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 teachers and often drives them out of the profession, why can't research provide a more solid answer? One book calls for one approach, but there's another in the next. And the next. And the next.

Here's the thing. Baby sleep and writing feedback have something in common - they're complex, they're individual, and they're so difficult that many, many people have tried to offer creative solutions. So instead of lamenting all these often frustratingly different possible approaches anymore, I decided to go hunting for treasure. Today on the podcast, I'm sharing my distillation of the feedback landscape. Ideas to keep in mind as you approach the feedback process, so that you can help students as much as possible while sparing yourself unnecessary angst. Because when it comes down to it, I think it's waaaaaay more important that your students get to have you as a healthy, creative, energized teacher than it is for them to get an acre of feedback on their writing.

Andersen, Carl (2000). How's it Going? Heinemann Educational Books.

Graham, S., MacArthur, C., & Hebert, M. (Eds). (2019). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. The Guilford Press.

Hillocks Jr., G. (2007). Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching. Heinemann.

Kohn, Alfie (2020). Forward to Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead), edited by Susan D. Blum, West Virginia University Press.

Perkins, David. (2009). Making Learning Whole. Jossey-Bass.

Terada, Youki and Stephen Merrill. (2024: November 8). "Why Teachers Should Grade Less Frequently." Edutopia Online. https://www.edutopia.org/article/why-teachers-should-grade-less-frequently

Zemelman, Daniels and Hyde. (2005). Best Practice. Heinemann.

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Earlier this month 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: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2020/02/how-to-use-i-am-from-poems-in-class.html

Learn more about hosting a poetry slam: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2017/03/poetry-outside-textbook-slam-jam.html

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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 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

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!