The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Want to love walking into your ELA classroom each day? Excited about innovative strategies like PBL, escape rooms, hexagonal thinking, sketchnotes, one-pagers, student podcasting, genius hour, and more? Want a thriving choice reading program and a shelf full of compelling diverse texts?
You're in the right place!
Here you'll find interviews with top authors from the ELA field, workshops with strategies you can use in class immediately, and quick tips to ignite your English teacher creativity.
Love teaching poetry? Explore blackout poems, book spine poems, I am from poems, performance poetry, lessons for contemporary poets, and more.
Excited to get started with hexagonal thinking? Find out how to build your first deck of hexagons, guide your students through their first discussion, and even expand into hexagonal one-pagers.
Into visual learning? Me too! Learn about sketchnotes, one-pagers, and the writing makerspace.
Want to get your students podcasting? Get the top technology recs you need to make it happen, and find out what tips a podcaster would give to students starting out.
Wish your students would fall for choice reading? Explore top titles and how to fund them, learn to make your library more appealing, and find out how to be a top P.R. agent for books in your classroom.
In it for the interviews? Fabulous! Find out about project-based-learning, innovative school design, what really helps kids learn deeply, design thinking, how to choose diverse texts, when to scaffold sketchnotes lessons, building your first writing makerspace, cultivating writer's notebooks, getting started with genius hour, and so much more, from our wonderful guests.
Here at The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, discover you're not alone as a creative English teacher. You're part of a vast community welcoming students to their next escape room, rolling out contemporary poetry and reading aloud on First Chapter Fridays, engaging kids with social media projects and real-world ELA units.
As your host (hi, I'm Betsy), I'm here to help you ENJOY your days at school and feel inspired by all the creative ways to teach both contemporary works and the classics your school may be pushing. I taught ELA at the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade levels both in the United States and overseas for almost a decade, and I didn't always get support for my creativity. Now I'm here to make sure YOU get the creative support you deserve, and it brings me so much joy.
Welcome to The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies!
Latest episodes
Jun 3, 2017 • 12min
006: 10 Ideas for your Professional Development (Besides Conferences)
In this episode, discover ten ideas for creative professional development besides attending a conference. There are so many ways to learn something new (including this podcast). 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!
May 28, 2017 • 19min
005: How to Get Started with a Classroom Collaboration
Want to try collaborating with another teacher? Maybe another teacher in another country? Get ideas for how to find a partner and start a project in this episode. 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!
May 18, 2017 • 15min
004: Theater and Performance Activities for ELA
Help your ELA students getengaged through theater and performance activities in class. There are so many options! We'll get into some of my favorites in this episode. 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!
May 17, 2017 • 19min
003: Start your Choice Reading Program
You don't have to choose between choice reading and whole class texts. You can have both, and student will benefit from each in different ways. In this episode, I explain how to create a free choice reading program for your ELA students to complement your main curriculum, and give you six fun ways to spark student engagement with it. 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!
May 17, 2017 • 15min
002: Easy Strategies for Differentiation
In this episode, discover three easy ways to use differentiation to let students play to their strengths in your ELA classroom. 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!
May 17, 2017 • 18min
001: My Favorite Strategy for Every Single ELA Unit
Would 12 year olds learn to spell 1000 words without the National Spelling Bee? Would high schoolers practice layups for hundreds of hours without the lure of Saturday games and the dream of college ball? For that matter, would you be as interested in upping your teaching game if you didn't know you would have 30 curious faces staring at you come Monday? Having a REASON to learn something is half the battle... maybe more than half. When you incorporate a showcase project in every unit, you give students motivation to learn the lessons along the way that will help them succeed. Maybe your poetry unit wraps up in a poetry slam, and students know they'll be on stage in front of their peers to perform. That's strong motivation to understand alliteration! Maybe your genius hour project finishes with the publication of student podcasts. To the actual world. Whoa. Motivation for sure! Maybe your speech unit finishes with a presentation to the school board. Suddenly rhetorical devices feel a lot more relevant. You get the idea! In this episode, I'm talking about the secret sauce I like to mix into every unit, and why it helps so much. 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!
