Teaching Middle School ELA

Episode 334: What to Do When Students Still Can’t Write a Strong Paragraph

Caitlin Mitchell Season 2 Episode 334

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So, you’ve taught the structure. You’ve modeled examples. You’ve practiced together. And still... your students are struggling to write a strong paragraph. Sound familiar?

In today’s episode, I’m breaking down exactly what to do when your students still aren’t getting it — including practical strategies, mindset shifts, and scaffolds that actually work. Let’s dive in and take the frustration out of paragraph writing once and for all.

Join me: https://www.ebteacher.com/writing-workshop

SPEAKER_00:

well hello teachers and welcome back to another episode of the teaching middle school ela podcast i am very excited about today's episode of what to do when students still can't write a strong paragraph but first things first i want to remind you that we are doing a special promotion here on the podcast to the month of july if you leave us a review on itunes and you send us an email to let us know that you did so you will be entered to win a free year inside of our eb teachers ela portal which is our monthly membership for middle school ela teachers you can use this as a core curriculum, your supplemental curriculum, just to be a part of the club and hang out with an amazing group of teachers from all around the world. We'll be picking a winner at the end of this month. So make sure, leave a review, send us an email. That's all you got to do. All right, let's dive into today's episode. So this is for anyone who has ever looked at a stack of student writing and thought, wait, Have I taught paragraphs at all? You've done the lessons, right? You've explained what a paragraph is, and yet here we are with responses that are either missing key pieces or just totally missed the mark. So if that's where you are right now, this episode is for you. So I'm going to walk you through... a very clear classroom-tested structure that we use inside of our membership, and it's our EB Writing Framework Paragraph Response resource, really, that I'm going to walk you through. It's not a unit. It's a resource, really. And I'm just going to walk you through how it's structured and how we set it up. And this has been used by thousands of teachers from all around the world, and it really helps their students understand start writing complete, thoughtful, evidence-based paragraphs without having to start from scratch every single time. So even if your students are struggling like right now, I promise you, if you just put these few simple shifts into practice, you are very close to turning things around for them. So this is a great episode and I think it's going to be really helpful. All right, let's go ahead and dive into it. Hi there, ELA teachers. Kaitlin here, CEO and co-founder of EB Academics. I'm so excited you're choosing to tune into the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Our mission here is simple, to help middle school ELA teachers take back their time outside of the classroom by providing them with engaging lessons, planning frameworks, and genuine support so that they can become the best version of themselves, both inside and outside of the classroom. And we do this every single day inside the EB Teachers ELA portal. This is a special place we've developed uniquely for ELA teachers to access every single piece of our engaging, fun, and rigorous curriculum so that they have everything they need to batch plan their lessons using our EB Teacher Digital Planner that's built right into the app. Over the years, we've watched as thousands of teachers from around the world have found success in and out of the classroom after using EB Academics programs. All right, I want to start with something that you might need to hear. If your students are struggling to write a strong paragraph, that doesn't mean that you need to start all the way over. You don't need to start your entire writing unit over. You don't need to go back to square one necessarily. I think the most important thing to do is you want to start to identify the one or two places where things are breaking down, possibly even for each student. So usually it's not everything that's missing. It's one of the following things. One, they don't know how to start the paragraph with a clear claim. Number two, maybe they don't have a good premise. They don't have a good reason to support their claim. Number three is maybe their evidence just kind of sucks. It doesn't connect to the point that they're making. You're like, this quote makes no sense. Number four, they are not justifying their evidence, or maybe they're just simply repeating it. Typically, that's the one where a lot of students get stuck, just a little side note. And last but not least, the final piece is they don't really know how to wrap it up in a way that reinforces their thinking. So when we see that there are like these major components to a paragraph response, when we have a consistent structure for our students, we're no longer teaching them to just like write a paragraph. What we're doing instead is we're showing them how to think in paragraph terms. So what I want to do is I want to give you the outline of our framework that we teach for evidence-based writing at eb and kind of how we do this in the classroom with our students so if you're a portal member if you're a part of our membership this resource is called if you go to resources and you type in paragraph depending on your membership it's called the ebw framework for paragraph response okay so if you're a member you can go look this up but if you're not i'm going to tell you how to use it so essentially The structure is very formulaic, but when we give students a formula, it makes it very simple for them to plug and play as they start to learn and build confidence. And then ultimately they can expand their thinking. They can be a little bit more, um, you know, uh, have some creative choices and things like that as they get stronger with the foundation, but we want to give them parameters so that they know what to even include. So we use what's called EBW at EB academics and EBW stands for evidence-based writing. And the structure that we teach our students follows really, it's like a six, five, part paragraph breakdown, if you will. So the first thing that we teach our students is to start their paragraph with a tag or a hook. So if we're writing about a text that has a title, an author, and a genre, then we're going to use tag. So much easier for students. I would suggest even starting with this as opposed to with, you know, a paragraph that's responding to a topic because then you're getting into hook. And hook is like students... are staring at a blank piece of paper. They're trying to figure out an interesting way to start their paragraph. Let's give that to them later when they feel a little bit more confident in their writing. I would highly suggest starting with responding to literature. So in that case, you're having your students start with a tag. And so if your students are struggling with paragraph writing and they don't have a tag, Well, that's a very simple fix. We just remind students, hey, you need a tag, or we can give them a graphic organizer that has a spot for the tag so that they don't forget that, right? Well, then the second part of that is the claim. So typically like we'll combine the tag and the claim together into like one sentence if we're writing a paragraph response. And the claim really is students responding to the essential question. So you are setting out to prove your point, right? So if the example, let me look at an example as I walk you guys through this. Let me pull one up, a sample paragraph. So if we're looking at a sample question that is responding to literature, and the prompt is, in the face of adversity, how can a person find happiness? And this is based on Jane Eyre. And we would start with the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte demonstrates that for people to feel fulfilled, they must be self-reliant. So this is my answer to the prompt, that they must be self-reliant. So if I find that my students are struggling with this part, the claim, then instead of teaching a whole like re from the beginning, all about essay writing and paragraph writing, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a lesson on just claim. Because clearly they don't get this piece yet, right? So that might look something like a claims versus statement sort. Maybe I give them a bunch of claims and I give them a bunch of statements and I ask them to put them into piles. Which ones are claims, which ones are statements, and why? And so students start to see that a claim is an opinion that can be supported with evidence or not. Right. So you'll notice that instead of going all the way back to teaching this whole framework to students and going through tag and claim and evidence and all the things, I'm just going to go pull out a claim activity and say, oh, I see. We're struggling with claims still. And if we're struggling with claims still, it's going to be really hard to do the rest of the paragraph. Right. Because if I don't have a strong claim, I'm not really going to have a solid premise. So we have tag. We have claim. We have premise. Right. And the premise is basically your reason for your claim. So it can be anything. It shows the reader why you believe your claim is true. So if we go back to our Jane Eyre example, my claim or my premise rather is this is because relying on others for happiness can cause people to remain in unsatisfying circumstances. So here, my reason that I feel that a person can find happiness is through self-reliance is My reason is because if people put their happiness on other people, then we're relying on others in all circumstances, right, as opposed to relying on ourself. And so this is challenging, right? The premise is challenging for students, especially if they don't have a strong claim. But what's great here is you can start to explain to students that they can have multiple reasons, right, for their claim. So if you wanted to do a practice with your students, you could have them read a short poem or have ChachiBT come up with one for you. And you write the tag, you write the claim, and then your students come up with a variety of premises. And you're going to have a bunch of different ones from all of the different perspectives in your class. So if I start to see, oh, premise is where they're struggling, I'm going to pull out that one specific piece of the framework and have a conversation about this or do a specific activity or unit or lesson just about premises. So hopefully you start to kind of follow what I'm saying is we're not reteaching everything from the get go. We're pinpointing like down to the part of the framework where where there's a struggle. But if I don't have a framework to begin with, there's nothing to even pinpoint, right? Which is why the framework matters so much. So, so far for the paragraph elements, we've covered tag claim and premise. Well, the next part is the introduction to evidence. So when we do the introduction to evidence effectively, we're not just dropping a quote in the middle of the paragraph, right? We are actually going to use a way to introduce the quote. So it can be something as simple as according to the text or the author states or blah, blah, blah. And then we give the piece of evidence as students start to get short. They might give some background information or like set the scene for the piece of evidence. So I just, I taught Huckleberry Finn when I was in, when I taught high school and that's what comes to mind. And it can be something when Jim and Huckleberry are, um, you know, on the, their raft going down the Mississippi river and they come across blah, blah, blah, X, Y, and Z happens. And then I have my quote. So there's a difference between according to the author and the author states and setting the scene. But setting the scene comes later. That's not going to be my expectation of my students from the beginning. Even if they just plop a quote in there, at least they have a quote. But if I'm finding, man, they're really struggling with finding a good quote. The quotes that they're choosing don't really make sense. Well, that gives me my pinpoint of data. I got to work on this. So I might do an activity that's just focused on evidence. So this would be something where going back to the example that we had before, I'm giving students on the board, a tag, a claim and a premise and a piece of text. And I'm going to say, go into the text and find the strongest piece of evidence that supports this claim and this premise. And I could do that with a multitude of examples using ChachiBT to come up with them for me. And so now I'm giving students ample opportunities to introduce the evidence and find strong quotes from the text, right? So these two really tie in together, but intro to evidence and evidence, we teach separately so that students don't forget to introduce evidence. Maybe we don't want to do like a drop a quote in and just leave and just run, right? So that's, you know, Pulling out that one specific part of the paragraph that students are struggling with. Well, the last part of a paragraph response using this framework is justification. And this is really where the magic can happen and also where most of our students fall short, right? So this is where students need to explain two things. They need to explain one, how the evidence that they chose supports their premise. And then two, how does all of this support their claim, which is really their answer to the essential question. So we're teaching them to answer the question, okay, well, so what? Why does this matter? Why should the reader take your evidence as support for your position? So this is where we're really teaching them to think critically. And this is where it's also very difficult. And so I think that what's important here is if you find yourself just hitting your head up against the wall with justification, it might be like that for the year. It might be like that for months. of students consistently practicing justification to then, oh, finally get it. But at least we know that this is a part of our paragraphs that have to be included, right? And so if students are really struggling with justification, you can, again, pull out just that thing and just give them practice only about that. Give them everything else. You provide them with the tag, with the claim, with the premise, with the entered evidence, with the evidence, and all they focus on are those two sentences of justification over and over and over again for various examples, right? We even have, if you're a portal member, if you're inside of our membership, let me see if I can go find this really fast for you guys. We have a deserted island justification activity. And if you type in justification to the portal, it should come up for you. Yeah, deserted island justification practice activity. This whole activity, it's a three hours long unit, right? And all it does is help students focus on gripping this concept of justification. Like that is how important it is. And also just goes to show how much time we need to spend on this. We can't teach it and be like, oh, they should get it now. It's like, no, that's a totally unrealistic expectation. So I think another part of this, of when we're looking at what to do when students can't write a strong paragraph, take a step back and be like, oh, it's okay. That's why we have a whole year to practice this. That's why it's also so important for you to have students writing about what they're reading about or discussing what they're reading on a consistent basis. Because if I put my students into small groups every single day after we've read a text together, let's say that we're reading Outsiders and they're doing a... One of my favorite things would be we'd read. I'd put students in groups of three. I'd give them an essential question. And based on what they read that night before, they would go formulate a claim, premise, evidence, and justification and present it to the class. So every single day, my students were practicing all of these elements. It wasn't like writing was just happening when we sat down to write a paragraph or when they sat down to write a response to literature. Writing, quote unquote, or this process of thinking was happening every single day in class. When we were discussing. So it's like if a student raises their hand and answers a question, I'm going to say, okay, where's evidence from the text that supports that? And if we find evidence from the text, how does that, how does that support that? And I'm going to keep asking. So what? Keep digging, keep going, right? And so I think a part of this too is when students still can't write a strong paragraph, know that we're going to keep teaching it to them over and over and over again, all throughout the year in all variety of ways. And so I actually want to invite you because it's easier for me to kind of teach this in like a, if you can see me and I can share my screen, I'm doing a three-day writing workshop next week. It starts on Tuesday. I have, uh, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday training that I'm doing. They're like 30 to 40 minutes each. Pop up Facebook group, doing a bunch of giveaways, all the fun stuff. I want you to sign up for that. Go to ebteacher.com forward slash writing dash workshop. And I'm going to talk in depth about this, about how we incorporate evidence-based writing into our entire ELA class period. So it's really not just isolated to when we're writing. It is, no, this is just how we think. This is just how we talk. This is just how we speak here. So, yeah, students are writing paragraphs, but they've already gotten exposed to all of these concepts, all of these parts of this framework multiple times. So when they do sit down to write a paragraph, it should be a no brainer. It should be easy peasy or relatively speaking. OK, so I want to give you just a couple of easy things that you can do in your classroom to to incorporate this beyond what I've just shared. So. First of all, you've got to follow the framework. So I'm going to say it again. Tag, claim, premise, intro to evidence, evidence, justification. That's what's included in a paragraph. That's what we include. That is the framework. So to do this together without any fancy tools or without access to our membership, you can write a paragraph together. So if you set students off on their own to write a paragraph and it sucks... You bring them back and we're going to write a paragraph together so I can give them a short text, a short prompt. I can find that from anywhere. And together you will share with them a model paragraph that you've done. So you're not going to go through every single sentence and write a sentence together. at a time with your students as you explain your thinking. We think that that is going to lose some of your audience, if you will. But instead, what you can do is you can share with them the model paragraph. But here's the twist to that. You cut the model paragraph up into pieces. So you put each sentence on its own sentence strip, if you will. And then students will sort the paragraph sentences based on the framework. So like you would have a sentence for Jane Eyre, the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte demonstrates that people, that for people to feel fulfilled, they must be self-reliant. That's going to go on one sentence trip. Well, then the premise is gonna go on another one. This is because relying on others for happiness can cause people to remain in unsatisfying circumstances. And I'm going to do that for every single sentence that's in this paragraph response. And I'm gonna give my students all of those sentences. So you should have a tag sentence that's combined with a claim, so that's one. You should have a premise sentence. You should have an intro to evidence and evidence sentence. And then you should have at least two justification sentences. So that's five sentences combined on five different sentence strips that you're giving your students. And students are then going to put them in the order that they believe the paragraph should go. And that shows them and it's helping them synthesize the concept of, okay, this is a claim because why, okay, this is a premise because why, right? The evidence obviously is evidence, but at least they're seeing it, right? And they're starting to kind of label these parts. So they have You can even use different colors or different symbols for students to make it visual. The other thing that you can do with this is give students a printed paragraph and have them label all of the parts. So you give them the full paragraph and then they label it or highlight it. And then have students go write something on their own. So after you've practiced this, and this is after you've introduced this concept to your students and This isn't, I'm identifying what needs to be worked on. This is like, okay, I'm introducing it to them for the first time or maybe coming back as a whole group instruction. But students will write their own using the same structure. But what I like to do is I like to have students before they turn it in, highlight and label each of the sections of the framework on their actual essays. So they will typically find when they're looking for intro to evidence to highlight, they're like, oh, I don't have it. It's missing, right? I got to put that in. OK, so I think that there are two things that I'm kind of trying to articulate here. Number one is you have to use a framework. Use ours. It's six parts. Already explained it. And when you introduce it to them, right, just make it super clear. We give our students like a whole like guided notes that has a section for each of the paragraph elements that we tell them what it is and what it does. And that's what I would suggest that you do. And then after students start to kind of like write these things on their own, instead of going all the way back to the beginning and teaching it all the way over again, what we're doing instead is we're looking for like the actual gaps. Do they actually understand tag? Okay, cool, check. Don't need to come back to that one again. Do they actually understand claim? Oh, no? Okay, we're going to do a claim versus a statement sort. We're going to spend more time working on this. I'm going to provide them with a prompt. All I want them to do is write a claim. And I could have them do that multiple times, right? And so on and so forth. So it's like I'm piecing out each section where they're struggling. I like to think of this from an athletics perspective. Let's say that my team... And it's a beautiful example, actually. Let's say that my team is really struggling in a game and we go in at halftime and I'm like, what's the issue? Okay. As the coach, I'm like, what's the issue? Why are we losing this game? Why are we not cohesive as a team right now? I'm not going to like, try to reteach dribbling and shooting and passing and all the plays. No, I'm going to look for the Because we keep turning over the ball or we're losing because we're not getting enough offensive rebounds or we're losing because our three point percentage is 10% instead of 35, right? So there's a pinpointed reason why we're quote unquote losing. So in this case, there's a pinpointed reason why your students aren't getting the strong paragraph. Yes, for some of our students, it's going to be the whole thing. And for others, it's just going to be pieces of it. But that's why it's so important to really kind of break this down and start to understand, oh, 50% of my class does not get premise. They just don't get it. Or 100% of my class is struggling with the whole thing. I got to go back to square one in that case, right? So you start to see where I'm going with this, right? But I think it's really important for you to kind of take away from this is that when students can't write a strong paragraph, it does not mean that you one have failed at all. And it also too, doesn't mean that they aren't capable. It just means that they need a structure that makes thinking visible to them. So you don't need a full curriculum overhaul. You don't need a full writing overhaul. You just need to focus on a repeatable paragraph structure, like what I walked you through. And like I said, we use this inside of our membership, inside of our portal, every single day with students, it works. And if you want access to it and you want to join us inside, make sure you add your name to our priority list at ebteacher.com forward slash portal. But definitely join me for next week's three-day writing workshop. It's going to be a game changer. You're going to learn so much. I'm going to give you tons of great resources, including one focused on tag. And I really just, I hope that this podcast episode helps you and serves you in some way of just really changing our thinking about how we're thinking about what our students are quote-unquote not getting or what our students are quote-unquote failing at, right? Because justification literally might take them seven months, eight months, the entire school year for it to finally be like, oh, now I understand what to do. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's why they're in your class, right? That's why they're there. That's why we're learning. And that's why we never give up. All right, you guys, have a wonderful rest of your day. This is Erin Woodhahn. the July 3rd. So tomorrow, 4th of July, to those of you who celebrate, hope you have a great holiday and we'll see you guys next week on the podcast. Thanks everyone.