{"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":"419: Hate Teaching Poetry? Here's Help (Part I)","slug":"419-hate-teaching-poetry-here-s-help-part-i","published_at":"2026-04-02T00:23:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/419-hate-teaching-poetry-here-s-help-part-i","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282","url":"https://sparkcreativity.libsyn.com/419-hate-teaching-poetry-heres-help-part-i","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sparkcreativity/poetry_1_full.mp3?dest-id=518145","summary":"Maybe you weren't taught poetry with joy and pizzazz, and you don't incline to writing it yourself. Which perhaps describes, what do you think, 99% of the population? Maybe 99.99%? If you're in this camp, I get it. Poetry can feel like a nebulous enigma in the world of literature, and it's easy to find yourself nodding along when people talk about it being great without really believing in your nod, like the parade-goers in The Emperor's New Clothes . I didn't have much use for it until I met my first performance poetry multimedia - audio recordings, a slam documentary, and the Def Poetry jam series - about twenty years ago. Then everything changed. Suddenly instead of a hoop to be jumped through, poetry opened up as a gateway I could use to help students connect to ELA. Since then, I've discovered layer upon layer of wonderful ways to build poetry in across units, learning a great deal from others along the way. Today on the pod, I'll walk you through twelve different creative, engaging options you can tap into as you teach poetry throughout the year. And I do hope that after this, you WILL teach poetry throughout the year. Links Mentioned: Chrome Music Labs Song Maker Tool: https://musiclab.chromeexperiments.com/Song-Maker Poetry Blackout for Analysis Activity Episode: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2025/10/poetry-blackout-a-creative-analysis-tool.html Blackout Poetry Activity Full Handouts Free Resource: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Blackout-Poetry-Activity-l-black-out-poetry-l-blackout-poetry-passages-4165682 Video Interpretation of \"In the Dead of Winter We\": https://jotreyes.com/in-the-dead-of-winter-we Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast . Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question s…","meta_description":"Maybe you weren't taught poetry with joy and pizzazz, and you don't incline to writing it yourself. Which perhaps describes, what do you think, 99% of the…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1556,"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/419-hate-teaching-poetry-here-s-help-part-i/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-743282/419-hate-teaching-poetry-here-s-help-part-i.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}