Teaching High School English? 20 Super-Helpful Blog Posts You Need
We may be biased, but we’re pretty sure teaching high school English is one of the toughest jobs out there.
We’re responsible for teaching skills that every student needs in the future, no matter what they choose to study in college or what they choose to do for a career. And there is always a spotlight on us: teaching high school English means teaching a subject that is tested on every high-stakes exam.
Teaching high school English means we’re discussing all kinds of important issues with students, navigating controversial cultural conversations, and acting as counselors when personal narratives invite our students to open up.
We teach the one course that all students are required to take every year, so teaching high school English means managing all the little administrative things that have to be done—school portraits, discipline assemblies, and college counseling sessions.
And don’t even get us started on the grading. Oh, the grading.
20 Must-Read Blog Posts to Make Teaching High School English Easier
We recently dug into our blog archives, looking for the most helpful resources we could find for teaching high school English, and we wanted to share a round-up of “must-read” posts in the hopes that you find something to make your teaching life just a little bit easier this week.
Teaching with Short Stories: Your Helpful All-in-One Guide
Short stories are crucial to an ELA teacher’s curriculum. Setting aside the fact that they fill our textbooks and pacing guides, they allow us to teach literary analysis skills to students with decreasing attention spans. Because they require authors to tell a full and meaningful story in a condensed form, short stories are often rich with literary elements, and many of them are quite thought-provoking.
Because short stories contain so much, it’s not always easy to know what to do with them, so we’ve written a guide that covers how to select the short stories that will work best in your classroom, a round-up of our favorite short stories to teach different literary elements, the most important story elements to make sure you cover in a short story unit, and strategies for successfully teaching short stories.
Are You Teaching Theme Effectively?
Theme is, perhaps, one of the most important literary elements for our students to master. Compelling themes are the reason literature so powerfully resonates with us, and writing theme statements is a necessary component of literary analysis.
It took us some time to figure out how best to help our students write effective theme statements, but we developed six key characteristics of an effective theme statement and some go-to lessons that helped our students get it.
Your New Go-To Novel Activity
If you’re teaching high school English, you’re probably often on the lookout for fun activities and projects to do at the end of a novel unit. We want to find activities that our students enjoy (or at least tolerate) but that still require them to think and demonstrate understanding of a text.
When we taught AP Literature, we created a go-to activity that we could assign at the end of every novel. It required students to focus on key literary elements and integrate quotations while still exercising creativity. It also made for a great AP exam review tool at the end of the year.
Why Build a Cultural Toolkit with Your Students?
We didn’t realize how foundational the idea of building a cultural toolkit was for us until we started blogging and saw just how frequently we link to this post. We learned early on that many of our students lack the cultural background—literary terms, allusions, archetypes—that are necessary for a successful study of Western literature. We wanted to ensure that our students weren’t at a disadvantage when they headed off to college, so we made an effort to create lessons and activities that would build up their cultural toolkits.
8 Strategies for Teaching Writing That Get Results
Teaching writing was, for us, the most challenging part about teaching high school English. It’s so important for our students, but they struggle with it, and it often requires far more individual attention, practice, and feedback than we feel we have time to give.
We won’t claim to have mastered writing instruction, but we did develop strategies that enabled us to see our students make progress. And since we’re all looking for ways to improve our students’ writing, we couldn’t keep those strategies to ourselves.
Sentence Starters: A Godsend for Teaching Writing
We did a deep dive on one of our go-to writing strategies: using sentence starters. We used these extensively with our standard-level students, many of whom were reading and writing below grade level. Sentence starters even had a place in our AP curriculum at times. We encountered many colleagues who weren’t sure these scaffolds were appropriate for high school students, so we thought it was important to articulate why these are such a valuable tool, even for more advanced writers.
How to Teach Writing Using the 5C Paragraph: It’s Easier than You Think
By far our biggest success in improving our students’ writing skills came from developing a go-to paragraph structure that we could use over and over again. Most English teachers have some sort of writing strategy they teach to students, whether it’s the source sandwich, CER paragraphs, the Jane Schaffer model, or something else entirely. But none of those quite worked for us, and when we made some modifications to Sonja Munévar Gagnon’s TEPAC structure, our students’ writing improved by leaps and bounds.
Teaching the Literary Analysis Essay Step-by-Step
Writing literary analysis essays is a particularly challenging task for our students. Not only do they have to articulate their ideas in writing, but they’re arguing for the interpretation of a piece of literature, a task that’s challenging enough on its own.
We’re big on structures that students can rely on time after time, so we set out to create a strategy for tackling the literary analysis essay, particularly with our AP Literature students, and it gave them a reliable starting point for approaching this complex task.
9 High School Syllabus Must-Haves
Creating a syllabus seems like it should be easy but often feels oh-so-frustrating. What do we include? How are we supposed to structure a class? What do students need to know about our procedures on the first day?
If you’re feeling stuck about what to include in your high school syllabus, we’ve got a list of the nine essentials (and a link to some infographic syllabus templates to make your job even easier).
Classroom Organization Tip: Use a Daily Agenda Template
For years, we spent the last few minutes of every school day dutifully updating our whiteboards with agendas for the next day and a list of upcoming due dates. Not only is this a tedious task, but the more courses you teach, the less whiteboard space you wind up with for your actual teaching.
Enter the daily agenda template. When we started using these, we saved ourselves board space and time, creating an easy reference of what exactly we had done in class each day and what announcements we wanted to make sure to remember to give all our classes.
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Need a New Bellringer? Try These Warm Up Activities
Bellringers are a valuable tool for teachers: they buy you a few minutes to do all those inescapable administrative tasks. They’re also a valuable way to efficiently cover the miscellaneous “stuff” we have to tackle as English teachers, like grammar and vocabulary.
While it took us a few years to work it out, we loved our bellringer system. Students rotated between typing practice, grammar practice, vocabulary practice, and First Chapter Friday assignments, and as we moved more and more towards a flipped classroom, our weekly routine evolved into a simple menu students could complete in any order they liked as long as all the tasks were done by Friday.
How We Use Our Teacher Planner to Get and Stay Organized
Steph is all about calendaring. It was one of her favorite tasks to do each year (and for each unit), and even working for Three Heads, she’ll happily spend an afternoon making adjustments to our content calendar. This wasn’t just a quirk, however; it played a key role in our success as teachers by helping us to stay organized and keep an eye on our end goals, easily seeing how a single lesson fit into a bigger picture.
In this post, Steph breaks down her approach to calendaring and, even better, we’ve provided a link to a free teacher planner.
Our Full Year Plan for Teaching AP Literature
Surprisingly, this has been one of our most popular blog posts. We see many AP teachers worrying about how they’re going to cover everything in one academic year that their students need to be successful on the AP exam in May. And it’s certainly overwhelming to work this out for the first time!
We detailed our full-year plan for teaching AP Literature, full of notes on pacing, book recommendations, and plenty of links. (And we’re happy to send you a detailed day-to-day version if you email us!)
Engaging Lessons to Make the First Week of School a Success
We don’t know about you, but the first week of school is . . . not our favorite. It’s awkward—you’re meeting an entirely new batch of students and you have all these boring administrative tasks to take care of when you really just want to dive into your curriculum. We rounded up some suggestions to make your first week of school a success, covering what you need to without completely boring your students to death.
Not Another Syllabus! First Day of Class Activities to Engage Students
The first week of school may be awkward, but the first day of school is even worse. Your students are literally strangers and you’re supposed to make them feel welcome while reviewing a sheet of paper full of rules. After way too many years of a traditional “read the syllabus” approach, we designed a first day of class that was a lot more engaging (and left us feeling a lot less tired at the end of the day).
The Challenges of Teaching: Why Teachers Are Especially Vulnerable to Burnout
As two teachers who left the classroom, we have a lot of feelings about teacher burnout and the insane expectations that send us hurtling in that direction. It was important to us to think through what it is about this profession that makes us so vulnerable to burnout and what we can do about it to help better prepare teachers still in the classroom to stay in it for the long haul.
The Key to Teacher Time Management? Let It Go.
As teachers, we’re constantly looking for ways to save time, and yet it often feels impossible to do so. One of the biggest factors in the burnout that led us to leave the classroom was our stubborn insistence on doing everything and doing it all excellently. But to survive in this profession for the long haul, we have to focus on the things that only we can do and be willing to let go of (or outsource) the rest.
Concerned About AI and Academic Integrity? We Have Ideas for You.
Could there possibly be a hotter topic right now for those of us teaching high school English than the challenges of dealing with AI use in the classroom? We have a lot of thoughts about how to handle this tricky issue in your classroom, aided by Steph’s experiences teaching AP Seminar online.
The Importance of Reading: Why It’s Worth the Battle
It’s distressing to us to see fewer and fewer of our students reading when we know how valuable reading is, academically and personally. For many years, it felt almost futile to us to make independent reading a meaningful part of our curriculum, but when we decided to devote more time and attention to it, we decided it was worth the challenge.
12 Reasons to Love the Young Adult Genre
The more we leaned into independent reading in our classroom, the more we incorporated a steady diet of young adult fiction in our own reading lists, doing our best to generate a catalog of recommendations for our students. And we think young adult fiction gets a bad rap! These books are a delight to read, and they have a lot of value for readers of all ages (especially for those of us teaching high school English). We’re probably preaching to the choir here, but this was our love letter to the young adult genre.
Teaching high school English may be a tough job, but we all know hardship builds character, and in our experience, English teachers are some of the strongest people out there! Our job is important, and we hope today’s roundup gives you something to hold onto as you head into another week in the classroom.
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