400: #evolvingEDdesign: Giving Students Real Agency
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Release Date: 10/29/2025
424: Ready. Set. Engage with Dystopia!
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Years ago, Teri Lesegne wrote a book called Reading Ladders, about meeting readers where they are and then guiding them to new heights. It's a lovely image. I've got my own twist on it; I like to think of helping kids get onto the reading escalator. They read the first book I hand them, or their best friend forks over after staying up til midnight to finish it, and boom, they're on that escalator cruising toward the next book without even realizing it. Sometimes it's a series that helps them on, or realizing that audiobooks count, or discovering Jason Reynolds for the first time. Sometimes...
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423: Try this Multimodal End-of-Year Review & Reflection
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
The countdown started yesterday in my kitchen, as my daughter flipped the calendar forward for something and realized she had less than thirty days of school left. She loves her teacher and looks forward to school, so she felt sad. It launched her into a story about how her class is trying to convince her teacher to move to the next grade with them. If you, too, are starting to plan ahead and think end-of-year thoughts, today I want to share a way to help students review and reflect on the year in one multimodal activity. I've had requests in The Lighthouse for ways to help students reflect...
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422: 7 Research-Backed Steps to Better, Easier Feedback in ELA
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
When my daughter was a baby, she was a terrible sleeper. I spent many early morning hours trying to find advice online from research, experts, and parents in similar situations. As surely as there was any piece of potentially helpful advice, there existed its polar opposite. “Keep the baby near you, so it can form a healthy attachment,” one expert article might read. “Let the baby soothe itself, or it will never be independent,” read the next. I sometimes feel the baby sleep debate is similar to the teacher feedback one. When it comes to this absolutely vital issue, one that plagues...
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421: Help for Teaching Poetry (Part II)
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
we started to explore creative poetry activity options for National Poetry Month (and any time!). But there were just too many to pack into one episode! I promised you a part II, so this week let's continue our creative poetry fun together. If you've always felt a surge of irritation when you flip your planner to the next week and realize a poetry unit is on the horizon, I believe these two episodes can really help. Let's dive right in. Learn more about I am From poems: Learn more about hosting a poetry slam: Go Further: Get my popular Join our community, , on...
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420: My 9th Grade Dream Curriculum (as I get an Unexpected Request)
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Recently an invite dropped into my inbox - did I want to swing by a school in my city to talk about teaching ninth grade English for them next year? They really needed to fill a hole for a year. Just one hole - one course, one period, one group of kids. For one year. Did I want to do it? If I did, what was my vision for the course? Whew. Honestly, the flood of emotions about knocked me over. On the one hand - maybe I could act on the ideas I've spent all my working hours cultivating for the last decade. How I would love to design my room, my booklist, my units, using all the materials I've...
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419: Hate Teaching Poetry? Here's Help (Part I)
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Maybe you weren't taught poetry with joy and pizzazz, and you don't incline to writing it yourself. Which perhaps describes, what do you think, 99% of the population? Maybe 99.99%? If you're in this camp, I get it. Poetry can feel like a nebulous enigma in the world of literature, and it's easy to find yourself nodding along when people talk about it being great without really believing in your nod, like the parade-goers in The Emperor's New Clothes. I didn't have much use for it until I met my first performance poetry multimedia - audio recordings, a slam documentary, and the Def Poetry jam...
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418: Highly Recommended: The New York Times Contest Calendar
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Welcome to another episode in our occasional series of short “Highly Recommended” episodes, in which we dive into a quick idea, resource, or tip that I hope will have an immediate impact for you. This week, we’re talking about an online treasure trove of for your student writers. Here’s the link for this year, or search “NYT Student Contest Calendar” anytime: Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of . Snag three Join our community, , on Facebook. Come hang out on . Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a...
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417: Graduate Programs for English Teachers (Help to Launch your Search)
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
I loved the Bread Loaf School of English program at Middlebury College. It’s a unique summer program leading to a Masters in English, catering almost entirely to English teachers. So the class conversations are literary, but somehow it’s all infused with teaching ideas, since it’s almost all teachers in every room. Through this program, I spent two summers in Vermont, two in Santa Fe, and one in Oxford. I’d be happy to talk about it here, in today's episode on masters programs, but I , so I’m going to direct you over to that episode if you’re looking for a masters in English...
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416: Book Club It: How to Restructure (Almost) any Unit into Book Clubs
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
I'm in a book club right now, for the first time ever. (Yeah, I know, gasp. But I've always had so much to read for so many reasons that I've never sought out a book club). It's a pretty great concept - reading a book you want to read with your friends. A concept that I've thought about for a while now should really be part of every single ELA curriculum. Book clubs allow us to offer students curated choices, present more diverse voices as part of our curricula, and expand on themes and genres to give students a wider range of experiences through their conversations with classmates. Win, win,...
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415: Struggling to Teach Narrative? 6 Craft Strategies for Students
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
When you boil down the essentials of so much writing, what you get is the need for vivid, original detail. In a college essay, the story comes alive when a student goes way past the generalities and gives specific examples. In an argument essay, the intricate examples and counterargument that is explained with depth makes the most impact. In any kind of research, carefully exploring the core of the ideas with the most interesting possible language will hook and hold the reader's attention. And in narrative - as we've seen, eminently transferable to other areas of writing - it's the details. ...
info_outlineImagine you and I were about to make a dinner together. Now, I bring a love of baking to our project, and a decently strong roast chicken game. But I don't want to dominate the conversation too much. "Let's make roast chicken and vegetables," I say, "and cookies." Your face falls a little. "Oh, but you can choose which vegetables we roast, and what kind of cookies - I have M & Ms AND chocolate chips."
Perhaps you love making bibimbap, tagine, paella, tacos, or BBQ pork. Maybe you've got three Ottolenghi cookbooks in your bag and you were about to suggest a middle eastern buffet followed up by your incredible raspberry jam donuts. Possibly, you spent a year in culinary school before I knew you, and your artisan pizza was legendary among your college friends.
You put all those ideas aside and dutifully don an apron, trying to look OK with the choice between sweet potatoes and carrots, chocolate chips and M & Ms.
But what if I had started the conversation by showing you everything I had in my kitchen, including my rainbow shelf of cookbooks, and asked you what you'd like to make? And how I could help? How would that feel?
Agency is a key word when it comes to education, but it's easy to underestimate its power and think of a few small choices as agency. Today, in our continuing conversation about #evolvingEDdesign, I want to think bigger and wider.
How can we give our students more agency in the classroom, empowering their creativity? Let's dig in.
Throughout this podcast, and the ones to come in this series, I'll be showcasing graphics and displays from the #evolvingEDdesign Toolkit, a vast free resource I made for you.
You can grab it here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/evolvingEDdesign
Please share your classroom design stories, questions, photos and ideas with the #evolvingEDdesign hashtag across platforms so we can continue the conversation off the pod!
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