A few weeks ago I shared my dream American Lit curriculum here on the pod, and soon after I heard from a British Literature teacher who was hoping for some new unit ideas for her curriculum too. She shared her starting point, which sounds like a highly engaging set of texts: "Our long reads," she wrote, "are The Princess Bride, Macbeth, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Beowulf- a hero's journey theme!" So today I'd like to brainstorm with you, throwing out ideas for a British Lit curriculum, based on some of these starting texts and a few more I'll throw into the mix. Get ready for a Holmes-inspired True Crime podcast project, Shakespearean book clubs, a mashup of dystopia and contemporary street art, and more. Whether or not you teach a British Literature course, I think you'll find some fresh ideas and inspiration for new unit possibilities today.

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The word audience conjures up a crowd, perhaps people watching an opera late at night at the Santa Fe outdoor amphitheatre, as the moon rises over the spectacle of Cosi Fan Tutte. Or wearing sparkles and friendship bracelets as they scream themselves hoarse at the Eras tour. Or packing a stadium as they stomp their feet and cheer at a Lakers game.

But audiences don't have to be so huge, or dramatic. When it comes to students, what they need is to know they'll pretty often have one for their best work. A friend, the kids walking through the hallways every day, the school principal, the 2nd grade class at Wilson elementary down the street... it matters.

It changes the way they work, and helps their work parallel the writing they'll do one day across a wide variety of careers, in which their emails will go to someone, their presentations will be to a room full of co-workers, and their social media posts will make the difference between their small business making it or not.

An authentic audience brings engagement and motivation, helping students be successful at school and beyond. So today, let's talk about where to find it (hint... around every corner!).

One quick note before we begin - for any of these audiences that exist online, keep in mind that you would need appropriate parent and/or school permission for students to submit to be published, and that students should never share their personal information or photos of themselves.

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Sources:

Landay, Eileen and Kurt Wooton. A Reason to Read. Harvard Education Press, 2012.

Warner, John. Why They Can't Write. John Hopkins University Press, 2020.

Zemelman, Daniels and Hyde. Best Practice. Heinemann, 2005.

American Lit has the potential to be an engaging, broadening, fascinating course. We're in what I consider an in-between era, where many schools are still providing the historical American lit canon to teachers, while other schools or independent teachers going around the system have moved into teaching a broader swirl of America's diverse stories.

The American Lit curriculum I was handed twenty years ago was 98% written by dead white men. Since then, I've learned about the impact on our students when they can (and can't) see themselves in the books they read.

When they can and can't see their identities. Their communities. Their problems. Their hopes.

I learned from Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's call for books in which students can see themselves and learn to understand others in her appeal to our collective humanity in her landmark essay, "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors."

I learned from Felicia Rose Chavez, author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, who shared her personal experience as a young reader: "It's startling as a young person of color to stare down the spines of literacy and note the neat annihilation of most of the world" (29).

I learned from Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño, co-authors of Conscious Classrooms, that using culturally relevant texts can improve student outcomes by helping improve their comprehension, motivation & engagement.

I learned more about pairing contemporary texts to the canon from the #distrupttexts movement, about "completing" the canon from Chavez, and about layering multicultural, multimodal texts from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's Cultivating Genius.

For me, it feels so clear. And yet I still see so many curriculums either still cleaving to the classics for the most part or abandoning books altogether in favor of textbooks and " short selections."

So today I want to offer my American Lit dream. If I had an unlimited budget, and didn't have to worry about book challenges, this is an outline of the American Lit curriculum I would love to teach today. If you're an American Lit teacher, I hope you find an idea for a new unit or two or five that you'd be excited to try out. If you don't teach American Lit, I think you'll still get a lot of ideas about curriculum possibilities in terms of structure and balance from this episode, which you could remix with any authors you choose.

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Sources:

Chavez, Felicia. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. Haymarket Books, 2021.

Bishop, Rudine Sims. "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. Vo. 6, No. 3, Summer 1990. https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf Accessed November 2, 2025.

Graham, S., MacArthur, C., & Hebert, M. (Eds). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. The Guilford Press, 2019.

Hillocks Jr., G. Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching. Heinemann, 2007.

Kittle, Penny. Micro Mentor Texts. Scholastic Professional, 2022.

Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating Genius. Scholastic, 2020.

Potash, Betsy. "Students Need Diverse Texts and Choice, with Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño." The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, Episode 204.

Resolution on Grammar Exercises to Teach Speaking and Writing. NCTE online: National Council of Teachers of English Position Statements: https://ncte.org/statement/grammarexercises/, Accessed January 2026.

Schoenborn, Andy and Troy Hicks. Creating Confident Writers. W.W. Norton, 2020.

Zemelman, Steven, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde. Best Practice. Heinemann, 2005.

Let's talk about an incredibly adaptable project in which students experiment with creative ideas across modes. It's easy to plug into a variety of units and times of year, and ready to tap at a moment's notice. It remixes easily for Valentine's Day on the horizon, but it could also work well at Halloween, or as part of a creative writing unit, or when you're reading any verse novel or graphic novel.

This project starts with fiction, moves into verse, and lands in a multimodal combination of verse and imagery. I call it a multimodal flash verse project, informed along the way by the brilliant mode collaborations of Jason Reynolds. Let's dig into it.

Links Mentioned:

Jason Reynolds' Interview with the Kennedy Center: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuXNsJvNaFs

Book Trailer for Ain't Burned all the Bright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjqvOyAh36Y

Reynolds on his collab with Novgorodoff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ErpAXd7Swg

There was a Party for Langston Read-Aloud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4MYO4WmR9s

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The more time you spend writing, the more you know that revision is everything. Let me cite writing superhero John Green on this one, who discusses his drafting processin the FAQs on his website: "...I'm a big believer in revision: I almost always delete most of my first drafts (often as much as 90%). But there are many mini-drafts along the way, so it's hard to talk about the process quantitatively. I do try to save the file with a different name each time I've made some dramatic changes I fear I might later regret, so that's some measure, maybe, of how many drafts there are. The final copy of Katherines on my hard drive is called aok284; the final copy of TFiOS is called okay192." If I'm understanding John correctly, that means he wrote 284 drafts with dramatic changes for just one of his novels.

Let's let that sink in for a moment.

Let's be sure to mention that to students sometime soon.

I tried to demonstrate some of this to my students back when I was at the Bread Loaf School of English in the summers (find out more about that fabulous program here in episode 223), and teaching in the school year. I photocopied every phase of one of my major papers, from random thoughts on paper to sort-of-organized thoughts to outline to research notes to draft to draft to draft to final paper. The booklet I passed out to students literally looked like a book. I wanted them to understand that writing isn't a matter of freewheeling a draft and then cleaning it up.

Recently, I spent twenty or so hours over winter vacation (soooo much travel time) reading up on the most current best practices in writing instruction. It was a good time. There's nothing quite like reading classroom stories about integrating sensory detail at 3 a.m. over the Atlantic while the plane around you sleeps. (Yep, stop laughing. You always knew this about me. Pedagogy is my jam). A lot of it felt familiar, but there were also things that sparked new connections for me, and a few surprises, too. So today, let's tackle a huge topic together: student revision. We'll dive into the challenge and some solid solution options, and I'll hand over a curriculum booster pack to help you put it all into action.

The visual walkthrough of this episode:

Make a copy of the curriculum that goes with this episode: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TIxaV1lgaAJMZipDt6hgoPC6-Tz7wAi2P4KF2uSd_pE/copy

Sources:

Green, John. "FAQs." John Green Books: https://www.johngreenbooks.com/where-i-get-my-ideas-inspiration-and-general-writing-stuff. Accessed January 2026.

Hillocks Jr., George. Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006.

"How to Teach Authentic Writing in the Age of AI." Edutopia: The School of Practice Podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-teach-authentic-writing-in-the-age-of-ai/id1840474338?i=1000736252749. Accessed January 2026.

"Improve Students' Evidence Analysis: Meet Mr. Skeptical." The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2025/05/improve-students-evidence-analysis-meet-mr-skeptical.html. Accessed January 2026.

MacArthur, Charles. "Evaluation and Revision" (Chapter 12). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. Ed. by Steve Graham, Charles MacArthur, and Michael Hebert. New York: Guilford Press, 2017.

Wilson, Joshua. "Assessing Writing" (Chapter 14). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. Ed. by Steve Graham, Charles MacArthur, and Michael Hebert. New York: Guilford Press, 2017.

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We know we want kids to have choice. As much choice as possible in creating the education that is meaningful and helpful for them. That choice can come through choice over content, medium, expression of ideas, types of discussion, seating in the classroom, what to work on when, when to take a break...there are so many possibilities! If you make it a professional challenge to start seeing the possibilities for choice, you'll find them everywhere!

As I've been working on choice as a theme for The Lighthouse this month, I knew that I wanted to create a final choice board project adaptable for any text that would provide a range of options for students. But I also knew I wanted to avoid the pitfalls of some of the choice projects I designed for my own classroom, when I ended up having to create seven different rubrics and rewire myself for a huge range of requirements on my different project options as I graded them. While I was glad to give my students those choices, it was frustrating how long it took to complete my comments.

So I took some of my favorite types of projects, what I've learned about creating linked hyperdocs, and my strong desire for an easy grading situation and mashed it all up into an adaptable final project with nine choices, including one that allows students to create their own way to make meaning from what they've studied (so really, a million choices). I'm going to walk you through the process today, so you can do the same next time you'd like to create a project full of options, gifting your students agency as they synthesize what they've learned and create something new.

Let's dive in.

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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 Considered:

Beghetto, Ronald. "Does Assessment Kill Student Creativity?" The Educational Forum, 2005.

Beghetto, Ronald. Killing Ideas Softly: The Promise & Peril of Creativity in the Classroom. Information Age Publishing, 2017. Accessed Online through the Ebesco Database.

Chavez, Felicia. The Anti-Racist Writer's Workshop. Haymarket Books, 2021.

Gabriel, Elise. "Six Ways to Help Kids Grow their Creativity." Greater Good Magazine Online: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_ways_to_help_kids_grow_their_creativity. Accessed 28 October 2025.

Gonzalez, Jennifer. "Meet the Single Point Rubric." Cult of Pedagogy Online: https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/single-point-rubric/. Accessed May 2025.

Pringle, Zorana Ivcevic. The Creativity Choice. Public Affairs: 2025.

Wiggins, Grant. "Creative." https://grantwiggins.wpcomstaging.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/creative.pdf. Accessed 28 October 2025.

I bet you know your favorite way to learn something. Maybe it's by listening to a podcast, skimming a couple of articles on the topic, reading a book, going to a live lecture, taking a Masterclass, talking to a knowledgable friend, playing your way through an App like Duolingo, attending a conference...

The point is, we're all pretty different when it comes to our FAVORITE way to take in information. The way that really helps it sink in.

For me, it's often about visuals and color, dating all the way back to my high school years when I created my own visual notes summaries of the semester for each class before finals. I enjoyed reading through all my notes and condensing them into a couple of brightly colored pages. Once I had done that, I barely had to study those highlight reels, because the process of making them had done most of the studying for me.

Honestly, I looked forward to exam week because I could take my exams and look at my notes for the next day more quickly than I could get through the work of a normal week of school. I had more free time when we had tests, and I enjoyed my review process.

Today on the pod, as many folks may be headed into a unit or term review, just as student focus is already taking a left out of school city toward vacation land, let's talk about an easy way to give students agency over their review, ANY review.

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Dickens' A Christmas Carol stands out strongly from his other works, but not because it's so different, really, in what it hopes to accomplish. Critiquing society, drawing attention to the world outside the doors of the wealthy in Victorian England, hoping to create social change... this was Dickens. But it's in A Christmas Carol that he condenses this message and provides joy in equal measure with distress. I've read a lot of Dickens, though I never did quite manage to finish Bleak House even after carrying it around for months, but it's A Christmas Carol that most stays with me, and that most feels like a doable add to a high school curriculum filled with many voices.

At the same time, we can't talk about A Christmas Carol without considering how it centers Christmas. If you're going to teach this book, consider how you can also acknowledge the many other holidays that happen in this season - Diwali, Hanukkah, Eid, Lunar New Year, and more. I recently redid all the imagery in my winter holiday maker project (snag it free here) because I realized that although I had tried to keep Christmas from dominating, it was still too red and green. Take a look at the simple changes I was able to make (below) to create a more inclusive project, featuring imagery from many holiday traditions.

And if you'd like to explore more inclusive holiday activities, you can find a bunch in this round up blog post.

But to come back to Dickens, I think it's important to use the vehicle as a book to discuss Dickens' desire to use his art to create change, his context in Victorian England, and the transformation of his character, Scrooge, rather than seeing it as mainly a fun holiday activity, because of course, many students do not celebrate Christmas and so reading a Christmas story won't necessarily feel like a fun holiday activity to them. IKYK.

OK, with all this said, let's dive in to five creative activities you can use with this text, whether you choose to read the play, watch the movie, or some combination.

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According to research by Stanford Professor Bob Sutton, innovative businesses need to generate about 4,000 ideas to come up with two or three really good ones.

Think about that.

4,000 ideas.

What does that mean for our students? In their busy whirlwind days, they're likely to opt for their first or second idea on any given assignment. A thesis pops into their head? They'll probably hit the ground running with it so they can get their paper done. They think of a project concept for genius hour? Boom. They jump on board.

In an era of busy busy and test prep, brainstorming often gets shortchanged. But what if that means students are spending hours, days, even weeks on ideas that don't deserve their time? Ideas they would have quickly surpassed with a few more minutes of thinking, and a quick feedback session with a partner?

Today on the pod, let's talk about how can we build a better brainstorming engine into our projects, paper processes, and units. We're going to take a peek at two quick case studies today - one in a classroom full of students just getting started on a podcast project, and another from my experience working on a concept for PD.

Want to go Deeper?

Check out this guide to Brainstorming from the Stanford d.School: https://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs247/2011/readings/dschool-brainstorming.pdf

Watch the Masters of Creativity Series from Stanford: https://www.youtube.com/@stanfordsmastersofcreativi9905/playlists

Sources:

Potash, Betsy. "Research-Based Practices to Ignite Creativity, with Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle." The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, Episode 393.

Pringle, Zorana Ivcevic. The Creativity Choice. Public Affairs, 2025.

Utley, Jeremy and Kathryn Segovia. "Masters of Creativity: Updating the Creative Operating System (Design Thinking)." Stanford d.School Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggza7df7N7Y&t=2233s. Accessed October 17, 2025.

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It's easy to think of hexagonal thinking as a big event, a full-class activity that you set up and run for a whole period. But once your students know how to use this tool, it could come in handy in lots of other ways. Especially if you keep some blank hexagons on hand in your classroom.

In today's short episode, I want to share five ten-minute hexagonal thinking activities you could use in your ELA classroom any old time, but my hope is that after hearing these ten, you'll realize there are hundreds more waiting. This is a tool you can reach for time and again, to help students warm-up for discussion, look at things in a new way, or organize their thinking, their research, or their ideas in the midst of all types of units.

For today's examples, I'm going to use Trevor Noah's memoir, Born a Crime, as an example text. Facing History & Ourselves has his chapter,"Chameleon," available online here, if you're intrigued and want to learn more.

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