Swapping out a few titles is not the only work of building an equitable ELA curriculum. Here are some reflection questions and suggestions to take to your department to have the real conversation today.

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.

Engage students in a whole new way by tapping into the power of Google Jamboard. From fishbowl discussions to daily check ins and attendance questions, Jamboard is versatile and powerful in all classrooms.

A curse. A desperate staff of household appliances and fixtures. One dinner. How will rhetoric move the needle?

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.

All to often, our list of Black poets and artists gets limited to the writers who have been anthologized over an over again. I see Langston Hughes “Harlem” and Gwendolyn Brooks’ “We Real Cool” and Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” over and over again. These poets, phenomenal poets, are often reduced to that one single poem, or, even more damningly, the end of the list of Black poets that students are exposed to in high school. LET’S CHANGE THAT.

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.

In five easy steps, let me walk you through and demonstrate how easy it is to create a digital poetry choice board. I even have a free template for you to download and get started!

I’d like to present SIX tech tools for teachers worth adding to your list of considerations. If you are feeling comfortable where you are and ready to implement something new, or maybe you’re happy where you are, but you need just one more solution to an issue that you’re having, I have been using these six tools faithfully and I want to recommend them to you with confidence.

If you are ready to tackle some fresh, new ideas this upcoming National Poetry Month or during other parts of your school year, I gathered together some of the best poetry minds that I know out here in the teacher blogging community.  Together, we’ve come up with twelve ideas to try during National Poetry Month and I’ve broken them into categories for you: COLLABORATE, PLAY, DIG, CREATE, & REACH.

With a little extra down-time during the holidays, I love curling up with my phone or computer to finally read the articles that I’ve had bookmarked or saved from the past year. With the hectic craziness of teacher-life, I feel like I only half-read articles, even when I’m DYING to read them! If you’re finding yourself with a teeny bit more reading time than usual, you have to check out this list. These are my Top 20 Blog Posts to Read Before 2020 - buckle up and get reading!

This year, I have a mixture of teaching related articles from friends of mine (saving grading time, first chapter Friday, scaffolding strategies), some fascinating photo journalism from The New York Times, a Ta-Neheisi Coates article on reparations from 2015 that I still haven’t fully digested, and more!

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.

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!

I love this poem. I love the imagery, the title, the metaphor, but most of all, I love how teachable it is. The poem has a great deal of mystery and room for debatable discussions about author’s intent, but it’s also accessible to students who might feel intimidated by poetry - or even just intimidated by language.

That was the goal I had in mind while making this list: I wanted to find poems that were challenging and worth discussing in class, but also poems that could be tackled by students in one or two class periods. As a guide, I used The Big Six as my foundational analysis tool . If you’ve never used it, get on board!