How to Make Poetry Interesting to High School Students
We recently overheard a conversation between high school English teachers about how to make poetry interesting (and if it’s even…
Unit Planning
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Why Teaching About Plot in High School is Still Important
We don’t know about you, but we had some questions about teaching about plot as high school teachers. Should we…
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Teaching Poetry: Helping Your Students Prepare for Discussion
Teaching poetry is simultaneously one of the most rewarding and most challenging things we do as English teachers. Its compactness means it is rich with literary devices, creating powerful effects that speak to significant human truths and experiences. However, this can also make it seem indecipherable upon first (and sometimes second) glance, which often leads students to dismiss it as boring because they aren’t getting the instant gratification of immediate understanding.
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Why Build a Cultural Toolkit with Your Students?
We came to believe we had an obligation to provide our students with what we call a “cultural toolkit.” What authors (for better or worse) once presumed to be a common body of knowledge is increasingly less common: Greek and Roman mythology, the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, and even fairy tales written by the brothers Grimm, not Disney.
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TV in the Classroom: 6 Episodes to Enrich Your ELA Curriculum
One of our favorite ways to grab students’ interest is through contemporary television shows and movies. Visual storytelling, whether as entertainment or on social media, is a big part of our students’ world, and using these other “texts” can be an easy yet powerful way to bring students into the world of a novel or introduce a skill in a way that is non threatening and high-interest.
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A Helpful Unit Plan Format for Secondary ELA Teachers
It can feel overwhelming to sort through the materials provided by your district or textbook publisher. This is exacerbated by looking at a pacing guide that seems to suggest other teachers are flying through every activity in a number of days that seems wildly unrealistic for your students (spoiler alert: those pacing guides are unrealistic for every classroom!).
