a good time to talk through it and think about some changes that can be made the next time that it’s used.  The unit that we’re talking about in today’s episode looks at systems of power. You’ll hear us discuss the vision for this unit, go through some clarifying questions, and move into forming an essential question. Most importantly, you’ll gain an understanding that this process is pretty messy to work through! Register for our virtual workshop on teaching biography and memoir: https://www.curriculumrehab.com/biographyandmemoir Check out the show notes: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode118 Follow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

We’re on this podcast for a lot of reasons, and one of them is to unpack one of the most powerful and often underutilized genres in the ELA curriculum world, and that is biography and memoir. In our last episode, we began making our passionate case for biography and memoir. If you missed it, you can check it out here.  We’re continuing that conversation today so that you can get even more excited to join our upcoming virtual workshop on teaching memoir and biography. Tickets start at just $7 and we would love to have you join us! We really want this episode to serve as your initial brainstorming so that when you come to the workshop, you are feeling prepared and have ideas ready to go. When we’re talking about how to effectively approach this genre, it all starts with essential questions. If it feels challenging to craft essential questions for biography and memoir, don’t worry, we have lots of ideas for how you can do this with intention. In fact, we have three specific approaches to creating a unit around biography and memoir that we'll share with you in this episode. Register for our virtual workshop on teaching biography and memoir: https://www.curriculumrehab.com/biographyandmemoir Check out the show notes: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode117 Follow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

Hey Brave New Teachers! We’re excited to start a brand new series that we’re putting together for you, starting with this episode. This series will lead into our newest virtual workshop (what we’ve called “festivals” in the past!) that will be held on October 3, 2022. It will be centered around nonfiction and teaching biography and memoir. Are you wondering why we’ve chosen biography and memoir? To put it simply, using biography and memoir, whether it’s a whole unit or sprinkled into your other units, is the single best way to bring authentic voice into your classroom. Today we’re sharing four main points that will build our case for biography and memoir. Register for our virtual workshop on teaching biography and memoir: https://www.curriculumrehab.com/biographyandmemoir Check out the show notes: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode116 Follow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel

Sometimes the best ideas and inspiration come from hearing about other teachers’ experiences in the classroom. That’s why I’m excited to have Ana Perez on the Brave New Teaching podcast today. Ana is a 10th year high school ELA teacher and a Jill of many other trades including poetry, Zumba, and techy resource creation. In the classroom she's a proponent of relationships over content, and outside the classroom, she enjoys creating resources to help other teachers foster meaningful relationships, too. She is passionate about sharing both knowledge and empathy, and believes strongly in the importance of mental health for both teachers and students.  In this conversation, you’ll hear Ana share how she paired Frankenstein with Punching the Air. She created an entire unit that covered a classic text, a film of that text, and a YA novel in-verse. She’s going to tell us all about how she dreamed this unit up, how she planned it all out, and how the unit actually went for her students. Buckle up, because it's incredible! Watch our FREE masterclass, Down with the Reading Quiz SHOW NOTES: https://www.bravenewteaching.com/home/episode115 Follow us on Instagram: @bravenewteachingMentioned in this episode:Get more Brave New Teaching each week:Join BNT Happy Hour Here!"Send us a message - please include your contact information so we can chat soon!"Get your FREE Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs gateway lesson: shop.bravenewteaching.com/cloudyCheck out Curriculum Rehab here!Support the show📚 BNT PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT & RESOURCES 👩‍💻 Join Happy Hour! Curriculum Rehab Down with the Reading Quiz Shop the BNT Resource Library Connect with us on Instagram @bravenewteaching Subscribe to our YouTube Channel