488 episodes listed below
Creative ELA ideas with classroom roots.
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA is a classroom-minded show about making English lessons feel more alive, flexible, and relevant. Betsy Potash moves through poetry, curriculum design, choice reading, classroom space, and teacher learning with a generous stream of usable examples.
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The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA treats English teaching as a creative practice that can be redesigned one unit, resource, or classroom choice at a time. It is especially useful for teachers who feel boxed in by scripted curriculum, stale book lists, or old habits around poetry and literary study. Betsy Potash brings the perspective of someone who cares about practical classroom texture. The episodes do not simply name an activity and move on. They build outward. A poetry discussion might begin with student hesitation and move into multimodal collage, imitative poems, collaborative annotation, blackout analysis, poetry songs, and poetry videos. The show keeps asking how students can make meaning in more than one mode. It also spends serious time on curriculum imagination. In episodes about ninth grade English and American literature, the show weighs core texts, book clubs, dystopian themes, identity, contemporary poetry, verse novels, first chapter Fridays, book trailers, grammar in context, and choice reading as part of a larger classroom ecosystem. That wider lens matters. A classroom is not only a syllabus here; it is also a library, a set of materials, a flexible space, a display strategy, a sensory environment, and a collection of prompts that make students want to begin. The show can be highly concrete, as in its recommendation of the New York Times contest calendar for authentic student audiences. It can also step back into professional growth, comparing graduate programs for English teachers and the tradeoffs between online, in-person, literary, and education-focused study. Guest episodes add another layer through conversations about student agency, microschools, portable innovation labs, and the PAST Foundation. The pacing is measured and cumulative. The appeal is not polish for its own sake. It is the feeling of a thoughtful teacher sorting through many possible doors until a few start to look usable on Monday.
Made for: English teachers looking for practical ways to refresh literature, writing, poetry, choice reading, and classroom design. It best suits educators who like abundant examples and adaptable options.
What sets it apart: The show stands out for turning big ELA ideals into specific classroom moves: contests, book clubs, poetry formats, resource systems, and classroom possibilities. Its episodes feel like guided planning sessions rather than abstract pedagogy.
Want to love walking into your ELA classroom each day? Excited about innovative strategies like PBL, escape rooms, hexagonal thinking, sketchnotes, one-pagers, student podcasting, genius hour, and more? Want a thriving choice reading program and a shelf full of compelling diverse texts?You're in the right place!Here you'll find interviews with top authors from the ELA field, workshops with strategies you can use in class immediately, and quick tips to ignite your English teacher creativity. Love teaching poetry? Explore blackout poems, book spine poems, I am from poems, performance poetry, lessons for contemporary poets, and more.Excited to get started with hexagonal thinking? Find out how t…
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
A practical ELA show that turns ambitious ideas about poetry, reading, and curriculum into classroom-ready decisions.
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA turns curriculum planning into a candid workshop, with the host thinking through classroom choices and showing how an idea might become an actual lesson.
An Apple commercial becomes a doorway into dystopia; your book club gets a sharper first question.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A ninth-grade English dream course takes shape through books, themes, and practical classroom thinking.
An unexpected invitation to teach ninth grade English for a year becomes a useful starting point for imagining what a dream course could look like when the textbook is no longer in charge.
A practical map for teachers who want poetry to do more than sit on the page.
The episode frames poetry as a practical classroom tool for teachers who did not arrive with much joy or pizzazz, beginning by naming that distance before moving into workable ways to weave poetry through ELA across the year.
A practical case for widening American lit while keeping the classroom central.
American literature is presented as a curriculum in motion, with some schools still holding close to the traditional canon while others widen the frame to include a fuller range of American stories.
A practical starting point for using dystopia to teach influence, argument, and student choice.
The episode treats dystopia as a classroom tool for thinking about how fiction makes an argument and where influence begins to look like propaganda.
Thoughtful teaching talk with classroom roots.
Careful conversations for better teaching.
Classroom creativity, treated as real work.
Education conversations with a human pulse.
Betsy Potash shares a framework for running dystopian book clubs in ELA classrooms, drawing from her experience teaching 1984 in Bulgaria.
Betsy Potash presents a quick idea for transforming old classroom books into a visual display.
Betsy Potash outlines six student-led strategies, including “picture it,” “sketch it,” and “what’s the gist,” for making sense of reading.
Andy Jackson, a 32-year veteran eighth-grade teacher, tells Betsy Podash how she adapted hexagonal thinking, originally developed by Anthony Hodgson in the business world, for three units.
This episode continues exploring creative poetry activities for the classroom, focusing on a multimodal poetry collage using the Poetry 180 collection.
Betsy Potash uses The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast to turn an unexpected invite to teach ninth grade English into a full year-long curriculum sketch.
["Betsy Potash opens The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast episode 'Hate Teaching Poetry?
This episode recommends the New York Times contest calendar as a resource for student writers to find authentic audiences through various contests.
This episode helps English teachers explore graduate program options, including a master's in English through the Bread Loaf School and various master's in education programs, with personal recommendations and resources.
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast examines student agency, microschools, and portable innovation labs through host Betsy Potash's conversation with PAST Foundation CEO and founder Dr.
Betsy Potash’s Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast offers fresh British literature curriculum ideas, including a “writing for change” unit built around Pride and Prejudice.
“The American Lit curriculum I was given 20 years ago was 98% written by dead white men.”
This episode explores five categories of flexible resources to organize in an ELA classroom to spark creativity.
An interview with Dr.
A teacher seeks advice on integrating book clubs, essential questions, and Genius Hour into a novel-based curriculum, and the host offers planning strategies.
Betsy Potash shares the results of a tournament polling over 2,000 teachers to find the most popular books for teaching 9th and 10th graders.