The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

This week I want to talk what to do if you're trying to help your students take advantage of the benefits of sketchnotes but they're stuck. We’re going to dig into a special video series by Sylvia Duckworth called “Sketchnote Fever” and how it can help. Students often struggle at first with sketchnotes, because they feel ill-equipped to add icons and doodles to their notes if they aren’t natural artists. Someone probably told them when they were 6 that they were bad at art, and they’ve integrated that into their identity by high school. HOWEVER. Sylvia has a wonderful series of short videos teaching by demonstration how to draw simple icons to help illustrate ideas. If you take a few minutes before a time when students will be taking notes and play one of her super short videos, like “School icons,” “Subject icons,” “frames,” or “banners,” students will have a chance to practice these easy icons and build confidence in how to integrate them.  Ask your students to keep a special place in their notes where they always draw their icons from the videos, so they slowly build a visual library they can refer to - then REMIND them to refer to it!  Little by little, students will become more proficient at creating meaningful sketches to complement their text notes. Which means that they will become better at making their notes memorable through the critical thinking and dual coding that happens when translate what they hear into words and imagery that work together to make meaning.  So this week, I want to highly recommend that you follow THIS LINK  and check out Sylvia Duckworth’s amazing “Sketchnote Fever” series. You’ll discover 34 super quick videos and printable handouts of the icons featured in every single one. Isn’t that amazing? Thank you, Sylvia! 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!   

The week before winter break can be a great time for wintery poetry. A mini-unit like this is flexible, seasonal, and easy to fit around whatever else is going on in those final (frantic? fun? festive?) days. You may have favorites of your own to incorporate, but today I just want to share three quick and creative ideas for your toolkit. #1: Winter Holiday Lipograms Ever since Melissa Alter Smith of Teach Living Poets introduced me to lipograms, I've been so intrigued by this poetic form. A lipogram is simply a poem in which a poet avoids a certain letter (or letters) of the alphabet, but I love the way Melissa had her students avoid all vowels except one. For this project (grab the free curriculum I designed with Melissa here), students will choose one vowel and then write a holiday poem using only that vowel. There are three quick brainstorming activities they can do to help them generate enough words with their chosen vowel to write a poem (it's harder than it may sound!). 2: Winter Poetry Tiles If you've ever played with magnetic poetry on your refrigerator, you already have the idea of digital poetry tiles. These kits are so easy to use to create poems, and they help students relax and move beyond writer's block. All you need is a Google Slide and a bunch of individual word images to move around on that slide. You can make it as complex or as simple as you like. Get the full walkthrough in the full shownotes at nowsparkcreativity.com.  Designing these kits does take a little time, and might best be enjoyed with a fun movie and a warm mug of cinnamon apple cider. (Or you can always use mine, which you can peruse here or grab from The Lighthouse). 3. Winter Poetry One-Pagers The Poetry Foundation has a lovely collection of Winter Poems, including Mary Oliver's "White Eyes," which I would really recommend. Its lovely language and gentle structure gives students plenty to dig into without being overwhelming. Whether you use "White Eyes" or another winter favorite of yours, why not try a poetry one-pager? Maybe you've tried one-pagers for novels and you're ready to branch out. Or maybe this will be your first one-pager. Either way, it's a great activity to help students dig into a poem and show their understanding through both words and visuals - a skill vital to many types of real-world communication in our world today. As always, I suggest sharing a template with students (this is mine on TPT). When you design your template, think about the types of things you want your students to really explore in the poem. For example, your one-pager instructions might ask students to include: a border of imagery from the poem poetic devices they notice along with quotations to illustrated them connections between the poem and other poems, pieces of art, or books connections between the poem and current events or their own lives themes from the poem along with illustrations of those themes through quotations and/or imagery a look at the poet's style a key symbol or image from the poem If students need full scaffolding, you can let them know where on the page to include each element. If they have some experience and are ready for more independence, you can let them choose where to put everything, or even to use blank paper instead of a template.   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!       

This week I want to share a productivity tip that has changed my life in ways large and small.  Three years ago we were all in the heart of a pandemic. My children were very young - five and eight. My mom was sick. There was a lot of pressure on our family, as there was on pretty much every family. I had been sharing teaching ideas on this podcast and by email for a long time, and it was clear that my community of teachers online needed more from me than a few ideas each week, given what they were being asked to do - radically change their curriculum to an online or hybrid one with little or no training or preparation.  At this time, I took a course with a guy named James Wedmore about how to be more effective in sharing my ideas online. But it was really one tiny part of that huge course that changed everything. It was the idea that anything can be completed if you break it down to its smallest parts and then schedule them into your calendar. I decided to try the process with opening a teacher membership, which is now The Ligthhouse. I wrote down all the tasks, starting from the tiniest - choose a name. And I scheduled them. Day one, choose the name. And so on. Little by little by little, all the tasks got done. I was able to start and complete the biggest work project of my life while homeschooling both kids and still doing everything at work that I was doing before, when both kids actually attended school.  So that’s a long story, I know. But for me, it shows the power of the chunk and schedule. What is that you do not have time for? That you dream of? Whether it’s getting your masters degree, planning an incredible unit on Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, applying to present at a national conference, running a 10K, or something else, break it down into its tiniest moving pieces. Then write them down in your planner. Make them the first thing you do on those days instead of the last. I honestly think you’ll be amazed at what you can accomplish once that dream project becomes a series of tiny, manageable tasks.  Because I was able to accomplish a task I found incredibly intimidating during a time in my life when I was unexpectedly busier than I had ever been, I am putting a lot of gusto behind this when I say... I highly recommend you try the chunk-and-schedule method the next time there’s something you want to do that you just can’t seem to find the time for that you want.  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 Martina Cahill, who goes by The Hungry Teacher online. One of her great gifts is helping middle school ELA teachers rock it with choice reading and book clubs, though I believe a lot of what she teaches can easily apply to high school too, especially when it comes to cultivating a culture of reading, trying out different forms of book clubs, and rolling out book tastings that make an impact.  If you’ve ever wondered what you can do in advance to help make your book club unit a success, you’re going to find some really helpful ideas in this conversation.  Helpful Links:  Ready to jump into book clubs, but need a bit more information? Be sure to grab Martina’s Book Club blueprint. You can find Martina on Instagram where she shares more about book clubs, independent reading and writing.  You can also visit her website here. 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!   

This week I want to talk about argument, and why it sometimes seems so esoteric to kids when they learn about it in class, and so relevant when they watch it unfold on their screens.  This week a member of our Lighthouse community threw out a question - is the five paragraph essay dead? It felt like a pretty important question for our community of English teachers, and soon got me thinking about my experience as someone who basically writes all day long. I write podcasts, blog posts, Instagram carousels, social media captions, interview outlines, and emails from morning til night. And I am very often trying to argue something. I argue that slam poetry will help you engage students with poetry. Or that it’s important to build art and design into ELA classes because communication is increasingly through multimedia. Or that student podcasting is not as hard as it seems.  But do I use the 5 paragraph essay structure that I learned back in my high school English and history classes? Do I use formal language and avoid contractions and keep slang out of it and always always always use 3rd person?  Interesting question. I often do use elements of the 5 paragraph essay. Hooks matter. Introducing what a piece is going to be about from the get go so people know what to expect. Supporting ideas with anecdotes, statistics, or relevant visuals to help bring home a point that makes the argument. Wrapping it all up, at least to some extent, with a concluding bow.  But I almost never go with formal language or 3rd person, and the extensive online writing class I took long ago basically told me I had better use contractions or suffer the consequences of sounding stilted and distant. Slang, pop culture references, and a good GIF help me make my point. Even emojis have been recommended to me by professionals in the online community as important additions to certain types of writing. So this week, I want to suggest that you talk with kids about how argument shows up in their world - maybe even ask them to go on a scavenger hunt for argument.  What TikTokers are out there making an argument? What are Youtubers trying to sell, and how do they make their case? What Instagram accounts make an interesting enough point about, well, anything, that your students stick around to read it?  These are arguments being made as surely as students are often asked to make arguments about The Great Gatsby, and the two are more related than it might seem on the surface.  Think about ways you can build argument into other types of assignments, in addition to the argumentative essay. But export the language. Teach kids the power of a hook on a research-based Instagram carousel. Show them how they need to use real evidence to back up the main points in an infographic, and how they still need a full sources cited.  Let them try writing emails to the school board about something they’re passionate about, and don’t stipulate the number of paragraphs so much as the clarity of the ideas and the evidence to support them.  I think of the 5 paragraph essay as a super-scaffolded ELA practice round for the writing waiting for kids in the world. Is it dead? Nope. Is it the end-all-be-all of argument? Definitely not. Can we frame it that way for our kids, kind of like batting practice for a professional athlete? Yep. And this week, I want to highly recommend that we do.    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!   

When it comes to an engaging poetry unit, I believe the #1 building block is performance. There's something about watching contemporary poets stand up and deliver their work that is undeniably engaging. Kids might hate the piece they see performed. They might love it. They might feel their skin crawl watching it because they think the poet is so awkward... or get goosebumps because it so exactly describes their own experience. But whether they love it or they hate it, in my experience, they're INTO it. They're THERE for it. And they love debating about it. So today on the podcast, I want to talk about performance poetry, and how to use it in your classroom. By the end of this episode, you'll walk away with my favorite clips, lesson ideas, and classroom event possibilities. See the Full Show Notes at Spark Creativity The Black Friday Catalogue  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!   

This week I want to talk about how one-pagers can be a powerful gateway to creative options in your classroom.  Let’s start with the one-pager basics. A one-pager allows students to express their takeaways from, well, just about anything, on a single paper through a combination of words and images. A one-pager can includes quotations, analysis, key terms, imagery, special fonts, symbolic colors, and more. You probably already know that my #1 tip for one-pagers is to give students a template that connects the elements that you want with a location on a template, so kids don’t feel overwhelmed as they begin to experiment.  You can try your first one-pager with a novel, a Ted talk, a poem, a short story, a play, a song, a podcast... You get the idea!  One of the great things about one-pagers is that they open the door to this form of dual expression, where kids are communicating their ideas through both words and visuals. Take a second to talk to them about how prevalent this is in the world. Ask them to consider political campaigns, social media, Youtube, online news. Get them started thinking about how often they see only words or only pictures, and how often it’s actually a combination that expresses ideas most effectively and memorably.  As students realize that their simple first step of a one-pager is actually guiding them into a new genre of expression, one that parallels many forms of real world communication, they may open up to more type of creative projects in class. You may find them more excited about research carousels, infographics, book trailers, and more real-world projects that bring visuals onto the scene to complement their writing. You may find that fewer students scoff that art is a waste of their time.  If you haven’t tried a one-pager yet, this week I want to highly recommend that you dive in! I’ll link my free templates for any novel in the show notes. And if you have, give a little thought to how you can use them as a gateway in students’ minds. It’s a powerful shift in how we see the world, and one that can benefit your creative classroom.  Free One-Pager Templates Here Black Friday Menu for Next Week Starting Monday (Each Button Goes Live on its Day of the Week) 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!   

The week before Thanksgiving it's easy to feel a little scattered! For teachers AND students. It can be nice to take a break from your main unit and focus on some activities that still promote ELA skills but give kids something freshly engaging to focus on. Since I imagine your attention is a bit divided at the moment between lesson planning, menu planning, and maybe even packing lists, I'd like to give you three day's worth of activities that you can plug and play next week to take the pressure off yourself. Links Mentioned in the Show: Preview the fun Black Friday week deals (including The Lighthouse $1 trial) here.  Free Native American Heritage Month Display: You can grab it here. You can make your copy of the guided gratitude journal and thank you notes here. Get the poetry tiles here.  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!     

This week I want to share advice I only wish someone had given me long ago - don’t grade everything your students create in class.  It’s easy to feel pressure to put a grade on everything students make. They often come in expecting to see a letter on top of every single piece of paper they create for you.  But ew. It’s impossible to keep up, and it doesn’t necessarily benefit them for you to try.  Instead, think about how you can grade what really shows what they’ve learned, and build in ways to validate their effort on other things. Maybe you do 5 bellringers a week, and the grading load is crushing you. Try walking around with a stamp and stamping them as students complete them. They see that you’re noticing their work, and you can give them a completion grade for the week, taking off for kids who repeatedly DON’T do the work. Or you could invite students to choose their favorite on Friday that really shows their mastery and effort, and turn that one in for you to see. Let’s look at another scenario. Your students are working on their argument writing, and you’re planning to do a series of five prompts with them. Think about how you can build in self-editing stations (with tips from you build into the stations), peer editing, and revision practice focused on specific skills you know they need to work on throughout the unit. Then invite them to turn in a final draft of just one of the prompts for you to grade.  I could go on and on with examples, but the main thing is to remember: you don’t have to grade it all. Use stickers, stamps, check marks, peer feedback, and selected pieces to turn in for grading to validate your students effort, and save your grading time for what really counts.  I highly recommend you give yourself permission to stop grading everything, and see how much creative planning time you can get back into your day!  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've all been there. You walk into your English class, unveil your new ELA lesson plan with all the joy and care of a museum curator lifting the veil on a new Van Gogh, and your students just... don't care. They've got their own problems. Their own stresses. They decided in 4th grade they didn't like reading. In 5th grade that they "weren't creative." In 7th grade that they needed to give serious attention to social media if they wanted to stay cool. And now they're sitting in your class, eyes not-so-subtly glued to the little glowing screen under their desk or the clock above your MLA poster display. So what do you do? In today's podcast, I'll share five different paths you might take to help them tap back into ELA. Choose your favorite, connect the dots on two or three, or try them all. Focus on Connection One way to chip away at apathy is to focus on connecting with students on a personal level. Maybe you come up with fun nicknames for kids you're trying to gently attract back into the ELA sphere. Maybe you make it to some sports games and get to talking with your student-athletes about the season. Maybe you work on some templates for positive notes home, and you send a slew of them every week. Maybe you do some serious student surveying about their interests, past reading lives, favorite types of projects, favorite EVERYTHING, so you can keep their personalities and histories in mind as you design curriculum. When you focus on connection, you help student start to feel more at home in class and more interested in paying attention. The relationships you have with kids can help them overcome their apathy, often in connection with some of the other strategies we're talking about today. One of the quickest, easiest ways to get started with relationship building in my experience is to use Attendance Questions. This quick five minute activity for the start of class is an automatic point of connection with every student. Whether you go with silly or serious questions, you give every student a chance to tell you something about themselves. You can grab three weeks of fun questions to get started for free right here.  Incorporate Student Interests in your Work whenever you Can I was reminded of how crucial student interests can be last year when I interviewed C.J. Reynolds about enjoyable classroom management strategies. He shared his wish that his teachers could have explained the hero's journey to him in terms of the movies he was loving as a teen, and how quickly that would have helped him understand it. C.J. tries hard to keep a handle on the T.V. shows, movies, Manga, etc. that his students love so that he can build it into class content and assignments, and ask kids about it in the in-between times. It's a strategy worth trying. Might your students be excited about writing argument practice about the One Chip Challenge? Might they enjoy analyzing the tone in Taylor Swift Songs? Might they look up in shock when you reference the crazy trend their favorite Tik-Toker just started as you move into your rhetorical analysis unit? Incorporating your students' interests anywhere and everywhere you can will help you build relationships with them (which we already talked about!) and it can also help you reel them in to be more interested in the work. A kid who dreams of being a Youtuber might be a lot more interested in creating a video documentary about a local change-maker than about writing a research paper about a historical changemaker. And you can build in a whole lot of the same skills... Ride your Choice Reading Program to Better Relationships and Motivation As an introvert, it wasn't always easy for me to chat with my students between periods. I wasn't the teacher out in the hall cracking jokes and inventing hilarious nicknames. But once I started working seriously on my choice reading program, it became a major vehicle for helping me connect with my students and motivate them more across all of our class content. I vividly remember my student Toran, in Bulgaria. He seemed to survey our class from some higher plane, smiling ironically at my attempts to engage him and generally staying out of every activity and discussion he could manage to avoid. He was smart, but he didn't really seem to care. After a few reading sessions in our choice reading unit, I realized he was reading nothing but super dense history books, many hundreds of pages long. He was incredibly interested in history, and willing to spend hours poring over it any time he was given the opportunity. Bingo. Our conversations changed entirely. When he realized how eager I was to help him find books that matched his interests, and to hear what he was learning, he warmed up to me and the class in general. I still remember his incredible slam poem about living in Bulgaria from later in the year, when he was one of our class slam winners. What a long way he came. I could tell you a lot of stories like this, but instead I'll encourage you to go and find your own! When you focus significant energy on your reading program, you'll find new ways to connect with kids, see their reading skills, motivation, and stamina improve, AND oten see their interest in your class go up. That's been my experience across classes, years, and even countries. Not sure where to start with independent reading? I boiled down all my best advice and resources into one epic toolkit for you. Grab my free choice reading toolkit here. Choose Projects with a Hook If you've been around here for long, you'll know I think projects can be a powerful motivator for any unit. I like to use the name "Showcase Projects." With a showcase project, students are going to be sharing something amazing that they create, and they're going to be working on that amazing something all through the unit. In fact, that showcase project is going to function as their motivation to learn the skills needed in the unit. To follow up on the documentary project I mentioned before, maybe you're going to host a film festival of short documentaries your students produce at the end of a unit on research and interview skills. As you teach them about hooks, B roll, researching background information on their documentary subjects, building interview questions, effective film angles, media mixing, and more, they'll have a powerful reason to pay attention. Their documentary will soon be competing in your school film festival, and more people will be watching it than just their teacher. Wrapping a poetry unit with a poetry slam, a theater unit with a play performance, a nonfiction unit with a podcast project, a novel unit with a literary food truck festival - these are all examples of connecting a project with a strong hook and an authentic audience with materials students may or may not be excited about at first. I have had consistent success using special projects as a hook to help students get interested in all different types of content, so I can honestly recommend it as a great way to fight against apathy and disconnection. Try Different Types of Texts Sometimes kids who have been turned off to ELA just need another way to engage with a text than a long novel. A novel-in-verse is a great option, and Jason Reynolds has some stellar ones, but so do a lot of other folks! Check out this fun show from last year about a novel-in-verse book club unit that kept seniors engaged all the way to the end of the year in Caitlin Lore's classroom. Book clubs in general can be a great way to reel students back in, since they provide for choice within any genre or theme focus you want to share. A memoir book club with books by people students admire could work well, or an identity book club with titles that students can relate to. Graphic novels are another amazing option. This genre has exploded in recent years, and the research tells us that graphic novels are a major hook for student readers. Swapping in Gareth Hinds' versions of classics like The Odyssey or Romeo and Juliet might help students re-engage, and you can always bring in parts of the traditional text to complement the graphic novel once students have become interested. Then there are all the options available through the media, like National Geographic's amazing series of short documentaries, podcasts, and short films. You can teach ELA skills with such a range of texts, and online multimedia is freely available, so you can always build a short and engaging unit around it to help start a new chapter with students who aren't engaging. Choose your own Adventure You know best which of these pathways might best help you help your students. Maybe it's a combination, but remember, you don't have to put it all in place at once. Try out some attendance questions this week, start working on some content based on students' interests next time you're building new writing or speaking prompts, think about your choice reading program or start previewing some graphic. novels... whatever you can fit, whenever you can fit it. And slowly but surely, I think you'll see more engagement. More students caring. More classes that gain momentum instead of feeling like a struggle. I'll be cheering for 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!