Episode 353: The Shortcut Narrative Unit: How to Get Powerful Stories in Just 10 Days

Narrative writing is such an important skill for middle schoolers—but let’s be honest, it often feels like it takes forever to teach. Before you know it, weeks (or even months!) are gone, and you’re scrambling to fit in argument and informational writing.

In this episode, I discussed how to make narrative writing powerful and effective—without letting it hijack your calendar. You’ll learn:

✅ Why narratives don’t have to take six weeks
 ✅ How to treat narrative writing as a skill-builder, not a time-sink
 ✅ Quick, practical strategies to streamline your instruction
 ✅ A sample two-week timeline that actually works

Give yourself permission to simplify while still giving your students the creativity, structure, and voice they need. 🎉

👉 Tune in now and take back your instructional time!

Transcript

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Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Today we are diving into one of those big challenges that comes up every single year, which is narrative writing. But more specifically, the fact that teaching narrative writing can take forever sometimes. Sometimes months get eaten up by our narrative writing units. Suddenly it's November, and you're like, oh my gosh, I still have to teach text-based writing. I still have to take uh teach informational writing, argumentative, all of the things. So today I want to share with you how to teach narrative writing effectively while still protecting your calendar and keeping pace with the rest of the ELA standards because the truth is narrative writing is a third of the writing standards, right? We still have two other writing styles that we get to cover throughout the school year, and we want to make sure that we are cognizant of that. So I'm gonna give you this little like shortcut narrative unit and talk about how to get powerful stories from your students in just 10 days. Okay, I'm excited. Let's dive into today's episode. Hi there, ELA teachers. Caitlin 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. And we're determined to help thousands more. If you're interested in learning more, simply click the link in the podcast description. And in the meantime, we look forward to serving you right here on the podcast every single week. So, first I want to start by acknowledging why sometimes it happens that narrative writing feels like it's taking forever. And a lot of the times it's overwhelming because some of our students really love telling stories, right? And they just want to write pages and pages and pages. Other students are the complete opposite. So it feels like pulling teeth just to get students to write a paragraph about something. And I think for a lot of us, we really want to give a ton of feedback on all of the details in our students' writing. And you then become buried in grading or our students are buried in revisions and all of these things. And sometimes I think what happens is we overcomplicating it, we overcomplicate it by trying to make sure that we cover all of the narrative common core state standards for ELA or whatever your standards are using all at once, right? There are so many different aspects to narrative writing. But one of the things that I want you to keep in mind, as with how we approach text-based writing, right? Evidence-based writing, is we teach it all throughout the school year. Well, narrative writing isn't going to be any different. We're going to do a main unit, and then we're also going to come back to it over and over again. So it's really just kind of like this combination of us as teachers wanting to leave a ton of great feedback and give our students tons of time and opportunities to revise their papers and peer editing and all of this stuff. And I just want to challenge you to perhaps see the possibility that we could get some strong narratives from our students in a short period of time. And it's all about our intention, all about our focus, and a little bit of a mindset shift. So that's kind of what I want to shift into is seeing narrative writing not just as this like one giant paper or story that our students are writing and it has to be perfect. And oh my gosh, we've got to cover all of the narrative writing skills. We have to make sure that we incorporate this and that and all, you know, dialogue and endings and yes, all of that stuff is important. And I think it might be helpful if we could look at maybe a smaller or a light version of a narrative writing unit through the perspective of, you know, what are the most essential narrative writing skills that my students need right now? So instead of being so worried about them making sure that they all, you know, understand what a lead is and they do it really well and understand what an ending is and do that really well, and that they understand, you know, the story arc and climax and all of that stuff. Instead, if we took like this one little like 10-day hyper-focused less uh unit on narrative writing that we can create and we only focus on, let's say, four skills, then in this capacity, we're hyper-targeted on just those four skills. And we could come back and do another 10-day narrative approach as well. Granted, inside of our writing program, we teach narrative writing a little bit differently than what I'm sharing with you right now, but I do think that this opens up the possibility of a variety of ways to approach narrative writing, right? If you are an EB teacher and you're a part of our membership, you might want to just teach narratives as we have it structured inside of the portal, inside of the membership, because it's so easy. But then you also might want to take what I'm talking to you about today and build your own narrative unit for December and then have another one that happens in April before the end of the school year. And I think when we are hyper-focused on very specific essential skills, as with anything that we're teaching, it allows us to stay focused and maybe cut things down a little bit and not have fluff sometimes creep in when we're trying to do too much without a lot of intention. Okay. So I want to give you a couple of practical strategies that you can use, as well as like a sample timeline for how you can make this happen in two weeks of class. So the ideal would be 10 days, right? If you have a 42-minute class period, this might be the only thing that you focus on for those two weeks, but that's it, right? If you have a 60-minute class period, you might only spend 30, 35 minutes of each of your class periods focusing on this over the course of two weeks. It's gonna vary widely based on how your school structure is or your schedule is at your school. So some of my favorite ways to streamline narrative writing instruction are the following five. Number one, and we do this inside of our writing program, is we use short mentor texts to teach a technique. So, for example, if we're teaching endings, we might pull very specific children's stories that have strong endings and cover a variety of the different types of endings that we're gonna teach our students in narrative writing. So we might focus on one specific type of ending with one specific narrative text. And for this like 10-day unit that we're gonna do with our students, we might ask them to only write that type of ending, or maybe we have them choose from two types of endings and we're only focusing on those ones. So we're not just inundating our students with information, and it allows them the opportunity to practice that very specific technique in a shorter piece of writing that they're producing in your classroom. And that's the other thing is if you're gonna do this over the course of 10 days and you wanna incorporate it a couple of times throughout the year, I want you to keep thinking about the value in keeping writing pieces short, right? Like not every narrative has to be three, four, five, six pages long, right? We could just do one page or a page and a half or a very specific word count. And you could even have students just write the climax of a story, or maybe they're pulling a scene from a current text that you're reading and they're rewriting that scene from a different perspective, but they're focused on those four main skills that you wanted to cover with this particular narrative unit. And so what you're doing is you're providing like kind of just this shorter practice to teach these skills without causing a ton of grading or revision overload in your classroom because we're not revising for everything, we're revising for the three or four skills that we are hyper-focused on for this specific unit. The other thing that you can do, and I do this, I did this with poetry when I was in the classroom. When I really wanted students to do like a close read of poetry, I had poetry stations. I don't even know if they're a part of our membership anymore. Hold on one sec. I'm gonna go look that up and see if they're even in there. App.edteacher, resources, poetry stations. Are they in here? I don't think they're in here anymore. Those might have gotten retired. But I had poetry stations that I used in my classroom to help students with annotating a poem. And each station was very focused on one specific type of read that I wanted them to do of the poem. So, like one station might have been very focused on um uh what's what I'm looking for? Unfamiliar words. And so they are just focusing on vocabulary at that station. Well, then another station might be focused on um breaking down the themes of each of the stanzas and things along those lines. I actually do have a YouTube video about this. I'll go find the YouTube video and I'll share it in the um the description. What's it called? The podcast notes, the show notes. There we go. That's the word I was looking for. The show notes so that you guys can go watch that and you can kind of see this in action. And that same concept is what I want you to think about of how you could apply that to this like 10-day timeline with your students. So if you, let's say, introduce that you're gonna do a little 10-day unit with your students on narrative writing, you introduce the four very specific skills that you want to focus on. Um, perhaps it's uh writing engaging leads, maybe we're talking about dialogue to reveal character, maybe we're talking about descriptive writing with sensory details, and maybe we are only focused then on endings. So those are the four things that we're focusing on. Well, what you'd have students do is after you do that mentor text, after you have them maybe write, you know, a very short piece focused on the topic of your choice, right? Whatever your narrative writing topic wants to you want it to be, well, then you would have students work through student rotation stations where they are focused on just one element of the four pieces of narrative writing that you're focused on. And they are then enhancing their original draft based on the uh criteria that you've included for that particular station. So if one station is focused just on um dialogue, for example, and using dialogue to reveal character, all they're doing at that station is focusing on their dialogue that they've included in the text. They might even do it with a partner where they swap after they've looked at their own and they swap each other's and they give feedback and they have these discussions about it. So it's not like peer editing in isolation. It's not like you're spending all of this time editing students' papers and giving them tons of feedback. And so what this does is it makes narrative writing kind of broken down into more manageable pieces, and hopefully you can see that literature hyper focusing on specific skills. Now, the other, the fourth strategy that I think is important to say that sometimes we just need permission is to just limit your feedback. I mean, when you do give feedback, try to allow yourself to not comment on everything, right? Maybe the first time that you look through students' essays after or papers after they've written their first draft, you are only giving feedback on the leads. The second time after they fixed their lead, you're only giving feedback on their ending. And the ending might be after they've gone in that second round of editing from you and feedback from you might be after they've gone through the station rotations, right? So it's like you're kind of using this approach of less is more to help you save time and help your students improve faster because you are hyper-focused. And this the last point that I want to make, number five, and that I think is bears just like repeating over and over and over again, because I say this with the EBW approach too, and text-based writing, is that narrative writing should be taught and can be taught throughout the school year. It doesn't have to exist in isolation as this one unit that you're doing. What you can do with narrative writing, and this doesn't apply to the 10-day um unit that I'm talking about, I'm just talking about like in general, that it doesn't have to just like stand by itself as this narrative unit. You can incorporate narrative writing into any of the units that you have in your class. So, for example, if you are teaching um evidence-based writing about, I don't know, what's uh Romeo and Juliet, you can actually have students write a personal anecdote about their experience that is similar to a scene from the text as they're writing their EBW approach essay. You can also have a secondary piece of writing that is focused on narratives. So it's not like the end of the unit always has to be an essay, a response to literature. It can be an essay and it can also be a short piece that is related to the text that's focused on narratives, that's focused on their personal experience of it, that uses sensory details, that uses endings and climax and all of that type of stuff, right? So you're not just forgetting that narrative writing exists. We are pulling it back in and keeping it alive by just incorporating a small written piece into any of the units that we do. I mean, really, you could utilize this all the time. So I want to give you just like a sample timeline of what this might actually look like in practice of how you could teach narrative writing in two weeks instead of six and letting it drag on. So the first two days, you would obviously introduce narratives to your students and then you would analyze a mentor text for let's just say leads as the specific example and perhaps endings. And that's it. That's all you're gonna do. Maybe students are practicing writing leads and endings for a specific topic that you give them, right? We can add obviously more than just reading the mentor text. You want students to practice those skills. Well, then days three through four, you're gonna move on to the next hyper-focused skill, which would be a mini lesson on dialogue. And for this one, the mini lesson on dialogue might happen at the beginning of day three. Well, the rest of day three and all of day four, students can write a short practice piece where they are just hyper-focused on the dialogue. They're not focused on the lead, they're not focused on the ending, they're not focused on, they're focused on using dialogue to help tell the story, right? Days five through six, we're gonna do another mini lesson, but we might now be looking at descriptive details. And now students are gonna go back to what they've written before from the mini lesson on dialogue, and they're gonna start to apply it into that particular piece that they've written. Or maybe you give them a completely different piece of writing that's a paragraph that you've written that is lacking descriptive detail, and after you've taught them about descriptive writing and descriptive details and what they can include, they take that piece of writing that's less than ideal and enhance it with everything that you've just taught them in that mini lesson. Days seven through eight, you might now combine skills that you've taught. You might combine leads and endings and dialogue and descriptive writing and descriptive details, all that you've talked about over the first like week of this little unit. And now students are gonna write a short one-page narrative on whatever topic you decide. And it's that's their first draft. And that happens over the course of two days. Two days might even be plenty of time. They might only need one day, right? Totally up to you. Your students, you're gonna have to make adjustments, obviously. Well, then days nine through 10, after they've written that initial piece, we're gonna do peer review and revisions. We're gonna focus on maybe one or two targeted skills. Perhaps that's where you use the station rotations to do peer review and revisions, as opposed to just swapping papers. And then at the end, obviously, this is longer than 10 days, but we want to share our student work with, you know, our school, other classmates. We have our teachers host a publishing party. A lot of them do like a glow party in their classrooms where they use black lights and have glow-in-the-dark stuff and glow notes, and it's a whole thing for our EB teachers. If you're an EB teacher, hopefully you know what I'm talking about. Um, but that's it. I mean, we have just essentially a super tight, focused, meaningful narrative unit. And we did it in under two weeks. But the thing is, is obviously like this isn't gonna be it. That can't be the only time that you teach narrative writing. It's gonna have to be incorporated multiple times throughout the year. But hopefully you can start to see, like, oh, I could take narrative writing, evidence-based writing, informational writing, whatever type of writing you're doing, and create some sort of mini, maybe not mini unit, it's like a medium unit. It's like a shorter, it's a it's a oh gosh, I can't think of the word I'm looking for. But you get what I'm saying. It's not a mini thing, and it's also not the full-blown thing, it's like an in-between. And I have no idea what the word is that I'm trying to think of. It'll come to me like while I'm falling asleep later tonight. Um, so the big takeaway from today's episode is that you really don't need to stress about losing weeks of instruction to narrative writing, especially like if you don't like narrative writing and you are just looking at that on your schedule, on your scope and sequence, on your lesson plans, and you're like, oh my gosh, I gotta teach this. It's gonna take me forever, it's gonna drag on and on and on. Why not try this approach instead? Or if you love teaching narrative writing and you find yourself spending way too much time teaching narrative writing, perhaps looking at this from the perspective of I can teach multiple narratives throughout the year while being hyper-focused on certain skills at each onset of these medium units. We gotta come up with a better word for that. If you have a better idea, send me a message on Instagram. If you're an EB teacher, tag me on the Facebook group. Um, but by focusing on very specific skills, by keeping assignments shorter and integrating these narrative techniques throughout the year, we give students so many different opportunities for that creative writing practice that they need. And we aren't necessarily necessarily sacrificing our time for the other types of writing that we have we get to teach in the classroom, right? And obviously everything else that you get to teach as an ELA teacher. And quite frankly, your students are gonna be happy too because no one wants to sit there and like slog through weeks and weeks and weeks of narrative writing. And by the end, it's like, I can't even look at this story ever again. That's kind of how I felt when writing our book towards the end. I was like, please don't make me read it ever again. I can't do it. Because at the you get to the end and it's like, I just I'm done with this, right? And our student, a lot of our students can start to feel that way when we get towards the end of a way too long and drawn out narrative unit. All right, that is it for today's episode. I hope it gave you just permission to simplify your narrative writing this year. Um, maybe look at it from a different perspective. And if you loved today's episode, make sure that you share it with a colleague. Anytime that you share about our podcast with others, it helps us reach more middle school ELA teachers just like you. And next week I am rounding out our chat GPT series on how to cut prep time in half without losing quality. It's gonna be extremely helpful. Um, and it'll be our last chat GPT series of the month. We I aired quite a few. Let's see. We did one, two, three, four, five, six, six different chat GPT episodes. Hopefully they were helpful for you guys. And as we head into October, I am doing an ELA games series on Thursdays. They will start airing, and it's literally talking about some of the most engaging games that we have inside of our membership. I'm gonna teach you what they are, how to recreate them in your classroom. And they are just some of our EB teachers students' favorite, favorite games to use in the classroom. So be on the lookout for those. And then I'm transitioning our Tuesday episodes in October to be kind of more about like mindset stuff. A lot of you have asked to have. The Monday mindset episodes come back. They're going to be Tuesday mindset episodes. Maybe we should air them on Monday. I don't know. That might be too much change for the team. But like we're going to talk about how to harness the power of micro wins in the classroom, like why micro wins are important or letting go of comparison. Like this is your classroom. And so often we find ourselves in the comparison trap and we feel less than and we feel unworthy and we go down this path of not being good enough, right? We can't do that to ourselves anymore. I also have another episode that's going to come out about resetting after having a really hard day. And I think that's extremely important because we want to try to do our best to leave school at school. Well, how do we do that? What are the thoughts that we can tell ourselves? What are the mantras that we can say? What's the reframe or the perspective shift that we might be able to have around that? And then also the last one, I love this one, is the positive ripple effect of how you and your energy and your mindset and how you approach things, how that ripple effect impacts your students. And I just love that because we are all so connected. And once we realize that, life becomes a whole lot cooler. All right, you guys. Thanks so much for joining me for today's episode. And I will see you next week on the podcast. Bye, everyone.