{"podcast":{"title":"The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA","slug":"the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282","podcast_index_feed_id":743282,"rss_url":"https://sparkcreativity.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"http://nowsparkcreativity.com","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/c/2/e/b/c2ebf102a6acd494bafc7308ab683e82/TSCTP_3000px.png","author":"Betsy Potash","episode_count":425,"summary":"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 mak…","last_synced_at":"2026-07-30T04:18:43.548102+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282"},"episode":{"title":"414: Highly Recommended: Play the Whole Game","slug":"414-highly-recommended-play-the-whole-game","published_at":"2026-02-25T14:54:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/414-highly-recommended-play-the-whole-game","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282","url":"https://sparkcreativity.libsyn.com/414-highly-recommended-play-the-whole-game","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sparkcreativity/the_whole_game_full.mp3?dest-id=518145","summary":"This week would be my Dad's birthday. If he was still here, spice cake with thick caramel frosting would be in order, and a beautiful cross country ski outing through the snowy forests of Duluth. He taught sociology at the University of Minnesota when I was growing up. Once, while teaching a weekly three-hour Monday-night class, he dressed as a different famous sociologist every week to help get his students interested in the history of his discipline. Isn't that nice? Over the course of his career, he was voted both adviser and professor of the year at the university by his students. There was always a new sociology book lying around our house, with half the text underlined and his untidy notes scrawled in the margins. Whatever had just come out, he had it. He crafted new courses about the civil rights movement, religion in Northern Minnesota, and corporate corruption, to name a few, trying to make sure his classes taught both what he thought was important for students to know more about AND what was current and interesting to them. He took his students to Chicago by train over spring break many times to study the city and its neighborhoods, arranging police ride-alongs (since many of his students were planning to become police officers) and museum visits. He offered extra credit to anyone who would challenge social convention and stand up on a public bus to sing the National Anthem. More than one student boarded a bus with a friend ready to videotape and then changed their mind, realizing just how strong the pull of convention really is. He invited students to examine the role of technology in their lives - way before rejecting screens was all the rage - with his assignment to watch someone else watching T.V. for an hour. I thought about Dad this month as I read Harv…","meta_description":"This week would be my Dad's birthday. If he was still here, spice cake with thick caramel frosting would be in order, and a beautiful cross country ski ou…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":280,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/episodes/414-highly-recommended-play-the-whole-game/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/414-highly-recommended-play-the-whole-game.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}