445: The Poetic Structure Lesson I Can't Wait to Do (Today)
Today on the pod, let me walk you through a fun new way of teaching poetic structure. I'm doing it TODAY, and I'm so excited about it, I jus...
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The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
This podcast is full of creative teaching strategies, classroom ideas, and inspiration for middle and high school English teachers. Betsy Potash from Spark Creativity presents new ideas for...
Episodes
20 of 436 episodes444: How One Teacher used Panel Discussions to Help Students Find their Voices
When you think back to your high school English classes, is there a certain activity that really sticks with you? One lesson or project that...
443: What I've Learned about Teaching Reading Strategies
As a fairly constant reader for the last few decades, I sometimes forget how challenging reading can be. But then I get into, for example, a...
442: How One Teacher Leveraged Hexagonal Thinking for Messy Magic
It's easy to think of hexagonal thinking as a one-and-done. But it's not. It's a strategy you can tailor to a thousand different situations....
441: 4 Ways to Help Early Finishers Thrive in ELA
We've all had the experience of planning a detailed activity meant to take thirty or forty minutes, and then watching a student close their...
440: ELA Classroom Design: Come Tour with Me
I've been the first one to school a lot lately, and I'm spending a lot of quiet moments in my classroom, thinking about what's working well,...
439: How to Play Genre Trashketball (A Lesson + A Game)
"What's this?" I was crouched alongside a student on the first day of school as she filled out her reading profile. She pointed her pink hig...
438: Experiments in Ungrading: What does it look like to Decenter Grades?
There are so many ways to grade students. You can avoid zeros, use a standards-based approach, allow iteration, tweak your late policy, expe...
437: 16 Graphic Novels for your Classroom Library
Recently I listened to Daniel Wilingham's book, Why Don't Kids Like School? , about how we can use what we know about how the mind works to...
436: Highly Recommended: This Free Vocabulary Tool
You know how I love to share a great find, and this week I've got a real winner for your vocabulary program. On this episode of "Highly Reco...
435: Start the Year with these AI Conversation Stations
If you joined us for Camp Creative last week, you know we spent one of our days focused on AI. I shared a variety of activities to help stud...
434: What I'll be Doing on the First Day of School
My first first day of school, as you probably know, did not go well. Unless you count laying on the floor of my office crying at the end of...
433: The Uncrackable Justification for Choice Reading
So here's the thing. I know I talk a lot about reading. It's pretty important to me. But all week I've been trying to prepare a different po...
432: ELA Classroom Design: What to Put on your Walls this Fall
I'm not going to lie, the prospect of getting to set up a classroom space after years of dreaming about that very task is one of the reasons...
431: Highly Recommended: This Vehicle for AI in ELA Conversations
So I've been working on the materials for Camp Creative: Your Back-to-School Kickoff Kit, this year's iteration of the free summer PD I run...
430: What you Need to Know about Design Thinking for ELA
Design thinking is a framework for creating things. And creating things, as Semour Papert argued in his theory of constructionism, is the ki...
429: Don't Miss this Essential Lesson on Multimodality
Recently I was invited to give a poetry workshop on a reflection day at a local school. They wanted the writing element of the day to help s...
428: Start a Classroom Library With Me
So maybe you already know I'll be teaching a section of ninth grade next year to help a local school fill a hole. Want to know what I was do...
427: Try this Colorful Maker Tool: Digital Idea Blocks
Walk into an expensive "Innovation Lab" or High Tech Cutting Edge University Makerspace, and you'll probably see a laser cutter, a 3D printe...
426: I Read 17 PD Books this Year so You Don't Have to
I often see conversations online at this time of year about PD books worth reading over the summer. Maybe your PLC is looking for a good rea...