These are 12 fresh, new ideas for shaking up your American Literature curriculum: from essential questions to literary food trucks, take these ideas to change up how you’ve done things in the past.

Teaching grammar shouldn’t happen in isolation. Here is one Padlet-based lesson idea for teachers to practice grammatical concepts by writing and revising captions of various pictures.

Design thinking is a creative, problem-solution based thought process that is vital to teach our students. Here’s the toolkit you need to get started in your virtual or in-person English Language Arts classroom.

he Donut describes themselves as “a community of people changing the world through inclusiveness and positivity. We provide fact-based summaries of the day’s biggest stories and shed light on big-media spin, all while promoting good vibes and civic action”. Okay! So, yes. Yes to all of this. Here’s how I’ll use it in my classroom.

Here is a giant list of 50+ books for high school English students to read before going to college. Let’s widen the cultural lens for our students by exposing them to books outside of American Literature. This list can be used for selecting a whole class novel, creating literature circles or book clubs, or even offering ideas for independent reading.

Here are my seven favorite spots to find supplementary texts for any high school ELA unit that I’m teaching.

Maybe you’ve been asked to lead a grade level team. Maybe you’re on a grade level team that has no appointed leadership and you’re ready to take the reins. No matter how you arrived at this moment and this blog post, you’re probably wondering where to start and what exactly your role should be. As your team works together during this school year, here are a few things to always keep in mind.

Traditionally, curriculum maps are developed based on one, golden goal: meeting standards. In my experience and research, standards are not only different in different parts of the world, but oftentimes are limiting or inaccurate representations of the big picture of what students need to learn in a given year. This curriculum map template should both serve as a functional way for your team to make a plan, but also a place to start important conversations about what curriculum writing can do for a school and its students.

If you’ve been following along on my teaching journey for some time, you’ll know that as an Adventurous Teacher, my goal is to always keep trying new things, no matter how daunting or intimidating a strategy or technology might be.  Last year, I posted 10 Adventurous Teaching Ideas that I planned to try, and I’m happy to announce that I accomplished 9/10 of them! As must as I tried, I really didn’t step up my game as far as grammar instruction is concerned, but I’m okay with being just okay in that area! This year, I have a few new things up my sleeve that I wanted to actually write down as I prepare for the new calendar year. Here is my list of teaching strategies, ideas, and other things that I want to accomplish in 2020.

You guys.  This is the first time in over a decade of teaching that I’ve gone through a stack of papers saying, “Yes!  Yes! YESSS!!!!” I’m so proud of what’s been accomplished that I’m just dying to share with you how to make this happen in your own classroom.

It’s every teacher’s most stressful, most highly anticipated, and most powerful time of the year:  back to school! After over a decade of first days back to school, I’ve finally found a plan for the first ten days that streamlines the three most important things for me:  routines, rigor, and relationships. Here, I will outline for you the importance of routines, rigor, and relationships, then, provide my daily plans for the first ten days.

The “summer slide” is a powerful force that knocks students off track who were making progress.  Students struggling with literacy all school year fall further behind during the summer months when the “faucet” (an analogy described by the Brookings Institute) is turned off.  We NEED to do something, but in high school, we face a plethora of challenges.

For this article, I interviewed teachers on social media and drew from my experiences at two different districts.  Here are the problems I found and some solutions that I propose. I’d love to hear your feedback and additional suggestions because we are in this together!

As the school year comes to a close, you might be looking at your calendar thinking, what on earth am I going to do with these random extra days?  Or maybe you have room on your calendar for a final unit, but no idea what to do with your students.  I’ve got your solution right here! Here is a roundup of 13 ideas for ELA mini-units and lessons that can effectively and meaningfully fill between 3-5 days at the end of the year.  

Teaching essay writing is no simple task:

1. The pressure is on:  this is a skill that students need, are tested on, and will need to harness for the next grade level all the way into college.  

2. Students somehow forget what they’ve learned in between assignments.  I mean...how many times do I have to teach you what CLAIM is?!?! We JUST went over it!

3. There are just TOO MANY skills all depending on each other.  Every time we teach an essay, we feel compelled to teach and grade everything, from selecting best evidence to writing a correct MLA header!

No matter whether you love or loathe the long novel you teach, the same struggles pop up every time we come around to teaching it year after year.  For me, it’s To Kill a Mockingbird.  It’s a 400 page monster!  It’s fun dawdling around with setting and making maps of Maycomb and then rolling through Boo Radley anecdotes.  Before we know it, August has turned into December. I’m kidding, of course, but time truly does have a way of slipping away as we work through a long text.  And there’s nothing worse for kids than dragging out a book for too long! Here are my best suggestions for getting through your version of my Mockingbird.

After teaching for ten years and then switching schools, I was very quickly reminded of how much work goes into writing curriculum from scratch. For a long time, I was in a happy place of continual revision of curriculum that I liked, but was tweaking here and there for relevance, rigor, and for fun.  

Now?  It’s the Wild West.  It’s intergalactic chaos.  It’s constant guessing and unpredictability.  All that aside, however, it’s also invigorating and exciting.  I would call myself “a curriculum person” because this kind of blank slate challenges me in a way that sparks joy in my life, despite the chaos, so I’d like to share with you how to most easily navigate through a first attempt at writing and implementing a new curriculum for a new novel in your secondary ELA classroom.

Teacher burnout is a real thing.  Exhaustion from the myriad demands placed on our shoulders year in and year out can make anyone question why on earth they started in this profession in the first place.  

As a teacher in the US, the winter break gives me a chance to reevaluate my “why” in teaching.   Why do it? Why work so hard? Why work to the point of burnout every single year? When there’s actually time to slow down and remember the answer to that question, the answer is so simple - why?  Because I love watching kids learn. That’s it. It’s that simple. And when does burnout start to feel so painful? It’s when the job has become something other than dedicating time to helping students learn and experience new things.

When I first started teaching, I remember trying so many different ideas all the time in my classroom. It was exhausting running a new small group scenario or differentiation strategy several times per week, and over my many years of teaching, I’ve come to master a handful of strategies that are versatile and work EVERY time (at least NOW they do!). For me, learning stations are the way to go. I’d say at least once a week, I have my students engaging with content through a learning stations setup and I love it.