Enjoy our interview with Emily of Pagecraft ELA!
Recently, we had the pleasure of talking with Emily of Pagecraft ELA. We hope you enjoy the reading the interview as much as we loved learning more about Emily’s work!
Emily is the pair of hands behind Pagecraft ELA, and is currently a practicing English and Literature teacher in the UK as well as a content creator on TPT. Emily's been teaching for nearly 20 years, and before finally deciding that front-line teaching was her niche rather than leadership, she took on several whole-school faculty-leading roles and was a trainee educator mentor. She also marks and grades English GCSE exams for her country's primary national exam board. In her own time Emily creates resources, reads uselessly, chases chickens and her own children, binge-watches crime dramas and starts DIY that she rarely finishes. She has it on good authority that she is the most aggressive typist in her school, but she still can't touch-type.
Emily, welcome! It is great to talk with you. First, what role has creativity played in your life, from childhood to present day?
I was probably the traditional creative child! I loved drawing, I loved reading, and from age seven I was convinced that I was going to be an illustrator. My parents fuelled this by surrounding me with books and arts supplies, and I actually lived next-door-but-one to the local library, so I would spend hours and hours among the pages. When I finished the children's section, I moved on to the Arts and Crafts shelves and I consumed everything that grabbed me visually. I became very aware of what pulled me in on the page from an early age, from fonts to layout and images... thinking about it, it's only now that I'm recognising how much this awareness has followed me through life.
In high school I was your run-of-the-mill misfit. I was heavily into the British gothic/grunge/rock scene of the late 90s, dressing accordingly, drawing 'edgy' art and listening to as much music as I could. I loved makeup and learnt about colour wheels and use of space this way. I enjoyed the sounds that alternative music brought me, but I used to print and pour over the lyrics, treating them like an English Lit analysis task - the double meanings and vivid visuals of the words sparked me. I was in absolute awe of these people using fabric and paint and pen to express themselves so deeply. I badly wanted to be like them, making a positive impact on people's lives through their creativity. Behind the scenes, I still loved books. I would read anything I could get my hands on. I listened to my parents' cassettes with 80s soft rock music, and downloaded the occasional pop song in secret.
I didn't know what I wanted to do for a career, so when university loomed I mulled over my A levels. Biology was a bust - I'd taken the subject to appease my parents and failed it spectacularly. I had English Language, Psychology, half an Art qualification and General Studies. Degrees that led directly into a specific career, like Journalism, piqued my interest but the idea of being constrained for three years when I was so uncertain put me off. I still loved books, and English Language had started a linguistic fire in me, so I settled for English and Creative Writing and ran away to a university in Wales. I loved it. I read and analysed and guessed and interpreted for one half of the course, and I wrote and explored and blacksmithed words into wonderful shapes for the other. I still have some of my marked Creative Writing pieces... and my God they're awful, but I was happy.
Falling into teaching was much the same - I didn't know what I wanted to do with my qualifications and desire to work with the written word, so I applied. Once again, I loved it. I was a terrible teacher at first, but I found creatIve ways to muddle through behaviour management and differentiation and match it with the pedagogy and psychology of teaching that we were constantly learning. I am still constantly learning! Here in Wales teachers don't move schools as much as they do in other countries. Once I found my 'forever' school, I settled in and I have been there for the past 12 years. It's a wonderful secondary school - big, chatty, supportive. I became known for making beautiful resources and at some point I stumbled across TPT... and the rest is history.
And, I look back at my teenage dream and realise... here I am, using paper and pen to express myself and making a positive impact on young people's lives.
If you think of some of the most challenging concepts or life lessons you've learned so far, what would you say helped you learn the most? You mentioned you are a visual learner---how has that factored into your own learning journey?
The most challenging thing for me was the realisation that people learn differently. I'm not just talking about learning styles - visual, kinaesthetic, etc - people need different learning environments. They need different levels of support offered to them. They need different amounts of time and different quantities of check-in from their teachers. This sent me down a research rabbithole, and I haven't even scratched the surface of the theories and anecdotes on the topic, but it has helped me to think sideways with my differentiation. We often differentiate up or down for ability, but restructuring versions of activities or worksheets for a range of engagement methods can be just as effective. As a visual learner, I remember layouts - for example, when revising my Psychology content, I would remember that on my revision note posters there would be a giant topic heading, a smaller sub-topic heading, multiple lists of information and how many bullet points were on each list. I would remember the colour scheme for each revision poster and whether there were diagrams or not. Then it was just a matter of remembering the words in all the spaces based on these recalled prompts. It took me until I was 18 to realise that this was what worked for me, and so I want students to find their learning style as early as possible to give them learning independence.
When we spoke previously, you mentioned that you consider yourself an introvert. I also think of myself as (mostly) an introvert, and find that having a blog and doing some online-based business activities makes for a great counterbalance to the more social aspects of being a teacher. How do you balance being an introvert and having to be 'on' in your role as a teacher and parent?
I spend a lot of down-time doing my own thing quietly to recharge - reading, listening to music, bingeing crime TV dramas... If I didn't have time where I was just left to my own devices I would definitely get overwhelmed! My children are both very different to each other, but have similar recharging needs to me, and my husband is an even bigger introvert so we get on well as a family unit. We understand each other and support in quiet little ways. I find that I'm less 'cluttered' in the way that I speak when I'm typing because I have the thinking time; in person my mind works faster than my mouth (or vice versa) and I can sound a bit confused and frantic on the spot! I think the social side of things online for me is much less 'fight or flight', but it's still interaction on the same level as frontline teaching and parenting. What helps to ground me is to clear my mind totally. I do this through sporadic meditation and weekly bellydancing with a group of wonderful local ladies. The dance method is follow-the-leader, which means that I literally can't think of anything else while I dance. It clears my mind and keeps me grounded.
How do you make your classroom a welcoming environment for your more introverted students, and what kind of activities and environments did you enjoy most in your own education?
This is one of the areas that I'm still developing, actually... and I have no idea if I'm doing it right! I was so introverted in school that I couldn't speak in front of others, even from my seat. I hated raising my hand, I couldn't answer questions to the point that teachers stopped calling on me, and if any of my work was read out to the class I would put my head down and sweat and my vision would go black around the edges. I think of little anxious me when planning my classroom, and I try to have prompts and hint sheets pre-printed so I can distribute them a few minutes into a task for students who might not be able to ask for help. Instead of hands up, I enjoy dishing out whiteboards and asking students to hold up answers en mass - safety in numbers - and I just invested in some of those cheap LCD sketchpads so I don't have to worry about pens running out! When I mark books, I ask all students questions in writing and they are expected to give written answers, which can be very revealing. Finally... I keep looking around. I am no behavioural expert, but if something about a kid screams unnecessary discomfort, I try to do what I can.
In my own education, I preferred anything with a diagram or independent research. I liked being able to pull knowledge and present it in a new format. With frontloading, I loved a good extract to read and some thinking prompts, and I also enjoyed listening to the rest of the class discuss, even if I was a bit jealous when someone was praised for an idea that I had been too shy to share myself!
What has it been like creating teaching resources and making them available for students and teachers around the globe? What have been some of your proudest moments?
It's an activity that feels like home in my brain, which probably sounds silly. When I know what I want to make I am happiest just sitting and working on it in the same way that other people are content sewing or painting. I enjoy watching it come together! You mentioned my resources being available to people around the globe... I just checked my stats to discover that I have sold resources in all 50 states, which has totally blown my mind. After all, I am one woman from a village in rural Wales, surrounded by sheep and chickens! My proudest moment was definitely when I was scrolling through social media, and I saw that a teacher had posted a photo of one of my resources in action in a teaching group. I was like, "Ooooh, that's ME!" I love knowing that people find my creations helpful, and seeing someone wanting to share the success publicly absolutely knocked my socks off!!
You mentioned that you love rummaging around on the internet as a form of research (like a true artist!). What have been some of your most fascinating finds recently?
I love Project Gutenberg and seeing which texts have come into the public domain - most recently there has been a glut of cheesy 1950s science fiction stories and novels, and I have several projects lined up based on these. It's amazing to see what writers predicted about the future. I'm also fascinated by folklore and cultural legends. I find it so exciting seeing how many similarities there are between myths from different countries.
Is there a resource you'd like to tell us more about?
Sure! My current joy is a poetry activity where students select ideas from some image prompts and then use them to fill in gaps in a poem. I did one called 'This Year' as an icebreaker for all the returning teachers, and I just created one for Halloween:
Halloween | Personalized Poetry Writing | Visual Prompts | Build a Poem
The idea is that all poems will be different, even if students used the same images because they're likely to have picked out different things from the picture. It also pushes students to edit and redraft as sometimes the initial ideas won't fit the flow. It's a nice personalised way to get creative!
700 products on TpT is impressive! How do you approach your process from start to finish?
In a generally slapdash manner! I often have several resources in progress at a time. Some will be abandoned totally, and others turn into mini resource lines. I don't tend to look at what is being searched for or purchased (although that helps at times when I'm not sure what I want to do with a concept), but I'll see an image or read something that inspires me. I usually start with, "this would make a REALLY cool activity," play around with it, test it out and then tweak it before it goes on sale. If I'm writing the content, I opt for complete silence, but if I'm messing around with layout, images, etc, I'll play music. The music could be anything, but recently it's been my dancing playlist.
Please check out more of Emily’s links below!
BUNDLE of Codebreaker Cryptogram Activities | 30 PRINTABLE Crack the Codes (teacherspayteachers.com)
PRINTABLE Any Character Autopsy | Body Biography | Worksheets | Bookmarks (teacherspayteachers.com)
Guided Writing Frames Bundle | Scaffolded Notes | Graphic Organizers (teacherspayteachers.com)
