Short story units have the potential to deeply inspire and impact learning with students, but if the approach is disjointed or lacking any sort of alignment, these units can feel like flops. Here are the ways that I craft meaningful, engaging, and interesting units to highlight the short stories that we love (and a few more that we should add to the rotation!)

One of the best ways to start your back to school lesson planning is with a stations activity. Gone are the days of reading the syllabus out loud, and right in front of us are the days of interactive, meaningful, and focused activities. Get your students started in groups and take them through an orientation to your room, your expectations, and the school year ahead. Here are 10 ideas to get you started.

Unit planning can feel overwhelming, but this guest post provides practical, easy steps for getting started on any unit. Follow Samantha’s guidance as she demonstrates the ways in which she organizes her “The Crucible” unit here!

Teachers can have happiness and power over their own lives, but it all starts with creating good habits. These are three habits that changed everything about my teaching career.

Rigor is not the same thing as busy work. Pushing students and challenging students to do their best work and to excel past their wildest dreams takes concentration, planning, and intention. Here are 12 ways to support students as you challenge them every step of the way.

Rhetorical analysis is a skill that needs practice and reinforcement all year long. Take a break from what you’re doing and tackle these Super Bowl ads together for students to practice discussion and analysis in an entertaining and engaging lesson.

Middle school reading can be a powerful way to expose students to issues in the world around them. It’s also one of the best ways for students to make connections between academics and their own lives. In this guest post, you’ll get three thematic book lists to fill up your Amazon cart.

Essential Questions are the backbone of inquiry-based teaching and learning, but writing them and using them can be challenging in a Shakespeare unit. Here are my favorite essential questions to use in some of the most popular plays that we teach in the classroom and how to move forward using them.

Valentine’s Day is the perfect way for ELA teachers at the high school level to have a little bit of fun and give students the chance to be creative. English classes almost always have a series of novels and characters at the ready, so why not ask students to write some haiku love poems between characters? Here’s the activity, how it started, and how to do it yourself.

Here in this post, I have curated resources and strategies for facing these unpredictable absence days or even days where learning has switched from in-person to hybrid or virtual learning. As always, I’d love to hear what you use or any other ideas you’d like to add in the comments at the bottom of this post!

If you have a world literature course, or any upperclassman English course for that matter, A Thousand Splendid Suns should be in your curriculum. Full stop. This is by far and away one of my personal and my students’ favorite novels and if you’re not teaching it, you’re missing out. There are so many things about this novel unit that are perfect for skill-building and ripe for deep, meaningful discussion, but if I had to boil it down to my top three, then here they are…

I settled on remaking an old game from the ‘80s to show the complexities of how a bill becomes a law. In the game, students roll a dice and try to move their game piece along a ‘stream’ that represents the often troublesome path that a bill often takes when trying to become a law. If a student rolls a 1-4, they continue to the next step in the law-making process. Rolling a 5 or 6 means they are stopped at one of the many obstacles that often prevent a bill from becoming law. Here’s how it went…

If you’re new to the podcast world, let me give you a big, warm WELCOME! Podcasts have been a game-changer for me both for professional development and for adding new texture, voices, and perspectives to my Essential Question based units.

The curated list below is broken into these two categories: podcasts for PD and podcasts for content. Each of these will inspire you with new ideas and restore your joy and love of teaching at your core.

AP Language and Composition shouldn’t be the only place where students learn certain skills. In fact, these skills are so important, they should really be spiraled down into all of the grade levels leading up to Lang. Here are my top four recommendations to consider in your vertical articulation in your English Department.

Raise your hand if the first unit of your school year is a short story unit with figurative language terminology review? Yes? This is unit one in thousands of English classrooms and this makes me wonder…if they’ve done this so many times, why aren’t they experts? How is it that by unit 2, the next time we encounter an example of personification, they’ve forgotten the term altogether?

The thought process here is logical: provide terms, provide definitions, provide examples, practice, practice practice = learning has succeeded. But we see this doesn’t actually happen. So what’s not working?

Keeping rhetorical analysis fun isn’t easy, but here’s a simple idea that requires no extra work on your end. Handprint or five-finger analysis is a memorable and creative way to analyze an argument and you can easily customize this organizer to fit any season or text you are studying.

In order to facilitate high-quality classroom discussion, we must set up purposeful scaffolds on the front and back end of each discussion; however, in order for students to engage with the practice needed to meet these goals, we have to let the discussion happen organically and without our interference. These are the time that we stay in the background and when to speak up.

Poems and poets come from all over the world and deliver POWERFUL and NEEDED perspectives to our students in a short, compact manner. Poetry studies don’t take the time that novel studies do. Pairing our texts alongside poems that provide additional voice and contrast is a critical practice that all English teachers should be working to make a regular occurrence in the classroom.

Bring LatinX voices into your ELA classroom and curriculum all year long. Here are five easy places to start with a more diverse approach.

If you aren’t familiar with a makerspace, it is a place where students can create, problem solve, and collaborate. One of the greatest benefits of implementing a makerspace is that it shakes things up from your normal routine. It gives your students the chance to get silly and creative while giving you the gift of seeing your kids in a totally different light. Not only does it foster learning through inquiry, but it also helps to build overall classroom community.