The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

This week I want to share a super simple strategy for building more book recommendations into your classes in just two or three minute installments, book trailers. I first heard the idea of “Book Trailer Tuesdays” from Abby Gross, over at Write On with Miss G. I loved the idea right away, as a companion to First Chapter Friday or as its own unique program. But even if you’re not doing Book Trailer Tuesdays, book trailers are an amazing thing to build into your class. Maybe you have a bookmarked list of trailers ready for those odd days when your lesson randomly ends five minutes earlier than you expect. Maybe you change up your book talk routine now and then and show a trailer for a book or two that you have featured in your library. Maybe you show a few trailers to help introduce a new genre, like novels-in-verse, or graphic novels.  Maybe after all this book trailer fun, you have students make book trailers of their own and start building a collection you can show to your students in future years! I hope you give book trailers a try this year!   Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram.  Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the ‘gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you!   

Librarians can help classroom teachers in sooooo many ways, and classroom teachers can return the favor by reminding kids they can always go further than the classroom library to the larger collection at the school or local library, and tap into their librarian's intricate knowledge of the collection to find even more books to love. Forming a bridge between the work you do in class and the life of your school or local library will help kids be connected to book sources and experts beyond the time they spend in your classroom. So today I want to dedicate a full episode to talking about the power of this collaboration and sharing creative options. If you're thinking sadly that your school doesn't have a librarian, or that your school librarian is frantically trying to serve the needs of thousands of kids with a tiny budget and no staff, then remember that many community librarians would love to get your call and help you bring more books into your students' lives. 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 fast-paced and fun podcast for middle schoolers, The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. It's a peabody-award winning mystery podcast, stuffed full of cliffhangers and featuring a full cast of professional actors - most of them middle-schoolers. The plot unfolds in bits and pieces as we follow a group of middle school kids who don’t quite fit in, and don’t know why their friends keep disappearing one by one. The show is frequently broken up by “announcements” from the show’s eccentric (fictional) billionaire sponsor, Oliver Pruitt, with his take on things or with commercials for his “special” school, Pruitt Prep.  This show would make a great text for middle school - there’s so much you could talk about from a podcasting perspective  in the way that it builds suspense, incorporates plot layers through the asides with Oliver Pruitt, and weaves in sound elements. But it could also make for great writing prompts, listening skills practice, and discussion or debate fodder.  I highly recommend listening to just one episode to see what you think, and I bet you won’t want to stop there!  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!   

So you want to share your favorite books with your students to help them love reading. Excellent! But maybe you lack the budget to keep up with their growing love of reading. Maybe you're wishing you could order about 25 different graphic novels (that waiting list for Heartstopper isn't getting any shorter) or your best Jason Reynolds and Kwame Alexander Titles keep disappearing. I hear you! These problems are only a sign that you're doing great things with your choice reading program. But what can you do, besides add to your Amazon Wishlist and apply for grants? Well, you can get your students connected to electronic books and create recommended reading digital shelves for them. And it's actually so much fun. Today on the podcast, I'm walking you through the step-by-step, nitty gritty details so you can start building your shelves immediately. I've had a lot of questions around this strategy, and my goal is to answer every single one so you can feel confident in your success. 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 two quick ways to make back-to-school night in your English classroom something you can enjoy this year.  In today's episode we're talking about how to take the pressure off back-to-school night with stations, and how to use QR codes to quickly and easily share anything that needs to happen online, whether that's signing up for an app, sharing a class website, or giving interested parents your Amazon class wishlist.  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!   

So you've assigned a book you love (or maybe a selection of several) to your students for the summer, and soon enough they'll be back to share their takeaways. But maybe this year you want to hear from them through a form other than the traditional summer reading essay. You want to kick things off with creativity, and also push them to think beyond any internet summary and commentary they may have perused alongside the book. Today on the podcast, I'd like to share four easy alternatives to an in-class essay. Each activity can easily be completed in a day, and can also lead into a larger class discussion of the text. Plus, they're more fun to grade than a stack of 100 essays. Is an in-class essay on the summer reading a valid choice? Sure! But if you'd like to change it up, here are some ideas. The Open Mind Characterization Project Hexagonal Thinking Theme One-Pagers Silent Discussion   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 one of my favorite recent reads - Alone, by Megan E Freeman. I picked up this book after hearing what a smash hit it was with Caitlin Lore’s seniors back when I interviewed her for our episode about verse novel book clubs. If a ton of seniors loved it AND it was middle school appropriate with a younger protagonist, I figured it was a must-read!  I knew coming in that it was a survival story, set in a dystopian future, and that it was a novel-in-verse. I read it in two days, and loved it just as much as I expected. It’s compelling, dramatic, and lyrical, and it manages to maintain suspense without being too frightening.  I’ve often seen it compared to Hatchet, but for me it felt quite different. Much more familiar. While the main character in Hatchet crashes a plane onto an island where he has to survive alone in nature, 12-year-old Maddie must survive in her own city when she wakes up to find every other citizen has been evacuated for some kind of mysterious national emergency, and she was accidentally left behind. It’s easy to start imagining what you would do in the same situation as you read.  Besides loving the book, I appreciated the notes from Megan Freeman at the end. Particularly the way she shared a section of the book written in prose and then its makeover into verse. This could easily become the basis of a creative writing project for kids working through any novel-in-verse or novel-in-verse book clubs.  So if you’ve got a couple of hours and a hammock, beach, or cozy couch available this week, I highly recommend reading Alone, by Megan E. Freeman and thinking about how to incorporate it into your book clubs, First Chapter Friday program, or choice reading library.  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, I’m glad to welcome Kareem Farah, founder of the Modern Classrooms Project. As a teacher in Washington D.C., Kareem faced problems that many teachers can relate to - students missing class all the time, and classes made up of students at hugely varied levels. He wanted to try something new, because he felt the practices he had been taught were not working. Together with his friend Rob Barnett, he created a new instructional model that took into account the fact that students were approaching the materials from different levels and often, on different days following absences. He now shares his methodology through his non-profit, The Modern Classrooms Project, in use by 58,000 teachers in over 150 countries. In this interview, Kareem and I talk about the blended learning approach of the MCP and how to try it out for yourself, and dig deep into how to combine this approach with creative practices and projects. Watch Edutopia's wonderful video about the MCP Grab the free course and resources here. Check out the non-profit 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 share a quick push for trying book clubs this year. If you haven’t jumped on this trend yet, I want to give you a few quick reasons why I hope you will!  Book clubs allow you to give students... more choice in their curriculum more diversity in the voices you share a deeper exploration of a theme or genre (since they end up hearing about so many different books from their peers) Book clubs allow YOU... to consolidate required texts to make room for other options to bring in a wider variety of authors you want to share to find helpful routines that take stress off lesson planning   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!   

AI is here. And everyone is paying attention. Many people are wondering if AI will take over their jobs, others how it can help them do their jobs. Some folks are asking if AI can help us solve global warming, while plenty of people fear that SuperIntelligence might eventually evolve beyond humanity and stop caring about us, dystopian sci-fi style.  And what about our students? Maybe they're wondering how it can help them with their work, while still making room for their originality, creativity, and sense of morality. Maybe they're wondering how it will change their future professions, or create the profession that will someday be theirs. Maybe they’ve heard some people say it should never be used in schools, and others say that to shut the door on it is like abandoning the calculator in favor of pencil and paper, except times a million. At this point, the questions on our minds as educators and the questions on our students' minds might not be so different. After I interviewed Ben Farrell from the New England Innovation Academy last spring, and he talked about bringing students into the conversation to let them share their ideas on how AI should be used, I was inspired to create my own version of an AI Ethical Use PBL unit, and now I want to share it with you. I designed this project in consultation with John Spencer, because I've always admired his work in the PBL and Design Thinking spaces. Today on the podcast, we're walking through the whole project, which you can sign up to have delivered free to your email right here. I'll guide you through the steps of the project, and hopefully by the end of the show you'll feel ready and excited to find space for this unit in your curriculum this year.