Episode 364: Make Writing Feel Easy Again: 3 Simple Systems That Actually Work

Today, on the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, Caitlin breaks down exactly why writing feels overwhelming — and how the problem isn’t you, it’s the system.

 You’ll discover three simple, teacher-tested frameworks that will help you:
 ✅ Simplify writing instruction without reinventing the wheel
 ✅ Give faster, more meaningful feedback
 ✅ Bring fun (and confidence!) back into your students’ writing

If you’re ready to feel calm, confident, and joyful teaching writing again — this episode is your roadmap.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. So if you've ever caught yourself thinking, I love teaching writing, but why does it have to be so hard? This episode is for you. Because here's the truth it's not that you're doing anything necessarily wrong. It's just possible that you've been taught to teach writing in a way that sets you up for burnout, or you haven't been taught to teach writing at all. So you just have all of these different moving parts and too much grading and you might loathe teaching writing. So today I want to share with you three simple systems that will completely shift how you teach writing. And they are systems that are gonna save you time, spark more engagement for your students, and hopefully actually make you enjoy or help you enjoy teaching writing because it can be really fun and you can love it. I promise that that is possible. Okay, 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 talking about why teaching writing can feel so hard. And I've done surveys and polls literally with thousands of middle school ELA teachers in our membership and our community, but also teachers who just subscribe to our newsletters. And they all say the same thing as to the struggles that they face when it comes to teaching writing. So I bet that one of these, if not all of them, are going to resonate with you. So the biggest complaint that we hear, the biggest struggle, is that I don't have enough time to plan or grade writing. Like all of the things that go along with writing, it takes too much time. So time is like the number one factor that teachers struggle with when it comes to teaching writing. Number two is the feeling of just drowning in essays that and that the feedback honestly feels like you're just shouting into the abyss. And literally your students could care less about the feedback that you spend hours on. That is another very common struggle. Um, the other one is that your students don't want to write, like they just don't want to participate at all. They look at you like, really, Mrs. Mitchell, you want us to do what? So for you, it feels like just pulling teeth. It is the most difficult part of your ELA class period. And deep down, a lot of our teachers say they wonder, like, am I even teaching writing the quote unquote right way? Or perhaps you have like a big box curriculum company textbook that your schools provided, or not even a textbook at in today's day and age. Um, I'm thinking back to my big red anthology when I taught high school, but you have a core curriculum that you're required to use, but the writing is negligible, right? Like you have a writing prompt and maybe one page on how to teach writing. So there's no support for you in this area of ELA. And perhaps a lot of what I just said sounds familiar to you. But what I want to point out that I love is that these are not you problems. They're not problems with you. These are system problems. So if you think of them as systemic problems, it removes you from the equation and gives you agency over how writing can be taught in your classroom. And writing feels really hard because most teachers that I talk to before they start using our approach to teaching writing or come into our world and start learning about all of the ways in which we approach teaching writing here, a lot of teachers are trying to essentially build a house with a pile of bricks, and you don't have any sort of blueprint at all. You have the right materials, right? You have great intentions, you have great ideas, but without a system or a framework that is explicitly being taught to you, it oftentimes feels chaotic. So, one, there's too much pressure, right? Not enough structure, feedback has become just a nightmare. And students really don't see writing as a skill that they can win at. Like a lot of writing, honestly, with our students, what we are doing as teachers is we are in the business of selling confidence to our students. Just as much as you're there to help them master the standards, you're also there to instill confidence in them. So those are just some of the big main problems as to why writing feels so hard. And so I want to talk about what we can do to flip that script. How can we make writing fun again? How can we make it enjoyable? No, maybe not even fun again, but fun to begin with, right? If you've always hated teaching writing. And this, these like three kind of systems that I'm gonna share with you are going to be extremely helpful for making that happen. So there are three simple systems that you can use to bring back the joy in teaching writing, to not have it be that part of your ELA class that you dread or don't even do because you hate it so much, right? Raise your hand if you are the teacher who has every intention of having an amazing writing year. And then lo and behold, you're in November and you've maybe done an essay or like a half of an essay, or you're like, oh my gosh, I forgot I have to do a writing unit. Right. A lot of the times that happens because of the curriculum that we're provided with. It doesn't have a strong writing component. And I'll actually point out that a lot of the schools that we work with, a lot of the schools that partner with us, come to us because they don't have a strong writing curriculum in their core ELA curriculum that they've adopted. Writing is lacking. And so they need some sort of a supplement to enhance or really replace the writing component that's included in the big box curriculum companies because it just doesn't exist in the way that it needs to for teachers and for students. So I'm gonna share three simple systems that all stem from what we teach our teachers, that all stem from what we do with our school partnerships that we know work for students. So, system number one, and I will say this until I am blue in the face, you have to have a predictable writing framework. This is your anchor, this is your North Star, this is the thing that you and your students come back to every single time you read about a text, you write about a text, even if you are discussing a text. Because the truth is when students don't have a framework for how to write and think about ideas, they freeze. That's when you get the blank stares where they're like, I don't know what to say, or that they have paragraphs that are basically a quote and absolutely no analysis. And so how we fix that is with a clear and consistent structure that students literally utilize everywhere. So not just in writing essays, but in thinking through ideas. So every writing task, every class discussion, every silent debate, any literally every single day this can be helped happening in your classroom is that we are using essentially a repeatable thinking framework when students are responding to a text or a topic. And that repeatable framework includes four main elements from our EBW approach. So our EBW approach at EB Academics is our style of teaching writing. So we obviously teach the introductory paragraph, body paragraphs, conclusion paragraphs, and each one of those paragraphs has essential elements. So the introduction has a tag, a summary, and a claim. The body paragraphs have a premise, intro to evidence, evidence, and justification, and the conclusion has a restatement of claim, summary of evidence, and a mic drop sentence. So that's like the full essay, right? But the four main components of a full essay that are also incorporated into paragraph writing with our students, but the way that we use this with our students in a discussion-based approach is that we want students to focus on a claim, a premise, evidence, and justification. So their claim is their position, their premise is their reasoning for their position, their evidence is what supports their position, and their justification is how all of that essentially supports their premise and their claim and answers the prompt or whatever question that you've provided for them. So if you're taking notes, we're looking at claim, premise, evidence, and justification. Those four components are essentially the backbone of the EBW approach. They are the difference between just like flippantly answering a question and actually building an argument. So, like I said, the layers are different in a full essay, right? We have all kinds of other components, but these four core elements are what give your students something solid to hold on to every single time they write, every single time they discuss, every single time they form an opinion. It is essentially giving them a map, right? They always know where they are going, no matter how that looks in your classroom. So what we teach our teachers to do is to model this often. We are very likely going to write something or discuss something on any given day in our class, right? And so the goal is for this framework to just be automatic. So it's so automatic that when they move into high school or college, they think in this approach. They think, okay, claim, premise, evidence, justification. It's how we have discussions as adults if we're talking about discussions about politics or whatever it might be around the Thanksgiving dinner table, which maybe you don't bring that up depending on how your family handles that type of stuff, right? But it's like we have to have a claim, we have to have a premise and evidence and justification to back it up. So what we want to do is we want to teach these four components to our students in depth at the beginning of the year and give them so many different opportunities to practice with them throughout any given day that it is literally just a familiar structure, a familiar framework that students come to rely on. And it moves them out of that fight or fight or flight or freeze or whatever mode where they look at you like a deer in headlights and have no idea what to say. You're not reteaching the basics of writing every single unit, every single time. You are able to use this foundation as a predictable way to allow students to focus on the why behind their writing and not how to write. So it really unlocks their ability to think in a different capacity because they're not thinking about how am I gonna get this out on the paper. They're thinking about why I get to have this opinion, why I'm going to support this position, why I even think that this claim is the one that I'm gonna argue, right? And so a predictable writing framework that includes those four components: a claim, premise, evidence, justification. You teach nothing else to your students, teach them that because that's what they're gonna have to have to communicate effectively as an adult in any capacity whatsoever. In their jobs, it's gonna be relevant when they get to high school and college, no matter what their profession ends up being, right? I think about doctors, even, right? They have to formulate a claim. They need to provide a reason for their claim and evidence and justification when they're diagnosing somebody, right? I mean, it happens all the time, everywhere. And I think students just don't realize how prominent. Is that the word I'm looking for? How prolific? Is that the word I'm looking for? Hold on, I gotta look this up. My brain doesn't work as well as it used to still. Um I'm looking this up. Yes, prolific. I don't think that's right though. Present in large numbers of quantities, plentiful. I guess so. That wasn't really the word I was looking for, but you get what I'm saying. That it is everywhere, ubiquitous. Is that a better word? I think so. Um, so I think that if we can like help students understand that this is not about writing, this is about communicating in any capacity, in any profession, at any stage of our lives, they will hopefully start to realize, oh, this is actually important. It's not just writing something for Miss Mitchell's class, it's beyond so much more than that. So we are starting to really refer to the EBW approach as a thinking framework as opposed to just a writing framework because that's really what it is. So, system number one is you've gotta have a predictable writingslash thinking framework for your students. System number two, that's going to help you immensely and is gonna bring back the joy in teaching writing, is you've gotta have fast feedback loops. So, one of the biggest complaints, like I said at the beginning, is time. I don't have time to do it all. I don't have time to teach it, I don't have time to grade it, I don't have time to give feedback, right? Time, time, time, time, time. So if you want to reclaim agency over your time and your energy, this is where you start, is with fast feedback loops. So the traditional feedback model, it just doesn't work, right? I remember when I first started teaching, and maybe some of you are still doing this and stuck in this loop of we collect essays, we spend hours grading them, we return them weeks later, sometimes, oh man, I think I returned essays once, like a month after my students have turned them on or turned them in. Students have moved on. They forgot what they wrote about at that point. And at that point, feedback doesn't create any sort of growth that we're looking for. It just creates guilt for you that it's not getting graded in time or back to them in time. It creates just this um stuckness that you can't get out of. You feel like you're always creating essays, right? It's just not good. It just doesn't work. It's not a positive way to provide feedback for our students. So, what we want to shift to instead is thinking about how to create fast feedback loops where feedback becomes an active part of student learning and not something that necessarily happens after the fact. So the first step that I want to invite you to and to do and to implement into your life is to set boundaries around what you grade. Set boundaries around what you grade. We've had so many EV teachers over the years who've been like, do I really have to grade everything? No, you do not. You have to just decide what is worth giving a grade to or not, and what is just worth giving verbal feedback on, or just like, okay, they completed the assignment and that counts as participation points or whatever it might be. And the thing with this, too, that I really want you to think about is you do not have to fix everything all at once. So we don't have to, no one's making us, hopefully, give feedback on a full essay every single week or every single month, right? If you try to do that, it's going to overwhelm you and it's gonna dilute your students' focus. If I think about an athlete who is working to get better and I wanna help them with, let's say, just their overall basketball game, I am not every single day going to necessarily focus on every single element of their game. That would be way too much. It would be overload. But instead, what we'll do sometimes is we will give um days where we are just focusing on dribbling. And the next day we're gonna do a shooting um, gosh, what's the word I'm looking for? Shooting clinic. And the following day we're gonna do passing clinic, and then the fourth day we combine it all together, right? So hopefully you kind of get what I'm saying is that when we have these focused, fast feedback loops, we are able to provide really focused feedback for our students. So what this looks like is zooming in on one writing skill or one concept that will move your students forward the most. So perhaps this week you're just focusing on justification. That's it. This whole week or this whole two weeks or three weeks or whatever, we're just working on this one skill of justification. Then the next week it's going to be finding quality evidence. And I'm just gonna focus on that for a week or two weeks or whatever it might be. Or maybe you're zeroing in on how students connect everything specifically back to their claim, right? When you narrow your focus, your feedback becomes sharper, it becomes faster, and it's infinite infinitely more effective. So let me give you an example of what this looks like in class. So let's say that I have my students, we're reading House on Mango Street, and we finished, you know, the first couple of vignettes, and I want to give them a question that is an open-ended question that I want them to write a paragraph response for. And in their paragraph response, they're going to include a claim, a premise, evidence, and justification. And that's it. I just want one piece of evidence and one premise for this particular writing assignment. Well, they can turn it into me, and I can certainly leave feedback on the entire paragraph, but I can also completely zoom in on the claim. So, hey, I'm gonna read your whole paragraph, but I'm really only going to grade your claim. So I want you to put a ton of focus on your claim for this particular assignment. Okay, great. I give my students feedback within a day or two because I'm only really giving feedback on that particular singular sentence. That's it. Think about how much faster that is. And when so students get that back, they can see, oh, this claim, you know, didn't meet the mark because of X, Y, and Z. All right, the next week, maybe students are gonna write a paragraph in response to the next set of vignettes that I'm reading in the house on Bango Street. Again, they're gonna write a claim, uh premise, evidence, and justification. Okay, last week we talked about claim. Hopefully, they take some of what I've suggested to them into this new claim for this new week that I'm um providing them with paragraph or that they're writing a paragraph for me. But this week I'm gonna focus specifically on your justification. I'm going to see, did you improve with your claim from last week's paragraph? How are we doing? Did we take my feedback into account or not? Right. So you can kind of start to get what I'm saying is that when you narrow your focus, feedback becomes sharper, it becomes faster. And because it's faster and it's a quick feedback loop, it's infinitely more effective for our students. Here's a really important nuance that I want you to walk away from this episode with that I think is so, so important. And whenever I do a writing workshop about this, teachers are like, oh my gosh, it makes so much sense to me, finally, right? Fast feedback does not always have to happen in writing. It doesn't have to happen in the setting of writing, of a paragraph, of an essay, whatever it might be. In fact, some of the most impactful feedback sometimes happens verbally, like right in the middle of your classroom discussions that are also using the EBW framework. So if you've taught your students that claim, premise, evidence, justification, this is a thinking framework. Now, when your students go to share their ideas out loud and they're talking about them, you can quickly step in and guide them. You can say to them, okay, that's a great claim, love it. Now, what's your premise? Like, why is that your claim? What is your reason for that position? You are literally practicing helping them see, oh, I need a reason for this. Well, and they give you their reason. You're like, okay, well, can can you explain that to me? Where's evidence from the text that supports that? Or can you justify how that supports your argument? So a lot of the times what I would do is I would put my students into groups, and I've talked about this style of discussion before, I put my students into small groups of like three or four, and I'd give them an open-ended question, and they would be responsible for answering it as a group of three or four. And they would um report their findings or present their findings to the class. Well, as students are presenting their findings to the class, I'm asking them questions. I'm poking holes in their argument. I'm asking them, well, what's a counterclaim to that? So I'm having these conversations with them about all four of these main components of a writing style. But it's happening verbally. It's happening in class, on class time, with everybody in the class listening to that discussion. So those are huge micro moments of valuable verbal feedback. And they're so powerful because they are immediate, right? Students immediately are getting feedback on the spot while they are thinking about their claim, their position, whatever it might be. Not weeks later, when the essay that they wrote is just they moved on from it. You know, it doesn't exist in their in their memory bank anymore. So essentially, you are coaching them through their thought process in real time. That is such a cool thing to be able to do. And they're they're they're not even writing. Like they are strengthening those four elements of strong writing even when they're not writing. That is very cool. So that's what fast feedback loops are all about. Like we want to keep learning active, we want to keep it proactive and not reactive weeks later down the line. So again, when we want to blah blah blah, we want to stop trying to fix everything and start responding in the moment. And when we do that, we create momentum. Students start to improve faster, and that feedback stops being something that happens just at the end of the unit or four times a year when students are writing the essay. It is something that happens every single day in your class spirit. It builds skills every single day, and it is a beautiful thing. Okay. Oh man, I love that stuff. Okay, system number three, last thing that I'm gonna talk about, is that we want to create buy-in through challenge and student choice. So if we want writing to feel fun, we want students to feel like they have a voice, they have a reason to use it, right? Writing is not just about responding to literature or responding to informational text. It writing is really about teaching our students how to communicate their opinion, their ideas, which let's be honest, our middle schoolers want to do, right? They want to be able to convince somebody to see their point of view, right? A lot of them, especially with their parents, why I should get an iPhone or why I should be able to wear an Apple Watch to school or whatever it is. I don't know. But that is where challenge and choice come in. Challenge and choice create authentic moments in your classroom where students are thinking critically. They want you want to get them to argue passionately, right, about their position and justify their ideas, again, without even realizing that they're building writing skills. So to do this in a fun way, and I've talked about this before on the podcast, our mystery stories are a fantastic way to do this. But one of the best examples that I want to mention is our deserted island justification activity. So it's a if you're an EB teacher and you're a part of the membership, I believe this is for pro tier or higher members. So pro-tier or all access, I'm not sure. Double check, um, go to your resources section. It's called deserted island justification activity. Or actually, maybe everybody has access to it. I'm not sure. But in that lesson, students are essentially told that a, you know, a plane has crashed on a deserted island and there are 10 survivors that remain. And students' task is to decide which five characters are going to be rescued and which five will have to stay behind and be rescued at a later time. And so at first glance, for students, this is like a survival game, right? But it's actually a deep writing and reasoning exercise in disguise because students have to work in small groups, right? They're analyzing student bios, they're debating their decisions, and then they need to write their justification, which is what we want to get them to practice for each choice using that same four elements of the EBW approach: claim, premise, evidence, and justification. And so what's magical about this is that even though it feels structured, even though it is structured, it's exciting because students are disagreeing, they're defending their reasoning. We're just adding this layer of joy, of fun, of engagement to our lesson. And that's what this activity does. That's what a lot of our mystery activities do, right? It's just such a fun way for students to participate in conversations that are just filled with analysis and persuasion and all of that evidence-based thinking. And as students are doing this in class and they're having these discussions out loud, you want to point out to students, hey, this is what good writing sounds like too, right? And the beauty of the system is that students feel like they are they're playing, right? They're doing something fun, but they're actually mastering the deepest layers of argumentation, which is justification. Now, I won't say too much, but if you are a pro or all access member in our membership and you love the deserted island justification activity, you might want to keep your eyes peeled later this winter. That is all I'm gonna say. That's it. The other thing that I will say is that if you are not a part of our membership, we're actually working on putting together a bundle of three mystery activities that are gonna help you start to implement claim premise evidence and justification into your class. So be on the lookout for that. It's not quite ready yet. I'll share about it on the podcast and I'll also send it out in our weekly emails. All right, so the truth at the end of the day is that writing does not have to drain you. It doesn't. When you have systems in place, everything changes. Your lessons are smoother, students become more confident. I remember what I told you we are in the business of selling confidence to our students, and you get to leave school feeling like you made real progress and you're not drowning in all of these papers that you have to grade. Imagine how much more effective it's gonna be for you to give those fast feedback loops to your students when they are discussing in class, and all you have to do is talk about it. All you have to do is ask questions, all you have to do is poke holes in their argument. You're not doing all of that and grading their papers. Yes, we are also gonna grade essays, and yes, we're also gonna use rubrics, and yes, we're also gonna give them feedback. But this is what helps students see progress on a consistent basis. And what happens is you start to enjoy teaching writing. And so your students are going to feel that energy. So if you are ready to start to implement this in your classroom, I'm going to suggest that you pick start small, right? Pick just one thing that I covered in today's episode and implement it this week. Or just choose one writing skill this week to focus your feedback on, or find one fun activity or one engaging activity to make writing joyful again. Because those small shifts that we make, they are ultimately what lead to huge transformations in our classroom. So if you're an EB teacher and you have not used the deserted island justification activity, you have to break it out. Like this is my call to action for you before Thanksgiving or the winter break. Use the deserted island justification activity in your class with your students. It is going to make such a difference. And if you are not a member of our membership, be on the lookout. Again, I'm gonna share it in emails. I'll share it on the podcast when I have that bundle of three detective lessons ready to go. Um, and I'm gonna give like a discounted price on it'll be very inexpensive to grab all three of those lessons once they are ready. Okay, that is it for today. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast episode. I'm releasing a bonus episode actually on Thursday of this week. I'm talking about why the race writing formula just isn't enough anymore and what we can do instead. So make sure that you check that particular episode out. All right, you guys, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, and I will see you later this week. Bye, everyone.