"What's this?" I was crouched alongside a student on the first day of school as she filled out her reading profile. She pointed her pink highlighter at the section of genres, unsure how to proceed.

I wanted to know if she liked scifi or romance, dystopia or suspense or YA.

She wanted to know what they were, and she wasn't the only one to ask.

So I pushed back my plans for the next class a bit, and made time for a lesson on genre instead. And it was such a blast, I want to share it with you today, in case your students are asking the same questions as mine.

Today I'll walk you through a speedy way to introduce the idea of genres across artistic disciplines, a fun option for brain-dumping the background knowledge kids may or may not realize they've already got when it comes to genre, and then a game you can play to bring it all together that's not just great retrieval practice, but also helps bond your new community of kids as they get to know each other.

Make a Copy of the Slides for this Lesson: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UMIrcBKJhxxuzjE1i-AkUdQV6y4H5YQO1BvO5pkFyuM/copy

Go Further:

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

Grab the free Better Discussions toolkit

Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides

Get my popular free hexagonal thinking digital toolkit

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!

There are so many ways to grade students. You can avoid zeros, use a standards-based approach, allow iteration, tweak your late policy, experiment with different categories and percentages.

What works best? That's hard to say. But today's guest, Dr. Brittany Dillman, wanted to try something different. She's an expert in educational psychology and educational technology, and directs several online masters programs at Michigan State University. She decided, with her colleagues, to step away from traditional grading and its many remixes altogether, and pursue an alternative known as "ungrading."

As a student myself in several educational technology courses there, I noticed the ways this approach felt different, and I liked it. So today I'm delighted to welcome Brittany to talk about ungrading - what it is, how it can help students, and how you can try it out in small ways to reap its benefits and learn from your experiments even if you're not prepared to chuck your digital gradebook.

Go Further:

Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

Grab the free Better Discussions 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!

Recently I listened to Daniel Wilingham's book, Why Don't Kids Like School?, about how we can use what we know about how the mind works to make school work better for kids.

And I found myself nodding along in chapter two as he talked about reading: "Do whatever you can to get kids to read, but it's not enough. People sometimes ask whether graphic novels count, or whether audiobooks do. The answer is an emphatic yes." I couldn't agree with Wilingham more.

Sure, I've heard the argument that students need "rigor" at school. The canon. The classics.

But I would certainly side with Penny Kittle and repeat the mic-drop line from her book, Book Love: "A book isn't rigorous if students aren't reading it."

Sure, we can give kids only Dickens, Austen, and Hawthorne. That's an option. We can say only print-reading is "real" reading. But what will we gain, and what will we lose? It seems pretty obvious to me that while a few more kids might read classics if they're the only option, what will mostly happen is that we'll lose the majority of kids who might have started to love reading in our classrooms, given different starting points.

So today I want to share the graphic novels I'll be showcasing in my classroom library this year. I'm really happy with this collection for my high school students, and I hope you'll find some new options for your library as I share mine. Of course, as always, you know your community best.

Dig into the research and see the infographic and sources here: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2026/07/the-uncrackable-justification-for-choice-reading.html

Watch Gene Luen Yang's Ted Talk, "Comics Belong in the Classroom" here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjvTIP7pV20

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!