The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

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.

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On this week’s mini-episode, I want to answer a question from our community about lesson planning. Here it is: “How do you plan? I’m struggling to put together a series of lessons that culminate into a bigger assignment. For example, if I want my students to end up writing a persuasive essay, what would I plan to prepare them to write it? Do you go with a theme? Make it part of a novel study? I’m struggling!” OK, this is a big question, but I’m ready for it. In today’s episode, we’re digging into planning and demystifying the process.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “plan with the end in mind.” The concept of backwards design, now widely used for planning, comes from Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins’ book, Understanding by Design. The University of Illinois’ “Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence” online site has a useful quick summary. Let me give you the speedy version here: First, you figure out what you want your students to be able to do. Then you figure out how they could show that they can do it. Then you plan the activities and assessments that will get them there.

So let’s apply this planning frameworks to today’s problem - how do you plan a unit around a persuasive essay? The goal is to have students write a strong essay, presumably with some specific characteristics appropriate to their level. Along the way, they can show their mastery of elements of the final work through smaller argument practices, then they’ll show their overall mastery in the essay. But what would be good activities to build in along the way?

The easy go-to for preparing for an essay would be to write lots of short pieces throughout the unit, which really could be centered on anything. You could embed work like this into a novel study, a deep dive into short stories, book clubs, poetry, or even podcasting. This will give you an inviting structure in which to situate your writing practice.

You can practice thesis statements, introductions, text analysis paragraphs, and conclusions based on your larger unit. And you can think about how to come at each one from different angles and with different types of prompts to help students stay interested. You can share mentor texts, incorporate peer review, station work, and writing makerspace elements. There are so many ways to practice these skills.

Here’s how I might plan the first week of a poetry unit focused on a final product of a persuasive essay.

Monday I might do a deep dive on a contemporary poet, sharing two of her performance pieces and doing some creative writing around her work with my students. Then I might share an online article about this poet, arguing that she should have been the winner of a prestigious spoken word poetry competition and ask student to identify the thesis statement in the article and discuss, in partners, whether or not they find the argument convincing.

Tuesday I might look at a contemporary poem in both its written and spoken form, and have a mini debate about which format feels more compelling. Then dive into a mini-lesson on thesis statements and have kids practice writing a thesis for the question we just debated, plus gather two pieces of evidence that could help them make their argument.

Wednesday we might start by trading those theses and giving each other feedback based on a checklist, then move into a pop-up poetry workshop and create performance pieces of our own.

Thursday we might look at a performance piece and work on annotating a text version of it, then again practice developing a thesis statement about it and gathering evidence.

Friday we might start with a mini-lesson on writing a full introduction and then write a practice introduction around that thesis statement looking at several models, before moving into our regular First Chapter Friday program for choice reading.

Now I’ve planned one week of the unit building toward my final assessment but also moving through a poetry unit that I find valuable for both engagement and other types of learning goals, and continued with my choice reading program as well. In the following week, we can practice text analysis paragraphs and conclusions, and look at some more mentor texts involving poetry-related arguments, as well as continue exploring the work of contemporary poets and furthering our choice reading goals.

Planning a unit means juggling a lot of different pieces - the learning goals, the types of activities that can engage and support many learners, the meaningful, ongoing programs you want to be consistent about, and of course, engagement. It gets easier the more you do it! This week, I highly recommend keeping backwards design in, well, the back of your mind, the next time you go to plan a unit.

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Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for this week’s mini episode. Today, I want to talk about a much-debated subject - when it comes to choice reading, what counts and what doesn’t?

If you’ve been here with me for long, I bet you can imagine that a lot of books were involved in the early life of my own children. They had tiny themed board book displays before they could roll over, and we were a constant at our little local library. But after their baby years, my two kids’ reading paths diverged, wildly.

My son’s path has been like mine. He went through epic series after epic series, hit the children’s classics, and is now deeply entrenched in wonderful fantasy books that he reads to himself every night, unless he’s not feeling well, in which case he plugs in an audiobook.

My daughter’s path, not so much. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve offered to read to her, tried to hand off a book I was sure she would love, or invited her to read with me and gotten turned down - very politely - I could probably book us into Club Med for the weekend.

Helping her become fond of books has been an eight year project, and lately I feel like I’m seeing it happen. But it’s been VERY heavy on three formats, and they happen to be much debated as “real” reading - graphic novels, re-reading old favorites, and audiobooks.

For my youngest, becoming a reader has meant listening to soooooooooo much Junie B. Jones and Ramona. It has meant reading all 18 of the hilarious graphic novel series, The Bad Guys, and suddenly announcing that it was “Better than eating candy.” It’s meant careful tiny steps forward with print text, one page at a time, in books about subjects she absolutely loves, like young girls discovering their magical connection to elemental horses.

Without the re-reading, the audiobooks and the graphic novels, I’m pretty sure I’d still be getting that polite smiling “no thank you, Mama” everytime I reached for a book.

It can be hard - believe me I know - to see a kid re-read an old book or plug into an audiobook - when you really want to see them explore new titles and improve their print comprehension. And I’m all for encouraging students to keep trying a lot of different things, and even to read two or three books at a time - maybe an old favorite, an audiobook, and a little bit of something new and challenging. I often have this pattern going in my own life. But this week I just want to highly recommend that we remember, all books are part of the journey to becoming a reader. Rereading, graphic novels, and audiobooks might just be a student’s gateway to a lifetime of reading.

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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

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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!

It's day one of Camp Creative, and we're diving into Podcasts as Texts! In today's show, I'll walk you through some of my favorite shows for class, listening activities to help kids focus, and the free resources waiting in today's camp materials (including the podcast clubs curriculum!)

Remember, Camp Creative is my favorite event of the year, and I wanted to make sure that no matter how busy you are, you can just pop in some earbuds and follow along.

But you DO need to be signed up for camp to snag all the free resources, and it's not too late.

You can sign up here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/camppodcasting2024

Each day's materials will link back to the previous day's in the bar across the top of the camp website, so you can always catch up if you're joining on day 2, 3, or 4.

Today's podcast club materials

Today's SEL Listening Materials