Students are likely to (at best) skim or (at worst) skip a poem entirely when it interrupts the prose of an assigned novel. This reading malpractice is not without consequences! So, how do we convince students that this generic navigation is labor worth undertaking?

NCTE 2025 came to a close after four full days of teaching conversations, creativity, and community. In this 3×3 recap, I’m sharing what I presented, what I learned, and what I’ve added to my to-be-read list for the trip home.

I share how my Introduction to Poetry students create a multimodal critical edition, a project that blends digital creativity and literary analysis while teaching them to think and act like editors in the twenty-first-century classroom.

I share three strategies — global feedback sheets, lesson plan calendar blocking, and Canva templates — that can help any faculty member survive a heavy teaching load for the first time.

This post explores why digital creativity should be treated as both a fundamental literacy and a human right in general education and beyond.

In this active learning exercise, students work collaboratively to reverse-engineer a sonnet, focusing on the poem's formal characteristics to predict the correct order of the lines in the original composition.

Are you a veteran poetry teacher looking for new ideas, or are you preparing to teach poetry at the college level for for the first time? Use these resources to jumpstart your lesson planning this semester.

I had the pleasure of being a guest speaker at IUB’s New Faculty Orientation to talk about active learning in my GenEd courses. I’m sharing 3 active learning strategies from this session and my classroom that you can apply to your courses this fall.

Marilyn Monroe died on this day sixty-three years ago, on August 4, 1962. Ever since, she has remained an enigmatic, spectral presence in the public imagination. These days, she haunts my composition classroom.

This week, I am wrapping up teaching an eight-week, online version of my “Putting the Lit in Literacies” Intro to Fiction course here at IU Bloomington. To celebrate the occasion, I want to share an updated look at one of my favorite summative assessments.

This spring, I was a finalist for the FACET Innovate Award in the Creative Uses of Online Tools category for one of the first installments in my Empower Your Learning module series.

This week, I’m sharing the active learning strategy I use to improve students’ ability to write thoughtful discussion questions, as well as a look into excavating “The Nineveh Bull” in my intro to fiction course using the social annotation tool Hypothesis.

This week, I’m sharing how I use Notion to organize my lesson plans, as well as a brief glimpse at paragraph mapping, one of my latest open educational resources.

The first week of the semester has come and gone, and with it I’m publishing the first post in my new blog series about my work as teaching faculty at Indiana University Bloomington. This series is intended to document the hidden labor of teaching faculty that often goes unseen, as well as celebrate wins & milestones inside and outside of the classroom. I’ll also use this as a space to share strategies & resources that are newly published or in development.