On the Teaching Track
Insights on teaching, learning, & faculty development
What I Taught, Learned, and Added to My TBR at NCTE 2025
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.
What do Readers Want? Teaching Students to Think Like Editors
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.
So We Teach On: Strategies for Managing Heavy Teaching Loads
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.
Digital Creativity Is Not Optional
This post explores why digital creativity should be treated as both a fundamental literacy and a human right in general education and beyond.
Sonnet Puzzles: Active Learning in the Literature Classroom
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.
5 Essential Resources for Teaching Poetry in Introductory College Courses
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.
3 Back-to-School Active Learning Strategies
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.
Teaching Composition with Marilyn Monroe
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.
Why I Teach Book Cover Design (& How You Can Too with My Free Resource)
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.
All About Multimodal Literacy: an Empower Your Learning Module
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.
Paper Balls & Digital Literary Excavation
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.
Lesson Plan Databases & Paragraph Maps
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.
A First Week in the Life of Teaching Faculty
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.
- creative technologies
- Canva
- creativity
- career management
- Branding Your Teaching Excellence
- lesson planning
- walking the walk
- OER
- philosophy statement
- discussion
- active learning
- back-to-school
- Canvas
- Adobe Express
- career documents
- course design
- poetry
- lms
- BYTE
- week in the life
- NTT
- woman artist
- Women & Film
- digital portfolios
- creative women
- education
- evidence
- Interview
- assessment
- creative confidence
- reflection
- multimodality
- honors curriculum
- learning outcomes
- NCTE
- workshops
- collaboration
- data
- accessibility
- Elizabeth Taylor
- future faculty
- Hypothesis
- National Day on Writing
- feedback
- Kate Chopin
- Notion
- social annotation
- canvas
- data-driven instruction
- Publication
- close reading
- teaching award
- literacy
- Mary Blair
- exit ticket
- conference
- Trello
- reading roundup
- Marilyn Monroe
- remediation
- work in progress
- SoTL
- icebreaker
- composition
- podcast
- design
- canva
- authentic assessment
- scholarly teaching
- grading
- Radio
- multimodal literacy
- women & tech
- cv
- course descriptions
- service