A Way to Teach

Last semester I stumbled across a website called A Way to Teach that I have continued to find extremely informative and helpful.

Please visit the site by either clicking the above picture or clicking here.

This is an active, literature-specific site run and maintained by educators and students. It offers a wide variety of resources and materials, including reading and writing lesson plans, literature reviews, audio files, useful links, discussion forums, teacher groups, and annotated and illuminated texts. In particular, the discussion forums have a plethora of information, suggestions, and links that have helped me plan my own lessons.

While this site is free, certain resources are locked by a points-earned policy in order to promote continued activity and procure new content. Access to the forums, links, and literature reviews is open even to unregistered users. After a free registration, however, you can actively participate in all the aforementioned subsections through comments and reviews and thereby earn points towards 'unlocking' the remaining resources. Adding poignant quotes to relevant discussion boards, commenting on discussion threads or lesson plans, or submitting your own lesson plans will earn you 1, 2, or 50 points each, respectively. Once 50 points have been earned, you will gain access to all downloadable files, lessons, and texts.

To discourage a deluge of useless or plagiarized information, each lesson plan is carefully evaluated for original content, proper attributions, and completeness before being admitted to the site. If a lesson is deemed helpful but incomplete, it will instead be added as a forum post. Furthermore, there is a rating system (between 1 and 5 stars) for each resource provided to help organize the site's content.

Ultimately, the community atmosphere at A Way to Teach is strong. The interaction between students, new teachers, and veteran educators has created a unique dynamic in which literature is approached in new and innovative ways. While the literature discussed on the site is largely Eurocentric at this time, the resources provided are extremely useful, and the site will likely grow in scope in the future. I would highly recommend this site as a reference for those who are teaching or plan to teach literature-based lessons in the future.