The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA By cover art

The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

By: Betsy Potash: ELA
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  • Summary

  • 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!
    Betsy Potash
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Episodes
  • 294: Crying in the Dusty Stairwell (on Hitting a Wall in Teaching)

    294: Crying in the Dusty Stairwell (on Hitting a Wall in Teaching)
    May 2 2024
    Today I want to talk about a subject I’m sure you’ve thought a lot about - how much are you willing to do for your job? And what do you do when you’ve hit your wall? I want to start by taking you to the dusty steps of the duplex I shared during my first year of teaching. It’s dusk, and I’m crying. I recently won the award for excellence in new teaching at my school, receiving many hugs and congratulations, as well as a raise and kind compliments from my head of school. I should be feeling great, right? I had discovered so much that year in my quest to engage my 10th and 11th graders - how to run Harkness discussions, hold poetry slams, launch play performances, find the gold on the teaching shelves of the Los Angeles Public Library. I had given it everything, and truthfully it had given me a lot back. But I was thinking of quitting. Utterly exhausted, I sat on those steps wondering if I could possibly continue in a career that took this much. Could I continue to work from 7 am to 10 pm? Could I continue to think about my job everywhere - in the car, with my friends, at the beach? Could I find love and family if I was always in my classroom, the dorm, or coaching on the tennis court? Wiping my eyes, I ran up those dusty stairs and into my office to find a piece of paper. I made a list of 23 rules for myself. The boundaries I would have to hold if I wanted to continue in the career I loved. I took everything else off my bulletin board and put the rules in the middle. Then, I stayed in teaching. And though honestly I’m not sure I was ever better at it than that first year when I made it my whole life, I found that my boundaries helped me enjoy my work as a creative teacher for many years. Until one night almost a decade later. It was nearly midnight and I had had THE WORST day. Up early to prep something or other, then racing from class to class all morning before taking my advisees out for a special lunch that had been requested by my residential life boss which made me late for a lunch meeting with my 10th grade honors students participating in the portfolio program that had been requested by my academic boss. Then more classes, coaching, a school dinner, an evening of working in the dorm and I was home at 11 with some work to do for the next day. I stared and stared at my computer screen as the rage built up in my mind and eventually led me into my email inbox to open a note to my head of school. You can probably imagine it. I kind of wish I still had it. I just let allll my feelings out, which isn’t very common for me. I woke up to a response inviting me to a meeting right away. My rage having subsided a bit, I felt awkward when I walked into that wood-paneled office in the administration building. Nothing helps you tap into how you really feel better than a 16 hour workday, and I told my head of school I wasn’t sure I could really capture it all again. He laughed a little awkwardly and said the email did a very good job. We talked for a while, and in the end, he took a huge part of my spring workload off my plate. OK, so these are two very different stories about the same thing. Hitting the wall. Thinking about leaving the profession. I can’t pretend to know all the circumstances you’re facing right now, but I’m seeing a lot of folks in our community struggling. If you’re hitting a wall like I have, for reasons of your own, see if you can tap into your feelings and try to create a pivot point. It could be personal - like my list of boundaries. Maybe instead of quitting, you radically change how you grade, refuse to give up your prep period, stop agreeing to join committees, only check email twice a day, and commit to taking weekends off. Or it could be a line you ask to draw in the sand with your boss - like my midnight letter (though I suggest you approach it more coherently than I did). If you need a change, is it possible you could get one through a letter or a very serious conversation with someone at your school, rather than a new job? If you want to stay but you’re thinking of leaving, is it at least worth a try? I want to see you enjoying your creative classroom and loving your work, and I know there are a whole lot of societal factors making that really hard right now. If you’ve hit a wall that can’t be overcome, I get that. Maybe you want to transfer your amazing skills to another path. But if you want to be in the career you’re in, but you too have cried in your own version of the dusty stairwell and questioned everything at the end of your own version of the unbelievably overwhelming day, maybe there’s a step you could take toward change. And this week I just want to highly recommend that you take it. Sign up for Camp Creative Here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/camppodcasting2024 Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on ...
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    8 mins
  • 293: Creative Exam Review Activities for ELA (that don't involve a packet)

    293: Creative Exam Review Activities for ELA (that don't involve a packet)
    Apr 30 2024

    With exam season coming up, you're probably looking for some creative ELA review activities.

    Whether your school requires that students sit a traditional exam, or you have room for something like the graduation speech final or another type of final project, it's helpful to look back over the big concepts, themes, and texts you've covered as the year draws to a close.

    So what options do you have besides printing out a 20 page review packet and giving students time to study it? A lot, as it turns out. Today we're going to explore five of them, in hopes that you'll find a match that feels just right to you.

    Before we get started, I want you to know that I'll be running Camp Creative, The Easiest Roadmap to Student Podcasting, in June. Inside this (free) and fun PD, you'll get access to the best models, easiest tech, and complete curriculum to get you and your students started with podcast projects. Everything arrives by email, so even if you're busy the week of June 10-14, you can catch up whenever you get a chance. It just takes 10 minutes a day to go through the materials!

    Links Mentioned:

    Grab your Copy of the Review Quiz Game Here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1s2HlNyX8Zh9_WYnJsZmTgbbLvGjewzhDnAn8aPgXg2U/copy

    Sign up for Camp Creative Here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/camppodcasting2024

    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!

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    10 mins
  • 292: Try the Sesame Street Quiz (5 Different Ways)

    292: Try the Sesame Street Quiz (5 Different Ways)
    Apr 25 2024

    Today, I want to highlight a useful tool Amanda Cardenas shared earlier this year on the show called The Sesame Street Quiz. It’s so versatile, so fun, and so helpful that I feel it deserves a show of its own, so here we go.

    Amanda has already shared with us how these work, back in episode 267.

    Here’s a quick review:

    A Sesame Street Quiz gives students four items. Three are connected and one is an outlier. For example, if you’re reading Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby, you might give students the options: Daisy, Jordan, floating, red. Which three are connected and why? Which one is the outlier and why? Amanda lets kids use their book and notes as they respond.

    Now, think about this idea of a Sesame Street Quiz. It’s a great way to check in and see which kids are doing the reading, and understanding the reading. But how else might you use it?

    It could make a great bellringer or discussion warm-up. Have students make their decisions alone or with a partner, justifying their choices.

    It could make for an intriguing way to review before a final exam. Invite students to consider the key texts of the term, and choose which ones go together and which is an outlier.

    It could lead into a fascinating one-pager assessment, with kids creating a visual representation of the three that group together and integrating quotations and analysis in their own words of why those three link.

    It could be a helpful exit ticket, to see how well students digested the material from the lesson if you’ve been deep diving into a text.

    I bet you can think of lots more uses as well! But however you use it, this week I just want to highly recommend that you give a Sesame Street question a try ASAP.

    Related Links:

    Episode 267, with Amanda Cardenas: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2024/03/so-your-students-arent-doing-the-reading-heres-help.html

    Explore more of Amanda's work: https://www.mudandinkteaching.org/

    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!

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    4 mins
Education
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