Mrs. Spangler in the Middle

After 30 years in the classroom, I’ve learned that teaching middle school ELA is anything but one-size-fits-all. Every year, my students come in with wildly different needs. Some need to review sentence basics. Others are ready to debate the development of a theme across chapters. And I’m sure you …

📌 The Overwhelming Baseline Essay Every year, our school wanted all students to complete a baseline essay writing assessment . I remember sitting there, grading 120 essays, determined to create a table marking every single writing skill gap at once. As you can imagine, I was quickly overwhelmed…

I don't know about you, but when I hear the word "rigor", I think about the level of complexity.  That is to say, the content has to be up to the grade level's complexity.   But what does that really mean? I'll give you a hint... This chart shows Bloom's Taxonomy, and a…

By the time May rolls around, my middle schoolers are done. They're dreaming of summer break, and honestly, so am I. But we still have standards to hit and skills to strengthen—especially when it comes to research, note-taking, and literary analysis. That’s why I created the Multiple Intelli…