{"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":"424: Ready. Set. Engage with Dystopia!","slug":"424-ready-set-engage-with-dystopia","published_at":"2026-05-06T19:07:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282/424-ready-set-engage-with-dystopia","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-spark-creativity-teacher-podcast-ela-743282","url":"https://sparkcreativity.libsyn.com/424-ready-set-engage-with-dystopia","audio_url":"https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sparkcreativity/dystopia_5_full.mp3?dest-id=518145","summary":"Years ago, Teri Lesegne wrote a book called Reading Ladders, about meeting readers where they are and then guiding them to new heights. It's a lovely image. I've got my own twist on it; I like to think of helping kids get onto the reading escalator. They read the first book I hand them, or their best friend forks over after staying up til midnight to finish it, and boom, they're on that escalator cruising toward the next book without even realizing it. Sometimes it's a series that helps them on, or realizing that audiobooks count, or discovering Jason Reynolds for the first time. Sometimes it's a genre - they grab a Rick Riordan, then the next twelve, then realize that \"fantasy\" is a thing and cruise straight into Fablehaven, Skandar, and the Unicorn Thief, and Harry Potter. It's a genre I want to talk about today, one that has exploded in popularity over the last twenty years, and just keeps going. Sometimes I think Neal Schusterman is keeping it alive singlehandedly, but then I remember that Margaret Atwood, Adam Silvera, Megan Freeman, and Darcie Little Badger are part of the movement, along with so many others. Have you guessed? Yep, it's dystopia. Dystopia provides a fast-paced reading escalator, with many series integrated inside. Students might pick up The Hunger Games, move through the whole series, snag The Maze Runner, move through the whole series, snag The Uglies, move through the whole series, pick up Scythe, move through the whole series, pick up Divergent, move through the whole series. You get the idea! There are many series-based, fast-paced starting points where students can step onto this reading path and find themselves carried upwards with a whoosh. Then, as they start to understand the genre more and more, and become intrigued with it, there are n…","meta_description":"Years ago, Teri Lesegne wrote a book called Reading Ladders, about meeting readers where they are and then guiding them to new heights. It's a lovely imag…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":700,"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/424-ready-set-engage-with-dystopia/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-743282/424-ready-set-engage-with-dystopia.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}