407: Build a Better Choice Board Project for any ELA Unit
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Release Date: 01/07/2026
435: Start the Year with these AI Conversation Stations
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
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 students consider, discuss, and write about how AI affects them and their learning. Because I received so much positive feedback about these activities, I want to share them here too, in case you missed Camp. So today, let's talk about how to dig into one of the big questions facing our profession right now, with your students, right from week one. Because I hope there's a middle option between going entirely to paper and staying digital but playing the role...
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434: What I'll be Doing on the First Day of School
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
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 the day "going well." It was the first time I ever realized you could be thinking one thing while saying something completely different. "Take a look at the syllabus," said my mouth, while my brain said, OH NO, they hate this! They're looking at the clock! And you have nothing else planned! And you have to do this with three more classes! Since then, "going over the syllabus" is not in my first day playbook. Nope, the last thing I want on day one is to...
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433: The Uncrackable Justification for Choice Reading
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
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 podcast, one NOT about the uncrackable justification for choice reading. But recently I heard from several teachers over in CHSE about thriving reading programs they had going, only to get shut down by folks who felt like reading in class was a waste of time. And then I kind of ended up in a rabbit hole, as I am wont to do. It's like researching the justification for choice reading became my guilty pleasure, sucking up all my time. I listened to...
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432: ELA Classroom Design: What to Put on your Walls this Fall
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
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 I'm headed back into the classroom this fall to teach one section of freshmen English. I just believe SO HARD that secondary spaces matter as much as elementary school ones. Heck, I'm an adult, and the space around me matters enormously to my productivity and pleasure in work. How could it not matter to teenagers? So today, I want to share a quick look at some of the resources and recommendations we'll be diving into at the end of the month inside our...
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431: Highly Recommended: This Vehicle for AI in ELA Conversations
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
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 every year. (By the way, you can for this fun, free, async PD). And it seems to me that one of the most vital conversations this year for us all to be having is what exactly it means to use AI at school - the risks and dangers, the helpful aspects in terms of accommodation, the temptation, the citation process, all of it. I've been in and out of the rabbit hole on AI for months and years now, following along with policies, trends, Ted Talks, teacher...
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430: What you Need to Know about Design Thinking for ELA
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Design thinking is a framework for creating things. And creating things, as Semour Papert argued in his theory of constructionism, is the kind of “hard fun” that engages people in meaningful work that helps them stretch themselves (Resnick). As his colleague at the MIT media lab, Mitchell Resnick, put it: “they’re going to learn fast when they work on things they really care about. Seymour once said that education has very little to do with explanation, it has to do with engagement, falling in love with ideas.” Design thinking is one of the many options in your teacher toolbox, but...
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429: Don't Miss this Essential Lesson on Multimodality
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
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 students understand themselves better, so I chose to provide a workshop based on George Ella Lyon’s poem, “Where I’m From.” You know I love that workshop. Together, we looked at how details bring poetry to life, brainstormed images about their childhood experiences, explored how various creators have interpreted the “I am From” prompt to create videos, paintings, photo essays, poems, and combinations thereof. Then I invited them to work...
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428: Start a Classroom Library With Me
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
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 doing at 11 pm the night after I agreed to this role? Guess. If you guessed working on my class library, you are so right. Let’s talk about first steps, for my library, and maybe, if you’re thinking of starting one of your own, for yours. Whether you're completely new to building a classroom library, about to start a new one in a new place (like me), or building new layers onto a library you've already begun, I think you'll find...
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427: Try this Colorful Maker Tool: Digital Idea Blocks
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Walk into an expensive "Innovation Lab" or High Tech Cutting Edge University Makerspace, and you'll probably see a laser cutter, a 3D printer or two, all kinds of expensive technology and the adjacent software and screens that make it possible. That's cool. But that's also a high barrier to entry. Does it really have to be that way? And how did the maker movement come to sit so deep in pricey STEM territory? You probably know I've always admired the work of Angela Stockman, writing makerspace pioneer. She's been on this podcast several times, and I love what she shares around having...
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426: I Read 17 PD Books this Year so You Don't Have to
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
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 read, or you want to take something awesome with you on a plane ride or road trip, along with a stack of Emily Henry novels and A Man Called Ove (which, by the way, I'm giving my own personal read-of-the-year award to, wow). Or maybe not, which I totally get too. If you'd like to take the next couple months totally away and renew your energy and creativity and health and not even think about the classroom, that's great too! That's another way to help...
info_outlineWe know we want kids to have choice. As much choice as possible in creating the education that is meaningful and helpful for them. That choice can come through choice over content, medium, expression of ideas, types of discussion, seating in the classroom, what to work on when, when to take a break...there are so many possibilities! If you make it a professional challenge to start seeing the possibilities for choice, you'll find them everywhere!
As I've been working on choice as a theme for The Lighthouse this month, I knew that I wanted to create a final choice board project adaptable for any text that would provide a range of options for students. But I also knew I wanted to avoid the pitfalls of some of the choice projects I designed for my own classroom, when I ended up having to create seven different rubrics and rewire myself for a huge range of requirements on my different project options as I graded them. While I was glad to give my students those choices, it was frustrating how long it took to complete my comments.
So I took some of my favorite types of projects, what I've learned about creating linked hyperdocs, and my strong desire for an easy grading situation and mashed it all up into an adaptable final project with nine choices, including one that allows students to create their own way to make meaning from what they've studied (so really, a million choices). I'm going to walk you through the process today, so you can do the same next time you'd like to create a project full of options, gifting your students agency as they synthesize what they've learned and create something new.
Let's dive in.
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Sources Considered:
Beghetto, Ronald. “Does Assessment Kill Student Creativity?” The Educational Forum, 2005.
Beghetto, Ronald. Killing Ideas Softly: The Promise & Peril of Creativity in the Classroom. Information Age Publishing, 2017. Accessed Online through the Ebesco Database.
Chavez, Felicia. The Anti-Racist Writer’s Workshop. Haymarket Books, 2021.
Gabriel, Elise. “Six Ways to Help Kids Grow their Creativity.” Greater Good Magazine Online: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_ways_to_help_kids_grow_their_creativity. Accessed 28 October 2025.
Gonzalez, Jennifer. “Meet the Single Point Rubric.” Cult of Pedagogy Online: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/single-point-rubric/. Accessed May 2025.
Pringle, Zorana Ivcevic. The Creativity Choice. Public Affairs: 2025.
Wiggins, Grant. “Creative.” https://grantwiggins.wpcomstaging.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/creative.pdf. Accessed 28 October 2025.