When it comes to assessments in English classrooms, many teachers fall in the routine of short answer questions, multiple choice questions, and essays. Rinse then repeat. While this can often be tedious for a teacher, imagine how your students feel.
Several years ago, I began using a 4-point Student Engagement rubric for assignments that were either early in the knowledge acquisition period or for process-type assignments. My Student Engagement Rubric is below:
I don’t know about you, but I hate grading reading comprehension questions. First of all, the answers usually could be “borrowed” from websites like LitCharts or Spark Notes so they don’t actually tell you if the students read or not. Secondly, just because a student can tell you what happened in a...
Teaching vocabulary—integrated into a text or isolation can be tricky when it comes to thinking of engaging ways to create meaning. We fall back on the old “write a sentence that shows the meaning of the word” assignment. But we all know that when students are developing an understanding of a word,...
In this creative writing activity, secondary ELA students will use what they overhear in the hallways to write poems! Download the lesson template and hear from ELA teacher Jennifer Nash how she implemented this activity in her classroom!
For this activity, students are tasked with creating an Instagram post imagining that their assigned vocabulary word was a person posting on social media. All aspects of the post should relate to the meaning of the vocabulary word. It is more than okay if more than one student is assigned the same...
Student writers—especially reluctant ones—often struggle with choosing the most fitting words to create an appropriate tone or mood in their writing. As a result, their essays end up with a lot of words like “nice” or “things” or “people.” These words are fine (another less-than-stellar word), but...
For some reason, students always struggle when teachers ask them to incorporate sources. It is a process that takes practice to do seamlessly, but when done well, it can boost your credibility in any argument. The thing that is so puzzling about our struggle to incorporate summaries, paraphrases...
If you teach seniors, you probably spend time on writing strategies for the dreaded college essay. Jennifer Nash provides a way to lead into teaching the college essay that's more engaging than a practice essay.
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