Reddit mentions of Bridging English (5th Edition)

Bridging English and The Lively Art of Writing are two books I swear by.

I must be the only person ever who found The First Days of School patronizing and dull.

One great resource is Bridging English. It's my college methods textbook, and it's pretty solid, chock full of good ideas. Get an older edition used.

I think you're looking for something like this. It is a collection of practical classroom-ready strategies for teaching high school (or middle school, really) english lit.

Here is a similar book that focuses more on grammar.

I've found them to be very useful. Hope this helps :)

Odd that your department chair couldn't give you any specific examples. Perhaps once you find some you think are useful, you could share them with her as well :)

A common mistake and misperception about teaching is the focus that new teachers (and sometimes whole districts) place on daily planning. What I mean to say is that rather than focusing your energy on what's on for the next sixty minutes, your plan should have a larger goal and direction. When I taught in NYC, district rules required that I was able to produce a plan for what I was doing at that very moment, but never that I had a detailed idea of where the class was heading. The most effective teachers have a unit plan, and often design those plans backwards from the goals they wish the class to achieve.

Check out Understanding by Design, a really powerful system of resources and thinking about curriculum design that's also something that keeps coming up in the ed community.

Lots of this material will be discussed during your education coursework, but if you try examining some of this now, you'll be miles ahead of others in your classes.

edit: another resource I find amazingly useful is Bridging English, a textbook I bought for a methods class during my masters degree. I'm still constantly turning back to it and its incredible appendices. I now work in New Zealand, and nobody on this side of the world seems to have heard of it, but my colleagues have all had a look and love it.