The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

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!   

I want you to watch Gene Luen Yang's Ted talk called “Comics Belong in the Classroom!”  Here's why. It's a hilarious look at why comics are such a powerful medium for our students, how they accidentally got classified as a negative influence on young people (with totally false evidence) and the power they can actually wield for good - Avengers-style. I was so amazed to learn that library usage goes up 82% in libraries that feature graphic novels, according to a School Library journal article.  This Ted Talk is a quick watch. Gene Luen Yang gives a stellar overview of why comics and graphic novels are so helpful for students, how they fell from grace, and why they deserve their current rise to popularity.  Grab a minute to watch it HERE, and then maybe share it with your department! If you've been struggling to get others onboard with a graphic novel book club, a graphic novel unit, or new graphic novels for your choice reading library, this talk just might help.    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 joined by education leader Reid Saaris. He’s the founder of Equal Opportunity Schools, a nonprofit dedicated to ensuring that students of all backgrounds have opportunities to succeed at the highest levels. He is an Echoing Green, a Draper Richards Kaplan, and a Stanford Social Innovation Fellow, and has advised federal, state, & local leaders, teachers, philanthropies, companies, and universities on topics like justice, impact, data analysis, communications, and learning.  His most challenging and meaningful professional experiences have been as a classroom teacher. He’s the author of the new book THE KID ACROSS THE HALL. Today we’ll be talking about why what is often called the achievement gap in schools is actually an opportunity gap, and what teachers can do about it, starting immediately. To follow along with his journey, visit reid4waschools.com. He's currently running for Washington State Superintendent.   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 wonderful website and resource with you, Melissa Alter Smith’s brainchild, Teach Living Poets. When I first started teaching poetry, it couldn’t have been clearer to me that students needed modern poets to relate to. Though we eventually enjoyed unpacking poems like Wallace Stevens’ “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” that was only because we started with a lot of performance poetry, modern poems students leaned into and even loved.  Melissa Alter Smith, founder of the #teachlivingpoets hashtag, creator of the website of the same name, and author of a book on the subject, has created an incredible resource for teachers who want to bring more modern poetry into their classrooms. Since I interviewed her on the show to share her Amanda Gorman lessons, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate on a number of projects with her showcasing other living poets and crafting poetry workshops for teens, and I'm so impressed by her imagination and the way she pushes kids to think deeply about poetry and then express themselves both through analysis and creative writing.  That’s why today I want to highly recommend you go and check out her work. Take a tour of teachlivingpoets.com, visit the amazing virtual library of work available to you there, and find a new poetry workshop to add to your lessons this year. See how your students respond, and then go back for more! 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 Dr. Mark Gooden, the Christian Johnson Endeavor Professor in Education Leadership and Director of the Endeavor Antiracist & Restorative Leadership Initiative (EARLI) in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University. He’s got a new book out, 5 Practices for Equity-Focused School Leadership, offering five methods to increase educational equity and eliminate marginalization based on race, disability, socioeconomics, language, gender, and sexual identity, and religion.  In this interview, I asked Dr. Gooden to bring his work right into the ELA classroom. You’re going to hear his thoughts on what it means to be an anti-racist teacher in the long term, how to listen better to the people in your community, how to fight for diverse books, and more.  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 give you a few quick ideas for using your whiteboard to help share great books with your students. First things first, your whiteboard tray. I am seeing a lot of folks making a super quick display that’s really impactful by spreading books along their tray, then writing a one-sentence teaser above the book. This display is so easy to change up, and you can even get students involved in making new versions. Next up, you can use your whiteboard to showcase what you’re reading. Create a little corner that says “Ms. Potash is reading…” and then print cover screenshots of what you’re reading. Again, so easy to change up, but it opens up conversations if kids have read or want to read what you’re reading. I recently saw the Book Wrangler on Instagram talking about magnetic book shelves that he’s using in his library under the circulation desk. These would be a great add on a whiteboard too. Small magnetic shelves would let you feature a few books front and center of your classroom, and you could write headers or descriptions next to the shelves. Finally, here’s an idea that could combine them all. You know I’ve been creating free display materials for various theme months throughout the year, most recently Hispanic Heritage Month. Caitlin Lore, who was on the podcast last year, has generously shared pictures with me of how she uses these displays as a starting point to devote her entire whiteboard to stunning displays for these various theme months. You could do the same, and incorporate all of these other ideas. Feature books from the theme along your whiteboard, add some to magnetic shelves, read one yourself and feature it in your corner, and then add display materials and posters wherever there’s still room.  So if you’ve got room on a whiteboard this year, I highly recommend trying one or all of these quick flips to turn it into a P.R. station for books and authors. It won’t take long, but it may just inspire a lot of new 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!   

Need a creative approach to your next short story? Or short story unit? (By the way, here are some fabulous classic and contemporary short stories if you need some). Stations can provide so many inroads, while allowing students to proceed at their own pace and based on their own interests. PLUS, they give you a chance to move around the room and help out individual students or small groups that need you. So today on the podcast, I want to share some creative options when it comes to short story stations. We'll talk about the fundamental elements that can help make stations a success (like clear tasks, resources, scaffolds, and models) as well as ideas specific to approaching the key elements of short stories. Could you use all these activities with short stories even if you WEREN'T doing stations? Sure, that's definitely an option too. But they would make excellent stations.   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 tell you about the most beautiful, powerful, impactful classroom posters I’ve seen on the internet. And they’re totally free.  This isn’t the first time I’ve talked about Amplifier Art on the podcast, and it probably won’t be the last. I’ve even had their executive director, Emily, on the podcast to talk about their incredible wellbeing series.  But since it was Indigenous Peoples Day this week, I think it’s the perfect time to recommend their “Thriving People, Thriving Places” campaign. These posters help to rewrite old narratives and counter stereotypes by featuring modern Indigenous leaders showing strength and courage.  Here’s how Amplifer describes the series: “The Thriving Peoples Thriving Places campaign was a collaboration between Nia Tero and Amplifier, and uplifts the stories of fifteen Indigenous women leaders from locales spanning from the Philippines and New Zealand to the Brazilian Amazon and the Arctic.” To find these posters, just visit Amplifier Art’s Free Downloads section, then choose Indigenous Resistance and click down at the bottom to show all the posters. Here's the link.  While you’re at Amplifier, I highly recommend looking around at their wellbeing series as well, and all their amazing free poster downloads, to see what else might be a helpful addition to your walls. It’s really an amazing site, and you can easily sign up for their updates while you’re there. They’re hosting their first ever educator’s conference in Los Angeles soon, if you happen to be in that area.  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!   

In this podcast, discover NINE creative ways to bring Taylor Swift's music into class. Find out how to have students create their own eras, practice public speaking on song-inspired topics with song-inspired tones, build book bracelets or character playlists, practice rhetorical analysis through songs and music videos, and more.  Special thanks to ALL our wonderful guests - Ashley from Building Book Love, Amanda from Mud & Ink Teaching, Delia from @mrsreganreads, Allie from @bayeringwithfreshmen, Meredith from Bespoke ELA, Melissa from Reading and Writing Haven, and Krista from @whimsyandrigor. Helpful Links: The Eras Project: Make your copy of the Canva template here Bookish Bracelets: See an example in this reel Practice Rhetorical Analysis with Songs: Grab the free rhetorical triangle templates here  Practice Character Analysis with Eras: Pick up the free resource Teach Narrative Terms with "Love Story": Grab the  free resource Help Students create their own Antiheroes:  FREE anti-hero character sketch chart Guide Students to Practice Tone when they "Talk Swiftly": use this link to download the free teaching tool   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’ve got a productivity tip to give you so much more focused time in your classroom.   Let’s talk about email, and how often you check it.    I can still remember the exact feeling of sitting in my kneeling desk in my first classroom, watching red flags spring up in the eight different inboxes in my First Class email dashboard. No sooner would I zero out my personal inbox than there would be a new announcement to teachers, or request to coaches, or task for advisors.    It was like playing whack-a-mole, trying to respond to everyone all day long.    But I worked hard at it. Every time I was free before school, between classes, before lunch, after lunch, and before practice, I’d quickly log in so I could reduce the stacking emails in every conference.   Whack. Whack. Whack.   And so it went on for years.   Want to know how much I check my email now? Once a day. Unless I really can’t get through it all, then I might follow up later after turning my attention to another project that needed me more.    Here’s the thing. In my experience, your inbox will be as demanding as you let it be. If you feel you must respond to everyone within 20 minutes, that’s what they’ll expect from you. But really, for almost everything, a day is a totally reasonable turnaround time.   Sitting down to respond to emails when you really have the time and energy, instead of task switching in and out of your inbox constantly just to “make progress” can be a huge time saver for you. Not to mention energy and mood saver. The last thing you want is to feel frustrated and angry starting class after getting a problematic email, or to walk into lunch with your mind overwhelmed by an announcement you just read.    Try saving email for one chunk of focused time in the day, and see if you begin to feel more free - in your mood and with your time -  for other aspects of your day that are more rewarding and interesting to you.   So, if you’ve ever felt like you’re caught in an email hamster wheel that never ends, this week I highly recommend you try an experiment. Check it once (or if you must, twice) a day for a week instead of 10 or 15 times. See if it’s a win 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!