420: My 9th Grade Dream Curriculum (as I get an Unexpected Request)
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Release Date: 04/08/2026
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_outlineRecently 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 developed, and hopefully making a real impact in the lives of this class of students.
On the other hand - the struggle. The school was already using a textbook to teach 9th grade English and I wanted nothing to do with it. I imagined total freedom to craft the course of my dreams, but of course, the school would already have arcs and norms in place. They might not want a vigilante substitute looking to repaint and refurnish her classroom with stacks of choice reading books while teaching podcasting and multimodal memoirs, hosting literary food truck festivals and one-pager fairs, and submitting to New York Times contests.
But maybe they would? I'll be taking that meeting soon, but in the meantime, I've got a question to answer. What's my vision for the course? So just in case you, too, are trying to define your vision for a 9th grade course, I thought I'd brainstorm right here with you.
For folks inside The Lighthouse, this will also serve as a fun look at how I'd use materials there to build my course. All the visuals you see in the blog version here are pulled from resources already available to you inside The Lighthouse.
Grab the Free Literary Food Truck Curriculum: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/literaryfoodtrucks
Grab the Free Classroom Design Tookit: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/evolvingEDdesign
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