The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA Podcast Por Betsy Potash: ELA arte de portada

The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

De: Betsy Potash: ELA
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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 Educación
Episodios
  • 410: The American Lit Curriculum I Would Teach Now

    410: The American Lit Curriculum I Would Teach Now
    Jan 28 2026
    American Lit has the potential to be an engaging, broadening, fascinating course. We're in what I consider an in-between era, where many schools are still providing the historical American lit canon to teachers, while other schools or independent teachers going around the system have moved into teaching a broader swirl of America's diverse stories. The American Lit curriculum I was handed twenty years ago was 98% written by dead white men. Since then, I've learned about the impact on our students when they can (and can't) see themselves in the books they read. When they can and can't see their identities. Their communities. Their problems. Their hopes. I learned from Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's call for books in which students can see themselves and learn to understand others in her appeal to our collective humanity in her landmark essay, "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." I learned from Felicia Rose Chavez, author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, who shared her personal experience as a young reader: "It's startling as a young person of color to stare down the spines of literacy and note the neat annihilation of most of the world" (29). I learned from Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño, co-authors of Conscious Classrooms, that using culturally relevant texts can improve student outcomes by helping improve their comprehension, motivation & engagement. I learned more about pairing contemporary texts to the canon from the #distrupttexts movement, about "completing" the canon from Chavez, and about layering multicultural, multimodal texts from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's Cultivating Genius. For me, it feels so clear. And yet I still see so many curriculums either still cleaving to the classics for the most part or abandoning books altogether in favor of textbooks and " short selections." So today I want to offer my American Lit dream. If I had an unlimited budget, and didn't have to worry about book challenges, this is an outline of the American Lit curriculum I would love to teach today. If you're an American Lit teacher, I hope you find an idea for a new unit or two or five that you'd be excited to try out. If you don't teach American Lit, I think you'll still get a lot of ideas about curriculum possibilities in terms of structure and balance from this episode, which you could remix with any authors you choose. Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Launch your choice reading program with all my favorite tools and recs, and grab the free toolkit. 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! Sources: Chavez, Felicia. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. Haymarket Books, 2021. Bishop, Rudine Sims. "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. Vo. 6, No. 3, Summer 1990. https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf Accessed November 2, 2025. Graham, S., MacArthur, C., & Hebert, M. (Eds). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. The Guilford Press, 2019. Hillocks Jr., G. Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching. Heinemann, 2007. Kittle, Penny. Micro Mentor Texts. Scholastic Professional, 2022. Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating Genius. Scholastic, 2020. Potash, Betsy. "Students Need Diverse Texts and Choice, with Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño." The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, Episode 204. Resolution on Grammar Exercises to Teach Speaking and Writing. NCTE online: National Council of Teachers of English Position Statements: https://ncte.org/statement/grammarexercises/, Accessed January 2026. Schoenborn, Andy and Troy Hicks. Creating Confident Writers. W.W. Norton, 2020. Zemelman, Steven, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde. Best Practice. Heinemann, 2005.
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    24 m
  • 409: How to do a Multimodal Flash Verse Project

    409: How to do a Multimodal Flash Verse Project
    Jan 21 2026

    Let's talk about an incredibly adaptable project in which students experiment with creative ideas across modes. It's easy to plug into a variety of units and times of year, and ready to tap at a moment's notice. It remixes easily for Valentine's Day on the horizon, but it could also work well at Halloween, or as part of a creative writing unit, or when you're reading any verse novel or graphic novel.

    This project starts with fiction, moves into verse, and lands in a multimodal combination of verse and imagery. I call it a multimodal flash verse project, informed along the way by the brilliant mode collaborations of Jason Reynolds. Let's dig into it.

    Links Mentioned:

    Jason Reynolds' Interview with the Kennedy Center: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuXNsJvNaFs

    Book Trailer for Ain't Burned all the Bright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjqvOyAh36Y

    Reynolds on his collab with Novgorodoff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ErpAXd7Swg

    There was a Party for Langston Read-Aloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4MYO4WmR9s

    Go Further:

    Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

    Get my popular free hexagonal thinking digital toolkit

    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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    11 m
  • 408: For Better Student Revision, Play the Matching Game

    408: For Better Student Revision, Play the Matching Game
    Jan 14 2026

    The more time you spend writing, the more you know that revision is everything. Let me cite writing superhero John Green on this one, who discusses his drafting processin the FAQs on his website: "...I'm a big believer in revision: I almost always delete most of my first drafts (often as much as 90%). But there are many mini-drafts along the way, so it's hard to talk about the process quantitatively. I do try to save the file with a different name each time I've made some dramatic changes I fear I might later regret, so that's some measure, maybe, of how many drafts there are. The final copy of Katherines on my hard drive is called aok284; the final copy of TFiOS is called okay192." If I'm understanding John correctly, that means he wrote 284 drafts with dramatic changes for just one of his novels.

    Let's let that sink in for a moment.

    Let's be sure to mention that to students sometime soon.

    I tried to demonstrate some of this to my students back when I was at the Bread Loaf School of English in the summers (find out more about that fabulous program here in episode 223), and teaching in the school year. I photocopied every phase of one of my major papers, from random thoughts on paper to sort-of-organized thoughts to outline to research notes to draft to draft to draft to final paper. The booklet I passed out to students literally looked like a book. I wanted them to understand that writing isn't a matter of freewheeling a draft and then cleaning it up.

    Recently, I spent twenty or so hours over winter vacation (soooo much travel time) reading up on the most current best practices in writing instruction. It was a good time. There's nothing quite like reading classroom stories about integrating sensory detail at 3 a.m. over the Atlantic while the plane around you sleeps. (Yep, stop laughing. You always knew this about me. Pedagogy is my jam). A lot of it felt familiar, but there were also things that sparked new connections for me, and a few surprises, too. So today, let's tackle a huge topic together: student revision. We'll dive into the challenge and some solid solution options, and I'll hand over a curriculum booster pack to help you put it all into action.

    The visual walkthrough of this episode:

    Make a copy of the curriculum that goes with this episode: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TIxaV1lgaAJMZipDt6hgoPC6-Tz7wAi2P4KF2uSd_pE/copy

    Sources:

    Green, John. "FAQs." John Green Books: https://www.johngreenbooks.com/where-i-get-my-ideas-inspiration-and-general-writing-stuff. Accessed January 2026.

    Hillocks Jr., George. Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006.

    "How to Teach Authentic Writing in the Age of AI." Edutopia: The School of Practice Podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-teach-authentic-writing-in-the-age-of-ai/id1840474338?i=1000736252749. Accessed January 2026.

    "Improve Students' Evidence Analysis: Meet Mr. Skeptical." The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2025/05/improve-students-evidence-analysis-meet-mr-skeptical.html. Accessed January 2026.

    MacArthur, Charles. "Evaluation and Revision" (Chapter 12). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. Ed. by Steve Graham, Charles MacArthur, and Michael Hebert. New York: Guilford Press, 2017.

    Wilson, Joshua. "Assessing Writing" (Chapter 14). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. Ed. by Steve Graham, Charles MacArthur, and Michael Hebert. New York: Guilford Press, 2017.

    Go Further:

    Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

    Get my popular free hexagonal thinking digital toolkit

    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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    34 m
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