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 on their own learning - to tell their own learning story. Research backs the importance of metacognitive reflection for students - in other words, it's helpful for them to think not only about what they've learned, but also how they've grown and developed as learners, and where they might want to go next.

Before we dive in, feel free to grab the free curriculum that goes along with this episode. Everything pictured below and discussed throughout the episode is already set up to make this activity as easy to implement for you as possible! And yes, the handouts are editable so you can tweak them to suit your own twist on the activity.

Grab the free curriculum for this activity: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/endofyearhexagons

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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

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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 series - about twenty years ago. Then everything changed. Suddenly instead of a hoop to be jumped through, poetry opened up as a gateway I could use to help students connect to ELA.

Since then, I've discovered layer upon layer of wonderful ways to build poetry in across units, learning a great deal from others along the way. Today on the pod, I'll walk you through twelve different creative, engaging options you can tap into as you teach poetry throughout the year. And I do hope that after this, you WILL teach poetry throughout the year.

Links Mentioned:

Chrome Music Labs Song Maker Tool: https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker

Poetry Blackout for Analysis Activity Episode: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2025/10/poetry-blackout-a-creative-analysis-tool.html

Blackout Poetry Activity Full Handouts Free Resource: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Blackout-Poetry-Activity-l-black-out-poetry-l-blackout-poetry-passages-4165682

Video Interpretation of "In the Dead of Winter We": https://jotreyes.com/in-the-dead-of-winter-we

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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 authentic audience for your student writers.

Here's the link for this year, or search "NYT Student Contest Calendar" anytime: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/learning/our-2025-26-student-contest-calendar.html

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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 already shared a complete review, from my perspective, of The Bread Loaf School back in episode 223, so I'm going to direct you over to that episode if you're looking for a masters in English right now that you can do in person while you teach.

But then there's the other option for an English teacher - a masters in the field of education. There are soooo many possibilities that it's a bit hard to know where to start. So here I'm going to round up some top candidates that I considered when I recently decided to go back and get a second masters. They all appeal in different ways. In the blog post, I'll let you know the name of the program, the format, the length, the description as given on the program website, and the current deadline to apply that they have listed for the nine programs I considered. In the podcast version, I'm going to zoom in on my personal top candidates. I'll also share links in this blog post and the podcast show notes to the many ongoing conversations on masters programs always taking place in Creative High School English, and to the U.S. News and World Report Rankings for top programs.

All the Links!

The Masters in Teaching & Curriculum at Michigan State University (all online): https://online.msu.edu/programs/teaching-curriculum

The Master of Arts in Education from Arizona State University (all online): https://asuonline.asu.edu/online-degree-programs/graduate/masters-in-education/

Learning Design, Innovation and Technology Program (in person):

• At Harvard: https://www.gse.harvard.edu/degrees/masters/program/ldit
• At Stanford: https://ed.stanford.edu/ldt

Interested in a Masters in ENGLISH? To learn about a summer in-person program for teachers that I did and loved, check out Episode 223: The Bread Loaf School of English

Want to read the most current conversations about masters programs in Creative High School English? Here they are: https://www.facebook.com/groups/256927044749038/search/?q=masters%20program

The U.S. News and World Report ranking for best programs in Curriculum & Instruction: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-education-schools/curriculum-instruction-rankings

The U.S. News and World Report ranking for best programs in Secondary Instruction: https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-education-schools/secondary-teacher-education-rankings

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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, win. Today on the pod, I want to show you how easy it is to wave your book club wand and easily turn part of your curriculum into book clubs.

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Launch your choice reading program with all my favorite tools and recs, and grab the free toolkit.

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