The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA Betsy Potash: ELA

On this week’s mini-episode, I want to share my top strategy for taking the pressure off you while delivering a great experience for parents on back-to-school night, stations. 
 
Back-to-school night, like the first day of school, can be a stressful time. You’re trying to get a lot of information across quickly, and it can feel like the only way to get that accomplished is by talking fast and furiously for the eight or so minutes you have with your rapidly moving parents. 
A colorful presentation that you love is great, if that works for you, but if you’d prefer to go interactive, why not try stations? It takes a lot of pressure off you, and it’s easy to repeat in session after session without losing your voice or sweating through your fancy schmancy parent meeting clothes. 
With stations, you can get parents up and moving around your classroom, get them the information they want, and even create a chance to chat and answer questions informally.
If you want to try this method, here’s how I’d break it down. 
Have your stations set up around the room before parents enter. Throw a welcome slide up on the board with your name, a fun photo (or collage) from classes past, and your contact information. Once parents are all inside, welcome them and invite them to move around the room to the different stations, letting them know how much time they have to move around so they can pace accordingly.
At each station, they should find an obvious sign telling them what to do, as well as any supporting papers they need to pick up or fill out. 
Here are some ideas for stations:
#1 Info Sheet + Q & A With you: At this station, parents can grab a paper with your name, course description, contact information, and a QR code that takes them to any website or LMS you’d like them to have access to. You can hang out here and chat with them, answering questions and getting to know them a bit. 
#2 Slideshow + Examples of Student Work: At this station, set up a computer or iPad to run a digital slideshow of student work from past years. Scatter a few great projects here too. This will give parents a sense for the type of work their kids will do in your class. 
#3 Tour the Library: Invite parents to browse the shelves in your library. Maybe they’ll find a title they once loved and it will inspire them to talk books with their students. By focusing on this important space in your classroom, they’ll realize that reading is going to be an integral part of your class.
#4 Learn how to Support Students: If there are certain things you wish parents would do, like set their kids up with a library card, ask them what they’re studying, remind them to leave their cell phones in their lockers, etc., create a station with these tips. Then leave out some post-its and invite parents to add their suggestions of what has worked well for them in supporting their child’s learning. 
#5 Write a Note: At this station you could go one of two ways. Invite parents to write a note of encouragement to their child that you can then share at a key moment. Or invite parents to write you a note letting you know how they feel you can best reach their child. That might mean telling you about a project their child loved in the past, about their favorite books, about their favorite subjects, about important events in their lives that are impacting their school time, etc.
You can always add more stations or choose just a few of these. You could also pair the stations with a short talk from you at the beginning. There are lots of recipes for a successful parent night – just choose what makes you feel comfortable and confident introducing them to all the wonderful work their kids will be doing. Back-to-School Night can be stressful, but this week I just want to highly recommend you create an experience that makes you feel relaxed and confident.
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If I told you the elective we’re about to dive into has an “awkward party” unit, would you believe me?

Well, it does, and I can’t wait for you to learn about it and start planning an awkward party lesson of your own. Today on the show, we’re continuing our creative electives series with veteran teacher Lisa Blake, who's been teaching for 33 years in Northern California. She's built a life skills elective to give her students confidence in how to learn new skills, not just to teach the skills themselves.

As she empowers them to explore and discover paths to success, she's not just teaching them to cook, sew, and manage the small talk at an awkward party, she's teaching them to believe they can tackle an area they know nothing about. And you can do the same for your students, whether it's through an entire elective like Lisa, or a smaller life skills unit. So let's dive in and learn how!
 
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On this week’s mini-episode, I want to answer a question from our community about reading in class. Here it is “ Hi all. Next year my middle school will be implementing a 45-minute every-other-day reading block for all students. All teachers (ELA or not) will be required to cover the class. I am wondering…what you do with it…” In today’s episode, I’m going to weigh in on how I would use a gift like this. If you give kids time to read in class, hopefully you’ll find some helpful ideas in how you can structure it so you all enjoy that time and benefit from it as much as possible.
The most important thing in my mind would be to make sure every student has access to a good book during this reading block. You could make bringing your book the only grade for this block, but even if you do, it’ll be essential to have wonderful books available during this time because no matter what you do, some kids will forget their book. I’d work with your librarian or department to make sure that there is a shelf of great age-appropriate reads available in every room. Then, as much as possible, I’d try to integrate some book recommendations. That could mean coordinating with the English department to create recommended reading posters, sharing short videos of authors reading from their work - similar to a First Chapter Friday - inviting a couple of kids to share what they’re reading if they’re loving it, 
And probably putting together some kind of curated digital access so students can hook into great e and audiobooks that others have enjoyed. The English department could also be the ones to help every student pick out their first book at the start of the program to get the ball rolling productively. 
This type of program, like any choice reading program, is going to build in momentum over time. Kids will likely struggle to sit in silence for 45 minutes at a time to read, especially if they don’t have a book they like. As much as possible, the early days of reading blocks should involve plenty of book PR in all its wonderful forms, and PLENTY of fantastic books available in audiobook, electronic, and physical format. Provide graphic novels, novels-in-verse, amazing series books, fantasy, scifi, and other popular genres alongside the classics. Ideally, every teacher monitoring this block could have a bit of training in watching for unengaged readers, so they can step over and suggest switching to a different book if a student’s current read is clearly boring them. Over time, as your reading culture grows and their reading muscles are strengthened, it will get easier. 
Anytime you can get time to let kids read at school, in my mind it’s a win. But a quiet room and the opportunity to read will only delight a handful of students at first. This week, I want to highly recommend that whether you’re working on a whole school program or a short reading block for your own class, you remember that it takes time and sustained, enthusiastic book PR to help build a culture of reading where none exists. Keep curating great titles, offering recommendations, putting up posters, and connecting kids with whatever book will get them started on the reading escalator.
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What would you do if you had nine weeks to help ELA students imagine the real-world use of ELA skills? Inside the unique elective wheel program at Lisa Jones' school, students explore each discipline for nine weeks before moving onto the next. To show them literacy in action, Lisa has crafted an elective with three real-world projects to help them imagine how they might use their ability to communicate across modern mediums. Listen (or read) on to dive into these three real-world projects with us. Whether you'd like to create a Literacy in Action elective of your own, or just add more real-world projects to one of your other courses, you'll find plenty of ideas in the show today.
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This week let’s talk about careers. I don’t know if you can relate, but I graduated from high school with a general awareness of maybe six careers - law, medicine, teaching, ministry, science, and business. Let’s talk about how we can show our students a broader view of what’s out there - and build in some ELA skills to the process. 
A fun way to start any careers unit is with a careers scavenger hunt,  an easy form of research students can do as they move through their days. Just ask your students to begin noticing the careers they’re interacting with, making a list of every career they can think of that relates to what they do for one day. Challenge them to come up with at least twenty-five. 
For example, they wake up and check their phones (social media influencer, programmer, designer, app creation, phone sales), pick up coffee (coffee shop manager or owner, organic coffee farmer, pastry chef, interior designer, contractor, advertising agent), go to school (teacher, administrator, politician, secretary, department chair, electrician, engineer), head for the mall (clothing designer, clothing buyer, social media for clothing lines, marketer, photographer, restaurant manager, chef, furniture buyer, urban planner etc.). As students begin to think about all the different jobs associated with their own daily routines, it’ll help open their eyes to the many careers out there. 
Similarly, you can help students begin to think beyond the surface by having them write down a field they’re interested in and research to discover  twenty-five different jobs in that field. What jobs are connected to film director? SO many. To doctor? To teacher? To chef? This is a really fun activity to stretch student’s imaginations. Then have students walk around to see each other’s lists, jotting down the one career on each other list that most appeals to them. 
Diving a little deeper, one unique way of approaching a careers unit is to start a class careers blog, inviting each student to shadow someone whose line of work interests them and then make a contribution to the blog based on what they learn. The contribution could be a video they make about the experience, a narrative profile they write about the person they shadow, a Q & A style written interview, a photo essay, or something else. If you’re going to publish the careers blog online so that all students can access the many wonderful resources they create for each other, and so that other students can add to it in the coming years, be sure to get the permission of those being shadowed to publish their image and story online. 
Another lower stakes project is to let students create timelines of start-up companies, based on NPR’s show, How I Built This. Let students choose an episode based on a company they’re actually interested in, and create timelines to show how the company grew (generally slowly, with lots of setbacks and lots of commitment and creativity from the creator!). Then share these timelines in a gallery walk or with mini-presentations so students get a taste of many different stories. 
Similarly, you could create a class podcast, having each student contribute by recording an interview with someone about their career. Students could learn to reach out with inquiries, write interview questions, and record sound clips. So many valuable real-world skills here! 
Hopefully after completing a few of these activities, your students will have a broader view of the working world and a little more motivation to care about the skills they’re learning in your classroom. After all, restaurant owners need to be able to write e-mail newsletters these days. Business owners may draw clientele through podcasting and social media captions.  App designers must be able to pitch their ideas through strong presentations to venture capitalists. You know what I’m getting at. 
A careers unit has the potential to be incredibly engaging - who isn’t curious a

Today on the show, we’ll find out what happened when an administrator attended a student’s genius hour project presentation about a new elective she wanted to see proposed Teaching African American Literature.

Spoiler alert, magic.

We’re continuing our elective series today, and I’m delighted to tell you we're hearing from passionate veteran teacher Bethany Yuninger. She'll be sharing her African American Literature Elective, and wait til you hear the story of how this elective came to be - it's incredible!
 
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