We all know the benefit of surrounding ourselves with others whom we can ask for advice. I’m fortunate to work with a bunch of English teachers who are terrific sounding boards for ideas. But it’s also good to take advantage of those who don’t work in my building. I’ve been
Sometimes the best lessons come not from great planning and preparation, but out of desperation and necessity. I had my students create their own essays prompts, and it definitely came from a spot where I felt like my back was up against the wall. However it was one of those
This year I’ve incorporated what I call Find Yourself Fridays. I’m giving my students something inspirational to read or watch. Sometimes it’s something quick, sometimes it takes up a good chunk of the period. But that’s ok. I have to remember I’m hear not just to teach students about literature
Nothing is worse than the sound of crickets in a classroom when you are trying to lead a discussion. This was the situation I faced last year with a couple of my classes. I created thought provoking discussion questions, asked them of the whole class, and was met with silence.
Preschools are hubs of creativity. When my children were in preschool there wasn’t a day that went by that they didn’t bring home some piece of artwork they made. We accumulated a lot of paper rapidly. Once students get into high school, however, a lot of the creative activities that
I know Othello really well. I have taught it for the past fifteen years and can recite entire passages from memory. I have read extensively about it – everything from scholarly articles to blog posts – and have seen at least three different movie versions of it and a stage production. I
Most of my students don’t like to annotate, and it’s because teachers have made it that way. We’ve used annotation to turn reading into work – and unpleasant work at that. We all agree that annotation is a valuable skill, but too many of our students tell me that annotation
Independent reading allows students time to read whatever they want to every day. You might remember it as SSR or DEAR, catchy acronyms that originated in the elementary grades, but there are tremendous benefits to allowing students time to read books that they select themselves at the high school level. Here’s
Sometimes when I teach poetry I get caught up in getting my students to understand what a poem means and neglect how poetic devices help create that meaning. Diction, syntax, rhyme – all of these are tools poets use in their writing. But how can we get students to understand how
