Best Introduction To Our Genius Hour Project Podcasts (2025)

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377: Teaching Students to Write an Argument Introduction with Easy Puzzle Pieces 10:04

1d ago10:04

10:04

Sure, there's no one right way to write an argument paper. It can be three paragraphs, nine, or even seventeen. It can be loaded with research. It can be full of voice and personal anecdotes. It can be intensely academic, with a formal objective perspective and thirty-two sources cited with MLA. We want our students to understand the rich palette o…

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376: Gamifying Argument Basics 11:46

8d ago11:46

11:46

I have to admit my kids have got me fully invested in "Is it Cake?" At some point in England last year, someone begged for us to watch the show while we ate green pesto pasta on the couch after a long day of hiking in the New Forest, and I said sure. It was the beginning of our "Is it Cake?" era. We've gasped, we've squinted, we've cheered. We all …

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375: Try this Engaging Swift-Inspired Prompt with any Text 9:34

16d ago9:34

9:34

I miss the Eras tour. Even though it hasn't been that long. My daughter is requesting Wicked songs and Katy Perry in the car all of a sudden, instead of our usual Taylor Swift-a-thon. But I haven't forgotten the joys of the Swiftiverse. And today I want to share a prompt you could use with any poem, short story, or novel that comes from Taylor's mu…

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374: 5 Top Poetry Activities Worth Trying 14:35

22d ago14:35

14:35

It's poetry month, and that means it's time for me to share as many poetry activities, poetry projects, and poetry workshops as I can muster over here! Today, I'm going to walk you through a toolkit of creative poetry options for your ELA classroom. We'll start with one of my favorite introductory activities for any poetry unit, poetry collage, and…

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373: The Most Popular Books to Teach 9th and 10th Graders (Tournament Results) 22:27

29d ago22:27

22:27

This winter, inspired by cool bookish tournament projects by Melissa Alter Smith of Teach Living Poets and Jared Amato of Project Lit, I decided to launch my own English teacher-y tournament. I wanted to know - of the hundreds of amazing books out there - which were working BEST in the classroom for the teachers in our community? After polling over…

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372: Teaching Long Way Down? Flash Verse, Colorful Character Analysis, and Outside-the-Box Discussions 32:26

1M ago32:26

32:26

If you’re teaching Long Way Down (and ready for some Long Way Down lesson plan ideas!), let me just start by saying “YAY!” It’s a reader-maker, an incredible book you can teach in a short time with a high impact. Today, I’m going to be sharing some of my favorite ideas and resources for you to pair with this book. We'll talk about discussion format…

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371: Top Middle School Book Recommendations (A Teacher's Perspective) 28:06

1M ago28:06

28:06

Today's guest, middle school teacher Susan Taylor, has repeatedly gone the extra mile to build a reading program that makes an impact. Not only does she guide her students towards the best books available, she guides her teaching network the same way, through her podcast, Wonder World Book Cafe. Today, we're going to go rapid fire through her favor…

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370: An Easy Win for Differentiating Writing Instruction: Video Lessons 32:30

2M ago32:30

32:30

If you've ever felt stymied over the fact that some of your students aren't sure how to write a thesis while others are ready to tackle counterargument, today's episode is for you. Not so long ago, Kareem Farah of the Modern Classrooms Project was here to share the MCP vision for a differentiated blended classroom, and how it can support all learne…

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369: Highlight Real-World Connections for Any Book with this Easy Activity 5:08

2M ago5:08

5:08

It all started with 1984, as so many things do. I wanted students to see how the ideas in the book were splashed across the world around them - yes, in their magazines and ads, but also in the current events they saw on the news and the news sites covering them. So I asked them to create collages, connecting 1984 to their lives. As we put the colla…

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368: The Glue: One Thing You Need in Every ELA Unit 4:46

2M ago4:46

4:46

You’ve probably heard me talk about my first poetry slam. The project that became my go-to vehicle for teaching poetry every year that followed. The book I was handed - 6 American Poets - was chock full of great poetry. Dickinson, Whitman, Hughes… but I knew that I, like every paper worth reading, would need a solid hook. That’s how I ended up stay…

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367: Gamify ELA Review with a Colorful Memory Game 8:04

2M ago8:04

8:04

I can still remember the faded, chipped blue print of my childhood game of Memory. The thick cardboard squares we flipped in search of pairs, thrilled when we found a match, frustrated when we accidentally revealed a match to our opponent. I’ve played a million games now as a parent too, watching my children’s eyes light up when they rack up more m…

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366: ELA Electives with a Twist: Outside-the-Box Ideas to Inspire You 18:37

3M ago18:37

18:37

Teaching an ELA elective that you've dreamed up yourself is such a joy. Today I want to stir up some ideas together for the next time you've got the chance to put your own spin on an older course or propose a new course altogether. So let's start with a few questions: Would you rather take a course called "Theater" or "Contemporary Theater: The Tri…

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365: 3 Easy Ways to Help Kids Build Better Arguments 26:29

3M ago26:29

26:29

Like most of us, Christina Schneider didn't find teaching writing one bit easy at first. Despite her background as a journalist, putting all the puzzle pieces together in the classroom to help her students understand how to build a thesis, introduce and analyze evidence, and express their ideas felt like a pretty tough task. But over time she had o…

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364: Contemporary Authors to Feature this Black History Month (and all year long) 12:14

3M ago12:14

12:14

It's February, the perfect time to feature work by contemporary Black authors in your book talks, poetry clip showings, First Chapter Fridays, book displays, and bulletin boards. It's also a good time to look ahead to next year and consider whether you want to order some of these books for book clubs and whole class texts in the 2025-2026 school ye…

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363: The Secret Sauce to Help Students Care 14:00

3M ago14:00

14:00

How many times have you sat in a PD meeting that didn't apply to you? One where you were learning an 11 letter acronym for a strategy you'd never use, a 3 point plan for a new program that wouldn't fit with your curriculum, or a training you'd already had? A PD meeting that was... irrelevant. In their book, Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matt…

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362: Art as Influencer: The Reason my Orwell Unit Failed and Why it Matters for your Students 23:39

4M ago23:39

23:39

I've been reading Kylene Beers and Bob Probst's Disrupting Thinking: How Why We Read Matters this week, and one of their points that has really come home for me is how often the standards and the pressure to boil books down to skills leads to pulling plot-based facts and point-based evidence out of a book, blocking opportunities for students to thi…

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361: Amplify Argument Engagement with a Mock Trial 4:24

4M ago4:24

4:24

This week I want to share a project idea that you can use for a ton of different texts - the mock trial. I’ll tell you why the mock trial was one of my FAVORITE projects as a student, and one fun way I used it as a teacher. By the time you finish listening to this quick episode, I hope you’ll be excited to put a mock trial into play in your own cla…

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360: The Ultimate Guide to One-Pagers 34:46

4M ago34:46

34:46

Open The New York Times today and you'll see photos, headlines, interactive infographics, audio, videos, and text articles. I could name almost any newspaper, magazine, social media platform, campaign website, or brand home page, and say the same. Communication today switches mediums like a chameleon switches colors wandering in a field of Skittles…

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359: Don't Send Emails that Make your Heart Race 3:49

4M ago3:49

3:49

This week I want to share a piece of advice that really comes from my wonderful husband and it’s this: Don’t send emails that make your heart race. That email will only make it worse. Let me explain. Just a few days ago I found myself in bed at eleven, eyes wide open in the dark, building an email in my mind. I laid there meticulously building a ca…

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358: Try this Easy New Year's Vision Board Activity 8:15

4M ago8:15

8:15

There's a lot of takes on the New Year and how it fits into our lives. There's the change-everything-starting-January-1 take. The New-Year-Same-Me take. The choose-your-word take. The pick-your-theme-song-take. There are SMART goals and stepping stone goals, personal goals and professional goals. Then of course there's the gentle twist that takes g…

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357: Your Writer's Craft Tournament 3:18

5M ago3:18

3:18

Lately, I’ve been working on gamification. Not the kind where you get points and add custom outfits to your hamster avatar when you advance through a lesson - though don’t get me wrong, that seems cool - more the kind where learning takes place through an actual game structure. We’re big fans of games at my house - Catan, Parcheesi, Taco Cat Goat C…

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356: The Best Last Day Before Break 5:39

5M ago5:39

5:39

If the work week is starting to feel like a blurry hand sanitizer-scented haze at the moment, you're right on schedule. The crush of holiday to-dos (fun and not-so) alongside the slow but insistent slip of student attention spans, plus the inevitable wave of illnesses you're trying to avoid makes these last few days a challenge. So today I'm hoping…

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355: When All Else Fails 4:38

5M ago4:38

4:38

This week I’m thinking about those moments when the system collapses. Your toddler wakes up at 3 am and stays awake until 7. Your careful planning for a poetry slam explodes when you feel a sore throat lurking the day before and you get one of those icky awful chills on your way out to the parking lot. Your partner has to work overtime when you wer…

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354: Classroom Management: Lifting the Veil (Finally) 56:32

5M ago56:32

56:32

Ever struggle to get students to stop talking? Keep their phones put away? Stay focused during the lesson? Stop whispering during an assembly? Engage with the classwork? Classroom management can sometimes feel like death by a thousand distractions. Today’s guest can help. Claire English is an experienced Australian secondary English teacher and sen…

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353: Your Poetry Video Project Roadmap 4:37

5M ago4:37

4:37

In today’s short episode of “Highly Recommended”, I’m here to tell you it’s time to try a poetry video project! Harness students’ excitement over the creator economy and the survival of TikTok and get them interpreting poetry through a medium that only keeps getting MORE relevant to communication today. First things first, let’s talk mentor texts. …

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352: Holiday Activities for ELA (with Inclusivity in Mind) 19:17

5M ago19:17

19:17

So you want to give the nod to the season, but you also want to make sure all your students feel included. Good for you! I've been privileged to see the holidays I celebrate centered in The United States for much of my life, but I've also had a lot of opportunities to see what it's like beyond this glow. I've lived in four other countries where som…

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351: 🤍 Gratitude Week: Revisiting Angela Stockman's Writing Makerspace 32:25

5M ago32:25

32:25

Welcome to day five of gratitude week here at Spark Creativity. Today, on our final day, we’re looking back at an interview with my friend Angela Stockman about how to get started with her innovative writing makerspace concept. She is a force of creativity, hope, care, and innovation in the education world, and I’m grateful to know her and to share…

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350: 🤍 Gratitude Week: Revisiting Dave Stuart Jr.'s Help for Student Apathy 41:48

5M ago41:48

41:48

Welcome to day four of gratitude week here at Spark Creativity. Today we’re looking back at an interview with Dave Stuart Jr. about how to help fight apathy in the classroom. I’m grateful for Dave’s hopeful voice in the world of education, and glad to share his ideas with you today. Check out the original show notes: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/…

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349: 🤍 Gratitude Week: Revisiting Crucial Advice on Diverse Texts & Choice 35:23

5M ago35:23

35:23

Welcome to day three of gratitude week here at Spark Creativity. Today we’re looking back at an interview with Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño about just how important it is to provide students with diverse books and choice in their reading experience. I’m grateful that they took the time to talk with us, and to be able to spot…

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348: 🤍 Gratitude Week: Revisiting Dr. Sarah Fine's Advice for Deeper Learning 47:22

5M ago47:22

47:22

Welcome to day two of gratitude week here at Spark Creativity. Today we're revisiting a popular interview with Dr. Sarah Fine, whose insightful work around deeper learning I am so grateful to be able to share with you. She crisscrossed the nation in search of the places and programs where students were truly engaged in deeper learning, and she shar…

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347: 🤍 Gratitude Week: Revisiting Penny Kittle's Quiet Revolution 52:16

5M ago52:16

52:16

This week I’m thinking about how grateful I am for this incredible community - all the creative educators around the world who have tuned into an episode, shared an idea with a colleague, joined me in conversation as a guest, written a review, or sent in a question. Thank you! Today we’re going to kick off a special five day series revisiting top i…

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346: Highly Recommended: The Extensive Research to Support English Teachers Grading Less 3:23

6M ago3:23

3:23

In today’s short episode of “Highly Recommended”, I want to recommend an article I read at Edutopia this week, because it’s chock-full of the research you need to support conversations at your school about grading less. Changing the culture of grading in our ELA classrooms won’t just benefit teachers, it benefits students too. So today I want to sh…

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345: How to use First Book Marketplace to Grow your Library Fast 10:31

6M ago10:31

10:31

If you’re a teacher in a Title I School, you need to know about First Book Marketplace. I’ve heard about it in passing so many times, and this week I decided to dive in and figure out how it works. And boy, does it work. Today I just want to walk you through how this site works so that you can start taking advantage of its many resources as soon as…

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344: Fighting the Sunday Scaries 5:28

6M ago5:28

5:28

This week, I want to talk about Sunday nights. If you’re struggling to figure out how you can be a good partner, parent, person, and teacher, and it all seems to come to a head on Sunday nights, I want to offer three ideas. I’m not saying I can solve the teacher work-life balance issue that plagues our profession in one short episode, but I hope on…

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343: Contemporary Playwrights to Spotlight in ELA 9:04

6M ago9:04

9:04

Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O'Neill get plenty of spotlight on the ELA curriculum stage. And sure, it's well-deserved! But they aren't the only incredible American playwrights to pick up a pen in the last century. If you're looking for some contemporary plays to share with your students, and you're struggling to find ones that fit…

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342: Easy Acting Games for Better Theater Units 5:48

6M ago5:48

5:48

This week I want to share a fabulous resource I recently discovered, a website full of short video models for acting games you can use in class. The first time I taught a play in class, I sure wished I had more theater background to help my students act out the scenes. Luckily, I was able to connect with a creative theater professional to come and …

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341: Characterization Activities that go Way Beyond Round vs. Flat 13:30

6M ago13:30

13:30

My son and I love a few certain characters from the books we've read aloud over the years. Gum-Baby, from Tristan Strong, Boots, from Gregor the Overlander, Maniac Magee. For my daughter, it's Junie B. Jones and Ramona from their named series collections. For me, it was always Anne (of Green Gables) I returned to growing up, and Jo from Little Wome…

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340: 💬 Grading Discussion in a way that won’t ruin your (Teaching) Life 5:54

6M ago5:54

5:54

Grading discussion can feel like juggling cats. How can you be present in a class discussion while also trying to grade thirty people’s comments? But over the years, I’ve tried three methods that that have worked for me without causing too much strain. I call them the bump, the challenge, and the chart. In today’s mini-episode, I’ll walk you throug…

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339: 💬 When Discussion goes off the Rails 18:20

6M ago18:20

18:20

We’ve all been in a discussion hurtling off the track and into the canyon, far, far below. Chances are, you’ve been in this type of discussion as a student AND as a teacher, and it’s no fun in either scenario. So how do we prevent it? And what do we do if it’s already happening and glaze is washing over our students’ eyes? In today’s episode, the f…

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338: 💬 Discussion Dominators and Silent Students 23:18

7M ago23:18

23:18

Remember in elementary school, how some kids were so excited to answer a question that they would wave their hand back and forth in the air, lifting ever so slightly from their seat? The Hermione Grangers of 2nd grade. Yeah, that was me. So I have real sympathy for students who become discussion dominators. Though on the outside, this appears to ma…

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337: 💬 Student-Led Discussion: Setting up Success + What Does an Observer Do? 28:56

7M ago28:56

28:56

Welcome back to our ongoing discussion series. If you missed the first two episodes, covering five types of discussion worth trying and introducing the Harkness method for student-led discussion, you might want to pause and go back to the last two episodes before continuing with this one. Today we’re diving deep into student-led discussion, specifi…

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336: 💬 How Harkness Won Me Over (Completely) 8:40

7M ago8:40

8:40

Today we’re talking about a model that influenced every discussion I ran in my classroom from my first year to my last, across grade levels, years, and countries. I’ve run hundreds of Harkness discussions - terrible ones, experimental ones, pretty ok ones, good ones, and absolutely incredible ones. Today I want to tell you how Harkness discussion c…

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335: 💬 5 Discussion Types that Can Work for You, Even if You've Almost Given Up (The Discussion Series Begins) 17:41

7M ago17:41

17:41

Discussion. Theoretically it’s the bread and butter of the English classroom, but sometimes it feels like all crusts and crumbs. How can you get students excited to talk about voice and theme, metaphor and symbolism, when they have a million other things going on? How do you inspire them to dive in together to the ways that literature illuminates l…

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334: The Writing Tip Every ELA Student Needs (that I Learned in Bulgaria) 4:08

7M ago4:08

4:08

The late afternoon sun filtered through the windows of our tiny English department office as I ran in to grab the papers I’d just printed. As I waited for them to finish, I examined the old books stacked on the shelf above the printer, brought to our school in Bulgaria by another ex-pat teacher many years ago, judging by the dust. One caught my eye…

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333: How to Teach a Multigenre Essay Project 15:43

7M ago15:43

15:43

Want to teach a multigenre essay project? Good! Our students see story splashed across so many platforms these days. Video, audio, visuals, and words all mixed up together in a daily swirl. Understanding how to tell a story across mediums is a highly relevant skill for students, and one they can quickly see the relevance of every time they switch o…

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332: The Rec Letter Tweak that gave me my Octobers Back 4:18

7M ago4:18

4:18

Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Tell me if this sounds familiar. You sit down to write a rec letter after a long fall day of teaching, meetings, coaching, and everything else on your plate. Maybe it’s 9 pm and you’re trying to remember…

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331: Does Essay Writing Feel like Torture to your English Students? Try this. 15:34

7M ago15:34

15:34

It's no fun announcing an argument paper and being met by groans. If your English students have arrived at your class afraid of essays, you're not the only one. And we all know, buy-in matters. When students are confronted with a task they're horrified by, it's hard for them to access their skills and motivation to do their best work. So what are y…

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330: Routines that aren’t Boring for Whole Class Novels 4:30

7M ago4:30

4:30

If you’ve ever felt like you were stuck in a rut doing the same thing day after day, I’ve got a quick mindset shift to help. I do NOT want you to give up on whole class novels, so let’s talk about how to make them work. In theory, whole class novels are the bread and butter of the English classroom. But if you struggle to get students to read at ho…

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329: Turn Dusty Old Books into a Stunning Display 3:24

8M ago3:24

3:24

Do you have old books lying around taking up space in your classroom? Books no one is ever going to read again? Recently in our Facebook group, Creative High School English, a fun visual thread erupted all about bookish page displays. So in today’s one minute idea-isode, I want to suggest you try one. You’ll clear space on your shelves, help the ea…

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328: The Short Unit that Never Fails 4:15

8M ago4:15

4:15

On this week’s mini-episode, I want to tell you about a one week unit that has never failed to produce incredible results from my students. I’ve done it with 10th graders and 11th graders, honors students and their counterparts, American students and Bulgarian students speaking English as their second language. And I’ve loved it every. Single. Time…

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Introduction To Our Genius Hour Project Podcasts

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