I am a new ELA High School Teacher and need some advice on how to improve my curriculum and lesson planning. Any book recommendations?

I've been an English teacher, at various levels, for eight years.  The first answerer pointed you to Bloom's Taxonomy, which I find useless, but then he went on to give some good ideas about curriculum activities.  Remember, however, that good teaching is not activity-based; it is objective-based.  In other words, instead of thinking "We could or must do X, Y, and Z" decide what the students should *learn.*  Then design activities to facilitate that. I think the Latin teacher above is right when it comes to memorizing, but I have a much easier time requiring memorization in Latin, where it's essential at the beginning stages, than in English, where there are so many other things to do.  Students learn so much in English: critical thinking, how to craft an argument, how to interpret (and generate) metaphors, how to mesh their own experiences with the experiences that are depicted by the text, etc.  Note I said nothing about learning to read or write better.  If you want them to memorize vocabulary--which isn't the best way to teach it-- send them home with a list on Monday and have a quizlet on Friday. Here are some excellent references that I have used to great effect: 1.  The Art of Teaching Reading (by, I think, Lucy McCormack Calkins) 2.  The Writer's Workshop 3.  Anything by Peter Elbow on teaching writing 4.  A wonderful book by Stephen Tchudi [Tschudi?], longtime director of the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English)--I don't remember the name, but it has a yellow cover, and that should find it for you on Amazon. 5.  The Elements of Style by W. Strunk and E.B. White [avoid On Writing Well by William Zinsser, which is just a repackaging of #5, above] If you can afford the dues, join the National Council of Teachers of English.  You get a free subscription to a magazine designed for the age group you teach.  I have found several excellent ideas from those materials. Finally, yes, technique, curriculum, activites, theory--but most of all you need to read and write yourself.  Kids learn by example.  You can say "Get down to writing" until you're blue in the face, but if you, yourself, opens up a journal and starts to write, the classroom will be silent and full of children writing within 30 seconds. Hope this helps.

Here's a website where ELA and English teachers congregate to ask questions and share resources: http://englishcompanion.ning.com/. Book on curriculum design in general: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/understanding-by-design-grant-wiggins/1101414205?ean=9781416600350 Book on English curriculum design: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/teaching-english-by-design-peter-smagorinsky/1110852187?ean=9780325009803 (I own this one but haven't gotten around to reading it yet.) Book on specific pedagogy: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/multiple-intelligences-in-the-classroom-3rd-edition-armstrong-thomas/1015511501?ean=9781416607892 Book on how to be a better teacher overall: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/teaching-as-leadership-teach-for-america/1116148950?ean=9780470432860 And as far as Bloom's Taxonomy goes, Nathan's diagram does a good job with the 20th Century version, but I prefer the 21st Century version, personally. Best of luck!

Just a few gut-reactions: First, call yourself an English teacher, because I've taught English, hired many English teachers, and never heard the term ELA.  :)  I've heard people say "Language Arts," which just confuses people since they'll ALWAYS hear "Spanish" when you say that. Second, the best lesson planning advice I ever got was from my first Principal, who said "Just read and re-read the source material again and again until you can't shut up for 45 minutes."  That's it.  Rather than spending 8 hours a day making outlines on how to explain every line of Romeo & Juliet, spend your time getting excited, learning to "control your state." Students crave structure and repetition.  You have no burden of thinking up new ideas, new techniques, or new games.  Just set a structure and stick to it.    You'll find a half dozen games they love to play, and they'll be just as happy rotating between those as a new game everyday. On that note, don't over-use metaphors and puns in teaching.  Metaphors rarely work, partially because most of your students in a raw frontal-lobe sense aren't old enough to catch them.  So drawing a sun on the board to help them remember the word "son" won't work, yet that device is largely the foundation of every movie title, every children's song, and half the educational resources you'll see. Write the name of the lesson, or a 5 word summary of the lesson, on the board everyday.  You'll be amazed how much giving each kid a moral to stare at will help. "Paper load" is your choice.  Either have them correct each other's work, do more portfolios (so they turn them in less often), write more in a journal format, blog more, etc.  Anything that requires you to put in more time is self-aggrandizing suicide. It's up to you, but kids that age love big words.  Err on the side of fun greek rhetorical terms and other terms that transfer power to anyone who knows them. They also love memorizing anything and everything.  Vocab lists, book quotes, etc. English teachers for some reason are the first to drop into trying to make their class difficult solely through complexity.  Most writing assignments on your level end up as glorified mad libs, with all sorts of rules about margin sizes and "don't use a colon unless you say 'the following' immediately before."  Don't play that stuff, especially if you're not a big grammarian, because every time a parent or another teacher has a different preference, you lose an entire class.  Yes, you're giving them simple versions of complex rules, and normalizing performance, but just know every time you are wrong, it'll backfire painfully. On a side note, English teachers, more even than History teachers, tend to abuse their pulpit.  That always bothers me.  Resist the urge to pollute the minds of minors or phrase anything controversial as non-controversial (war is bad, feminism, the suffering of people in _____, etc.) Ask your friends "when they quit reading," (including just as a status question on facebook or quora), listen to their answers, and don't do those things. You'll hear it everyday, but resist the urge to become co-dependent on your students liking you.  Find some friends who praise you a lot so that you can be tough enough to be uninterested in being obsequious to babies. Now I'm off topic, so I'll stop.  Again, baseline is "play with it until you can't shut up."  And ask quora questions constantly.