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Reading comprehension questions and summaries are no one's idea of big fun. They often feel like a game for a grade, and they don't inspire much engagement. And yet, we do want kids to be able to look back on their reading and remember what happened. Cleary, being able to pull together a quick mental summary of a text is a useful skill for argument, conversation, research analysis, debate, and more. So how do we help kids grow the ability to look back over a text and pull what's vital without relying on questions that feel like busywork? For the answer, I'm turning to my favorite smoothie. I start by blending spinach and orange juice. The juice quickly turns a beautiful bright green. Then I add a half banana and a lot of frozen pineapple and mango. Once I blend it, no one can taste the spinach at all. It's a family favorite. So how do we turn summary skills into a green smoothie? That's what we're talking about on the podcast with today's quick tip. Grab the free Discussion Toolkit with 15 Discussion Warm-Ups ready to go: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/discussiontoolkit  Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. 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!

Today on the pod, let me walk you through a fun new way of teaching poetic structure. I'm doing it TODAY, and I'm so excited about it, I just had to share it immediately. Poetic Terms you could explore: form, structure, concrete poem, line break, enjambment, stanza, repetition, rhythm, rhyme Access the post, "How to Make Digital Poetry Tiles," here: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2020/11/109-how-to-make-digital-magnetic-poetry.html  Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides 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!

When you think back to your high school English classes, is there a certain activity that really sticks with you? One lesson or project that still hums through your brain and puts a smile on your face when you look back? I have a feeling that today's guest, veteran teacher Wendy Eberhardt, will have a lot of students who look back on their lives in high school and think about the activity she's about to share with us. I don't want to ruin the surprise, so let's just say that Wendy has come up with an incredible way to help her kids find their voices, and she's about to give us all the details. Grab Wendy's guide to panel discussions: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1iVAMzrYrhljA_9NvxcL2wNHeuF6ENzd44v161JjiETA/copy Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. 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!

As a fairly constant reader for the last few decades, I sometimes forget how challenging reading can be. But then I get into, for example, a dense thirty page research write-up about the study of how different factors affect relationships between kindergarten teachers and kindergarten moms in Finland, and I remember. Reading can be so hard. So how can you make it easier for your students, as they dive into the books you share? Well, one option is to share explicit strategies they can plug into along the way. Penny Kittle does such a beautiful job of demonstrating the way she does this in her book, Book Love, and in the reading conference videos she and Kelly Gallagher share alongside their book, 180 Days. Another go-to source on this for me is Shea Kerkhoff, whose recent book, Adolescent Literacy: Integrating the Sciences of Reading and Writing in Grades 4-12, is full of strategies teachers can pull out to help students who struggle with comprehension. But how and when do you tap these strategies, especially considering some kids will really need them and others will find their mere mention a waste of time? Today on the pod, we'll talk about six reading strategies that can help students understand what they're reading, plus how to introduce them, ways to spiral back, and options for keeping them in mind for individual kids. Note, we won't be talking about what you, as a teacher, can do to make comprehension easier (like building background knowledge in advance, or providing key vocabulary up front). Nope, today is about the strategies kids can implement on their own, and how to make it easier for them to tap those strategies. 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! Sources: Kerkhoff, Shea. (2026). Adolescent Literacy: Integrating the Sciences of Reading and Writing in Grades 4-12. Bloomsbury Academic. Kittle, Penny. (2013). Book Love. Heineman. Online Supplementary Videos Associated with Kittle, Penny & Kelly Gallagher. (2018). 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Empower and Engage Adolescents. Heineman. Leong, Kristin. (Host). (2025, October 28). The Extraordinary Impact of Drawing to Learn. [Audio Podcast Episode]. In Edutopia's School of Practice Podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-extraordinary-impact-of-drawing-to-learn/id1840474338?i=1000733852674

It's easy to think of hexagonal thinking as a one-and-done. But it's not. It's a strategy you can tailor to a thousand different situations. Andi Jackson, veteran teacher, creative thinker, and hexagonal thinking launcher-extraordinaire, is here today to spotlight the possibilities. She's taken hexagonal thinking, originally developed by Anthony Hodgson in the business world, and remixed it in three different creative ways to help guide her students through complex thinking toward original writing. She's about to share her stories and tips with us, and I'm positive you'll come away from today's episode with fresh ideas for your own use of this fun discussion strategy. 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!

We've all had the experience of planning a detailed activity meant to take thirty or forty minutes, and then watching a student close their book or notebook after five. It's confusing. It feels obvious that they couldn't have done a good job, and yet it's often not the best use of teacher time to litigate this individually with each early finisher. And yet, preparing a plan for what to do is tricky, because there's not a one-size-fits-all approach to students finishing early, because it looks different in different situations.   Sometimes students finish early because they rushed, but sometimes it's because they're just fast and working on a different timeline than the class. Sometimes students finish two minutes early, sometimes forty-five. Sometimes students finish early just once in a unit, sometimes it's the same kids every day.  So how do we meet the varied needs of all these early finishers? Today on the pod, let's talk about setting up a range of options you can choose from based on the maaaaany different situations that come up. 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!

I've been the first one to school a lot lately, and I'm spending a lot of quiet moments in my classroom, thinking about what's working well, what I can tweak, and how I can best use the spaces I've set up. Rounding the bend into week three feels very different than the summer what-if energy, so I'm in a position now to tell you what's working, what's a work-in-progress, and what I still need to work out. I wish I could swing by and see your classroom too - wouldn't it be fun if there was some way we could run a vast YouTube channel with just 90 second videos of classrooms all over the world? Of course, then we'd never get anything else done in August but writing a giant list of inspiration. Or maybe that's just me. I love thinking about classroom spaces, and I've done a lot of research on this, so here we go. Let me share what I'm trying, so you can see if you want to try it too. 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!

"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!

You know how I love to share a great find, and this week I've got a real winner for your vocabulary program. On this episode of "Highly Recommended," I'll tell you about a new tool I just found and why it's so high impact for helping kids learn new words. Let's dive in. Word Dissector App Link: https://word-dissector.irrc-tools.org/  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!  Sources: Cambridge Dictionary Online. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/ Kerkhoff, Shea. (2026). Adolescent Literacy: Integrating the Sciences of Reading and Writing in Grades 4-12. Bloomsbury Academic. Merriam Webster Online. https://www.merriam-webster.com "Word Dissector." (2026). Iowa Reading Research Center Morpheme Lab. https://word-dissector.irrc-tools.org/ Your Dictionary. https://education.yourdictionary.com/education/for-students-and-parents/greek-and-latin-word-roots.html

If you joined us for Camp Creative last week, you know we spent one of our days focused on AI. I shared a variety of activities to help students consider, discuss, and write about how AI affects them and their learning. Because I received so much positive feedback about these activities, I want to share them here too, in case you missed Camp. So today, let's talk about how to dig into one of the big questions facing our profession right now, with your students, right from week one. Because I hope there's a middle option between going entirely to paper and staying digital but playing the role of constant AI detective. Because there are digital activities I really love, activities that put the world at students' fingertips. And we already know that AI Detectors constantly make mistakes or are duped by AI Humanizer programs. Make your copy of this curriculum as a station set or as individual activities in the full show notes at nowsparkcreativity.com.  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!

My first first day of school, as you probably know, did not go well. Unless you count laying on the floor of my office crying at the end of the day "going well." It was the first time I ever realized you could be thinking one thing while saying something completely different. "Take a look at the syllabus," said my mouth, while my brain said, OH NO, they hate this! They're looking at the clock! And you have nothing else planned! And you have to do this with three more classes! Since then, "going over the syllabus" is not in my first day playbook. Nope, the last thing I want on day one is to stand in front of the class and lecture about our course texts, my expectations, and their upcoming units. So what will I be doing instead, in my first year back in the classroom in a bit? That's what today's podcast is all about. Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides 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!

So here's the thing. I know I talk a lot about reading. It's pretty important to me. But all week I've been trying to prepare a different podcast, one NOT about the uncrackable justification for choice reading. But recently I heard from several teachers over in CHSE about thriving reading programs they had going, only to get shut down by folks who felt like reading in class was a waste of time. And then I kind of ended up in a rabbit hole, as I am wont to do. It's like researching the justification for choice reading became my guilty pleasure, sucking up all my time. I listened to audiobooks on my walks, pored over research roundups and articles at the coffee shop, hit up the hammock with my Penny Kittle, and stared and stared and stared at the growing evidence mounting in my endless Google doc of notes. The evidence is clear. The need for help for kids who don't read, don't like reading, and don't want to read is great. And yet STILL we are prioritizing reading snippets and drilling for tests to "improve" our readers' reading. I want you to have the information you need to fight. So here I am. Again. Despite my efforts to focus on something else this week. Let's dig deep. Illustration for The Cycles I share in this episode: The Infographic I mentioned: 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: Amato, Jarred. (2024). Just Read It. Corwin. Atwell, Nancie. (2007). The Reading Zone. Scholastic. Aukerman, M. & Schuldt, L. (2021). "What Matters Most? Toward a Robust and Socially Just Science of Reading." Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1) pp. S85–S103 | doi:10.1002/rrq.40 Bains, A., Spaulding, C., Ricketts, J., & Krishnan, S. (2026). Providing choice enhances reading motivation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006), 79(4), 959–970. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218251370916 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. Briceño, Allison and Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica. (2022). Conscious Classrooms. PD Essentials. Bridges, Lois. (2018). The Joy and Power of Reading: A Summary of Research and Expert Opinion. Scholastic. Chavez, Felicia. (2021) The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. Haymarket Books. Elley, W. B. (2000). The Potential of Book Floods for Raising Literary Levels. International Review of Education, 46(3–4), 233–255. Gallagher, Kelly. (2009). Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It. Routledge. Kerkhoff, Shea. (2026). Adolescent Literacy: Integrating the Sciences of Reading and Writing in Grades 4-12. Bloomsbury Academic. Kittle, Penny. (2013). Book Love. Heinneman. Miller, Donalyn and Susan Kelley. (2013). Reading in the Wild: The Book Whisperer's Keys to Cultivating Lifelong Reading Habits. Jossey-Bass. Morgan, Denise N., & Wagner, Christopher W. (2013). "What's the Catch?" Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 56(8), 659–667 doi: 10.1002/JAAL.193 National Endowment for the Arts. (2007, November). To Read or Not to Read. O'Grady, R. J. (2025). The reading renaissance: Reimagining literacy practices in secondary English education. ENGLISH IN EDUCATION. https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2025.2567939 Wilhelm, J. D. (2016). Recognising the power of pleasure: What engaged adolescent readers get from their free-choice reading, and how teachers can leverage this for all. Australian Journal of Language & Literacy, 39(1), 30. Willingham, Daniel. (2021). Why Don't Kids Like School? Jossey-Bass. 2nd Ed. (Audiobook)

I'm not going to lie, the prospect of getting to set up a classroom space after years of dreaming about that very task is one of the reasons I'm headed back into the classroom this fall to teach one section of freshmen English. I just believe SO HARD that secondary spaces matter as much as elementary school ones. Heck, I'm an adult, and the space around me matters enormously to my productivity and pleasure in work. How could it not matter to teenagers? So today, I want to share a quick look at some of the resources and recommendations we'll be diving into at the end of the month inside our free (asynchronous) PD, Camp Creative: Your Stress-Free School Kickoff Kit. We'll keep it simple today, digging into five colorful, fun ideas for your walls. I'll be sharing all the resources and links for these resources inside Camp, don't worry! Sign up for Camp Creative (free PD lands in your inbox July 27-31): https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/Khm334 Visit the Downloads section at PBS' The Great American Read: https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/resources/downloads/  Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides 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!