Some of the most challenging questions I’ve faced in my career have to do with race and culture.

After I taught the elective Filmmaking for the first time a few years ago, I realized how easy it is for students to quickly create a ...

It’s a new year and this will be my 100th blog and podcast, so I’ve been thinking about reflection, the mental process of looking back and t

Narrative mode is what makes fiction different from essays, history, and art forms like video and images. Without fiction ...

To wrap up my unit on Things Fall Apart, I’m doing what I believe Chinua Achebe would have wanted....

If you’ve ever listened to a fellow teacher deliver a presentation about their favorite project or unit, you know how creativity and passion

I’ve long held the belief that we’re doing conclusions all wrong. Traditionally, it’s a moment in the essay where the writer wraps ...

Every time I sit down to plan a unit, I think about how I can move inward, into the mind of the protagonist. I want to go from the external

What if we treated our students like we treat athletes? What if we taught like a coach at halftime? What if we could recreate the same...

When we ask our students to pay attention, we’re competing with five to ten second video clips on television and social media apps...

Every fall my students seem a little sluggish from the summer. Over the course of a few weeks in September, I see their brains turn on,...

It’s a kind of academic rite of passage to get confused about scanning a line of poetry. It can feel maddening to figure out what...

What makes a great personal narrative? In the beginning of every year, I ask my students to write a story that communicates something...

If you look back on being a student, I’m sure you remember not the specifics of what you learned, but your teachers, the people tasked with

There is no challenge quite like teaching Shakespeare. Early modern English always poses challenges for teenage readers, and ...

No, not that kind of drama. Performance. Few people know how to act, but everyone knows what a good performance looks like. The words...

We are all familiar with the first few days in our classroom. It’s a little tense because our students don’t know us ...

A few years ago, I was the advisor for my school’s student-run art gallery. My district converted an old garage used for storage space ...