The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA cover art

The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

By: Betsy Potash: ELA
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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 to build your first deck of hexagons, guide your students through their first discussion, and even expand into hexagonal one-pagers. Into visual learning? Me too! Learn about sketchnotes, one-pagers, and the writing makerspace. Want to get your students podcasting? Get the top technology recs you need to make it happen, and find out what tips a podcaster would give to students starting out. Wish your students would fall for choice reading? Explore top titles and how to fund them, learn to make your library more appealing, and find out how to be a top P.R. agent for books in your classroom. In it for the interviews? Fabulous! Find out about project-based-learning, innovative school design, what really helps kids learn deeply, design thinking, how to choose diverse texts, when to scaffold sketchnotes lessons, building your first writing makerspace, cultivating writer's notebooks, getting started with genius hour, and so much more, from our wonderful guests. Here at The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, discover you're not alone as a creative English teacher. You're part of a vast community welcoming students to their next escape room, rolling out contemporary poetry and reading aloud on First Chapter Fridays, engaging kids with social media projects and real-world ELA units. As your host (hi, I'm Betsy), I'm here to help you ENJOY your days at school and feel inspired by all the creative ways to teach both contemporary works and the classics your school may be pushing. I taught ELA at the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade levels both in the United States and overseas for almost a decade, and I didn't always get support for my creativity. Now I'm here to make sure YOU get the creative support you deserve, and it brings me so much joy. Welcome to The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies!Betsy Potash Education
Episodes
  • 429: Don't Miss this Essential Lesson on Multimodality

    429: Don't Miss this Essential Lesson on Multimodality
    Jun 24 2026

    Recently I was invited to give a poetry workshop on a reflection day at a local school. They wanted the writing element of the day to help students understand themselves better, so I chose to provide a workshop based on George Ella Lyon's poem, "Where I'm From." You know I love that workshop.

    Together, we looked at how details bring poetry to life, brainstormed images about their childhood experiences, explored how various creators have interpreted the "I am From" prompt to create videos, paintings, photo essays, poems, and combinations thereof. Then I invited them to work multimodaly as they knit together their images with color and imagery.

    But I had never worked with them before, and none of them had heard of multimodal communication, though they're surrounded with it everyday. I realized I had left out a crucial step in the workshop, to help them see that multimodal communication would go well beyond "decorating" their poem or underlining all the lines in color.

    So how can we introduce this concept to students? How can we help them see that text, images, audio, and video can all convey such very different shades of meaning in communication? This week on the pod, let's talk about introducing multimodality, and showing kids what works and what doesn't. Be sure to grab the free download that goes along with this episode, a slideshow full of examples you can share with your students.

    You can sign up to have me send it over totally free right here. You'll also be subscribed to my teaching idea emails, though of course you can unsubscribe at any time.

    OK, let's dive in.

    Grab your copy of the multimodality introduction slideshow: https://spark-creativity.kit.com/bdde614049

    Go Further:

    Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

    Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides

    Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook.

    Come hang out on Instagram.

    Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you!

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    10 mins
  • 428: Start a Classroom Library With Me

    428: Start a Classroom Library With Me
    Jun 17 2026

    So maybe you already know I'll be teaching a section of ninth grade next year to help a local school fill a hole. Want to know what I was doing at 11 pm the night after I agreed to this role?

    Guess.

    If you guessed working on my class library, you are so right.

    Let's talk about first steps, for my library, and maybe, if you're thinking of starting one of your own, for yours. Whether you're completely new to building a classroom library, about to start a new one in a new place (like me), or building new layers onto a library you've already begun, I think you'll find some helpful inspiration in this episode.

    Links:

    Access the Scholastic Compendium on Reading Research: https://www.scholastic.com/worldofpossible/sites/default/files/Research_Compendium_0.pdf

    Sign up for Camp Creative Coming in July: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/Khm334

    Go Further:

    Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast.

    Grab the free Better Discussions toolkit

    Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook.

    Come hang out on Instagram.

    Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you!

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    7 mins
  • 427: Try this Colorful Maker Tool: Digital Idea Blocks

    427: Try this Colorful Maker Tool: Digital Idea Blocks
    May 28 2026
    Walk into an expensive "Innovation Lab" or High Tech Cutting Edge University Makerspace, and you'll probably see a laser cutter, a 3D printer or two, all kinds of expensive technology and the adjacent software and screens that make it possible. That's cool. But that's also a high barrier to entry. Does it really have to be that way? And how did the maker movement come to sit so deep in pricey STEM territory? You probably know I've always admired the work of Angela Stockman, writing makerspace pioneer. She's been on this podcast several times, and I love what she shares around having students build ideas across modes, using free or inexpensive materials to help them construct concepts, characters, and storylines. In our interview a few years ago, she said: "When we ask kids to build, they typically come up with ideas they wouldn't have otherwise. When we ask kids to build and then talk about what they have built, the complexity of their ideas is usually higher." These feel like very worthwhile goals to me - kids coming up with innovative, complex ideas. But let's be clear, we don't have to ask kids to build on a 3D printer or learn to code in order to help them extend and amplify their thinking through maker tools. Angela has always said that, but the proliferation of high tech makerspaces can be hard to drown out when thinking about this issue. Making is not about having one specific tool. It's about what making can give to kids in terms of their development of ideas, as Stockman suggest above, and in their development as learners too (Cohen). When students make, they make choices, they make mistakes, they recover. Ideally, they develop new skills at the same time that they develop a growth mindset around iterating. Today on the podcast, let's talk about a fun new free tool I've created for you to help your students build their ideas. Sign up for the free block kit: https://spark-creativity.kit.com/2195ef8920 Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Get my popular free hexagonal thinking digital toolkit Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram. Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the 'gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! Sources: Ackermann, E. (2001). Piaget's Constructivism, Papert's Constructionism: What's the Difference? Future of Learning Group Publication, 5(3), 1-11. Cohen, J. D., Jones, W. M., & Smith, S. (2018). Preservice and early career teachers' preconceptions and misconceptions about making in education. Journal of Digital Learning in Teacher Education, 34(1), 31-42. J, Jessie. "Price Tag." Spotify Lyrics. https://open.spotify.com/track/2vR1oGQdPfwJe4EVh8uNGc Kretchmar, Jennifer. "Seymour Papert and Constructionism." EBESCO: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/seymour-papert-and-constructionism. 2021. Potash, Betsy (Host). (2018, September 6). The Power of the Writing Makerspace, with Angela Stockman (No. 47). [Audio Podcast Episode]. In The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2018/09/the-power-of-writing-makerspace-with.html Smith, S. (2018). Children's Negotiations of Visualization Skills During a Design-Based Learning Experience Using Nondigital and Digital Techniques. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 12 (2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1747 Stockman, Angela. (2016). Make Writing: 5 Teaching Strategies That Turn Writer's Workshop into a Maker Space. Hack Learning Series. TEDxTalk. (2013, January 10). Reimagining learning: Richard Culatta at TEDx Beacon Street [Video]. YouTube.
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    18 mins
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