🚌 33 Big Ideas to Start Your School Year
This post aggregates materials from the Ignite 2025 Conference.
Welcome!
If you're joining from Lafayette Ignite 2025, this post contains links and materials from today's talks. Feel free to like, subscribe, and join the conversation! As for the title, since I’m presenting from several list-centered posts, I figured I may as well combine them.
Starter Pack
🎁 New to the blog? Check out my recent Starter Pack, which contains almost everything from 2024-2025. Also check out my recent posts, "Creative Writing Doesn't Exist" and “Teach Computers Before AI”!
Session: How to Teach with Student Writing
💡 Big Idea: Improving student writing requires dialogue, not scripted curriculum. Teaching with student writing means actually teaching with student writing. The three main steps including collecting, compiling, and curating. While introducing student samples takes time to collect, students reading student writing pays off quickly.
Session: 20 Tips for Teaching Writing Tomorrow
💡 Big Idea: Actually, this talk has twenty big ideas. Written as the next steps to my talk "Help! I don't know how to teach writing," this moves from attitudes to actions and mindsets to methods. Eventually I'll rework this talk into a chapter.
Session: 13 1/2 Evidence-Based Reading Comprehension Strategies
💡 Big Idea: Ever feel like teaching reading comprehension means just rereading passages? What if there were evidence-based ways to move beyond that? How do you improve inferencing and vocabulary?
The Summer Session (May to June 2025)
🏝️ This summer I've started converting long-time resources into hands-on posts. Have you considered Google Forms for your classes?
🏆 Teach Writing Reactively (5/24/2025)
🏆 Google Forms for Teachers: A Primer (+ Templates)(5/29/2025)
How Google Forms Automate Grading (6/5/2025)
My Favorite Printable Grading Sheet [+ Template] (6/10/2025)
100+ MORE Random Lesson Plan Starters (No AI) (6/14/2025)
Google Docs for Teens. The Basics. (+ FREE Workshop) (6/17/2025)
Practice Writing Rules by Breaking Them (+ FREE Template) (6/21/2025)
