How To Get your Students to Work Independently

The best piece of advice that I ever got as a teacher was from a principal way back in 2004. He told me that at the end of the day, my students should be more tired than I was. I took that as permission to give myself a break, not martyr myself for the kids, and get them to do the work, not me. The second best piece of advice I ever got as a teacher was from a freshman

Why You Should Teach ELA in Thematic Units

When I first started teaching, I did what lots of ELA teachers do: I started at the beginning and then went from there. In other words, I taught literature chronologically. What better way for students to understand the comprehensive sweep of literature written in English, right? Well, it often felt like I was just stringing together a list of texts, and, as happens to many people, I never really got to the stuff that was written in the last 100

4 Units to Achieve Back-To-School Goals

As a teacher, you might have just a few goals for the beginning of the school year: set the tone for your classroom; inspire students to work harder; establish rigor and expectations; teach students to think independently. Oh, and don’t forget win over students by showing them how much fun they’ll be having this year, and, when you teach high school, getting to know over 100 new people as fast as possible. Seems simple, right? Every year, I have tried

A List of Poems For Every Unit

One resource that I have always wanted as a teacher is a list of poems arranged by theme so I could easily find a great piece to add to any unit. Well, here’s that list. If you see a link in the title to the poem, that’s because I sell a resource for teaching that poem. (Think about it as a great choice if it’s nine o’clock on a Wednesday night and you’d rather go to bed than sit up

Classroom Management: Why I Love a Good Jigsaw

Students moving around the room, talking to each other, sharing information, and teaching their peers—it’s sort of a teacher’s dream, and it’s what happens when I do a jigsaw activity with my students. I use a jigsaw in three of my content-heavy resources: my Fake News and Digital Literacy Unit, my Growth Mindset Unit, and my Elements of Poetry Unit. The basic idea of a jigsaw is that students learn a piece of the content and then teach that to

How To Instill A Growth Mindset In Your Students: 6 Tips

When I first learned about growth mindset, I was fascinated. It explained so many behaviors and beliefs that I had witnessed over the years. The difference between students who were a burden to teach because of their negative attitude, lack of motivation, or refusal to acknowledge feedback and those who were a pleasure to teach because of their willingness to take on challenges and eagerness to learn and work hard—as soon as I saw the first group as having a