Episode 401: Graphic Group Essays: A Writing Assignment Your Students Will Actually Like

April makes it hard to keep essay writing rigorous without burying ourselves in grading. We use graphic group essays to help students practise claims, evidence, and justification through a visual, collaborative process that keeps writing engaging and low stakes.

• why April is the perfect time for a lighter essay structure
• what a graphic group essay is and how it combines visual planning with group writing
• using the strategy to replace a standard essay or prep for a formal draft
• how collaboration boosts thinking beyond a single student perspective
• choosing prompts with complexity so students can defend multiple answers
• ideal group size and optional roles to build individual accountability
• building the graphic essay on paper, with cards, or digitally while keeping core essay parts
• coaching student reasoning in real time instead of only through grading
• adding presentations for speaking and listening plus revision opportunities

If you do try this in with it in your classroom with your students, let me know over in our Facebook group if you are a part of our membership and you're an EB teacher, or if you're not, head over to our Instagram at ebacademics, send me a direct message, and I would love to read about how this goes with your students.

Transcript

April Apathy And Essay Fatigue<br>

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. I am so excited about today's episode. It is perfect for this time of year. It's April. Students are kind of starting to get a little apathetic. I know you are excited for summer. You don't want to be grading a ton of essays. There's testing season. Sometimes we have research papers that are happening this time of year, but we still want our students to be able to practice the structure of writing essays, right? Formulating claims, premises, finding evidence from the text, and then justifying their reasoning. But we don't want to grade massive amounts of essays. And so the graphic group essay is a perfect way to allow your students the opportunity to practice all of these incredible core skills that we need them to practice, but without you having to grade a ton and without them feeling like it is a mundane essay assignment. So I know that this episode is going to be super helpful for you. It's really short, it's succinct, it doesn't take a ton on your part, on your students' part, and it's really just a simple way to bring some writing into your classroom that's fun for your students and doesn't cause a ton of grading for you. All right, 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 in to 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. Okay, so a graphic group essay, what is it? Well, we've probably all heard of graphic essays, and if you haven't, it's basically a visual way of organizing an essay with different boxes, or you can use post-its and different colored index cards, whatever it might be. And a group essay is when students write an essay together and they submit it for a singular grade as a group. Well, a graphic group essay is basically those two things combined. So it is a structured, visual, collaborative, like group approach to the thinking process essentially, that is at the heart of evidence-based writing. And so before students write like a formal essay, you could use this to have them work together and like work through their thinking aloud, or it can 100% just replace a standard essay that you were going to give to your students this time of year. You know, this time of year I always had my poetry unit and I would have like a final essay on one of the poems. And this would be a simple assignment that you could have students do a group, a graphic group essay based on the poem that they want to respond to. Right? If my class had read four different poems, I would give them the opportunity to write an essay about one of those four poems. And here we could group students together based on the poem that they want to write about and create like essentially a graphic essay as a group. So what I love about this is the number one thing is that it really lowers the barrier to entry with writing in a fun way, right? We're still having our students move to formulate claims and find evidence from the text and justify their reasoning, but they get to do it in a way that allows them to process their thinking out loud, to hear someone else's point of view, to kind of like discuss together before they come up with their final response. Right. Whereas when we're writing an essay in class and we're just responding on our own, or students are responding on their own, their thinking really operates in a silo, right? It's just their perspective. But here, when we're working with a group, we're getting all of these different perspectives. Maybe there's a piece of evidence that their classmate thought of that they never would have seen, or that their claim totally changes after they discuss as a small group what they're actually going to use as their claim. So it's just a really interesting way to help build thinking as opposed to operating just in that silo for our students. And it really allows for accountability, right? Because students can't just say, well, I think X, Y, and Z, because they have three other people in their group who are gonna be like, well, I don't know about that, bro. Like, do you find the evidence in the text? Like, how can you support that? And so here, what we're doing is just this way to create kind of like this low-stakes arena essentially for students to think through and develop their ideas and their thoughts and things like that, without actually sitting down and writing a high-stakes essay. They're having these conversations about the text before they actually sit down to kind of put it into the graphic essay format. So here's how to do it step by step. Number one is you have to choose the right prompt, right? As a teacher, we've talked about this on the podcast episode before, how important it is that we give our students a question that genuinely has complexity to it, right? We want students to be able to formulate multiple defensible answers. There's no like one right response. And so students can actually go into the text and find, you know, um different pieces of evidence for various opinions. When we have these questions that are kind of like binary, right? Like either or questions, it doesn't really generate the type of debate and discussions that we want our students to be able to do in this type of structure that we're providing them with this graphic group essay. So number one, you got to choose the right prompt. Um, and then number two, we can put students into small groups, and we're really like three to four students. Doesn't we don't want it to be bigger than that, um, and we definitely don't want it to be two. I mean, it's fine if it's two, but we like um incorporating a variety of viewpoints. So three to four is kind of the sweet spot here. And one of the things that you can do is you could assign roles if you wanted to, where one student is responsible for really drafting and refining the claim, that central argument that the group is making. You could have another student who's responsible for being, you know, the curator of the evidence, another student is responsible for the justification development, and then another student is responsible for like the visual aspect of it. So you could do that if you wanted to. I don't love assigning roles because I really do want students to have discussions about all of the aspects of their essay that they're going to be including. However, you could put each student responsible for each one of those things, and then they own that aspect of the final product. So no one is singularly responsible for each thing, but they are the owner of it. So the onus lies on them to ensure that the justification is really clean and you know, so uh what's the word I'm looking for? Like solidified before they turn it in, etc. So you could do that if you wanted to. Um and what I love about this is that everyone is contributing to everything, and those roles really create that individual accountability within the collective assignment that they're they're doing. Um, so the next step, step three, is to actually build the graphic essay. So this is the heart of the activity, and you can set this up however you want. You could have students do this on chart paper, you could have students do it on whiteboard space with multicolored index cards, you could do it digitally on a, you know, shared Google um slides if you wanted to. And however you choose to structure it, you're still going to have like the central elements of an essay for your students. And at EB, we use the EBW approach, right? So students are gonna have a tag, a summary, and a claim for their introductory paragraph. They're going to have premises, intro to evidence, evidence and justification for their body paragraphs, and for their conclusion, they're gonna have the restatement of claim, the summary of their evidence, and then the mic drop sentence. And so students can really, you know, branch out and create this graphic however they they see fit, right? They can use color coding to represent different aspects of an essay. They could use arrows or like a visual hierarchy, whatever makes the structure legible. And so I want you to give students the opportunity to really be creative here because they it might be really interesting to see what they come up with as a group in terms of how they choose to visually represent the essay. You know, at EB, we have a graphic essay organizer that we provide our students, and they're just little like thought bubbles essentially with the different aspects of an essay visually organized on a piece of paper. Well, here we have the opportunity to give students the creative license to really structure this however they see fit. And what's cool is as they're working on this, you can walk around the classroom and you can ask them questions, you can ask them, you know, a piece of evidence, why they're considering this piece of evidence or, you know, all of those types of things as they're um assembling it and putting it together. So it's great because you get to coach their thinking in real time as it's actually being constructed, as opposed to when you're grading essays, you are responding to their essays, you know, sometimes weeks later, hopefully within the week, but we all know how difficult it is to grade a stack of essays. Um, last but not least, you can also have students present their findings to the class. So this is a great opportunity to tap into speaking and listening skills and things along those lines. And so if you choose to use those roles, you could have each aspect of the roles that you assigned present that part of the essay to the class. So it's great because then everybody gets to present and speak in front of the class. And then you can also have them, if you choose to give them the creative license for how they choose to visually represent the essay, you can have them discuss why and defend why they chose to represent their essay in that particular visual capacity, so that there's reasoning even behind that too, right? So we're getting a variety of opportunities for students to practice justifying their reasoning. So I want you to picture this in your room in terms of, you know, as opposed to 30 students sitting at their desks just right or 36 students or 42 students. I know some of us have a lot of students, and 30 might seem like a good number. Um, I never, I was gonna tell a little story, but I'm not gonna go off in a tangent. But imagine instead of having, you know, 30 students just sitting at their desks, it's April, it's hot, your classroom's miserable, right? It's just, and you don't even want to grade the essays. They don't want to write them, you don't want to grade them. Let's do this instead, right? Students are working together, especially with the visual aspect of it. They get to really have fun with it. And when you sit down to actually read what they wrote, you're reading essays that have all of these different thoughts put into it. You're giving, you know, four students, one singular grade. If you choose to break out the grades separately for contribution, you can have students grade each other as well and get their feedback and assign students kind of different grades as opposed to a singular grade for each group of students. However, you choose to structure it, obviously is totally fine. But you're you're reading essays that are going to be easy for you to digest because they've been written by four different students together. You've already given them feedback in class as they've been working on it. They've presented their findings to the class, which you could also use as an opportunity for editing and revision. So after they present, if you have a bunch of questions that, you know, as they're presenting it, you are asking them, they can go back and revise and make their essays even stronger before they submit the final product to you. So it's just a really simple strategy that two strategies essentially that we're taking and um combining together and marrying together. So if essay writing is just like not the top of your list this time of year, I want you to give this a shot and you know, bring it into your classroom and add your own creative license to it too. It's a great way to give students the time and space to really collaborate and think together. And, you know, the writing just kind of takes care of itself because they're all working collaboratively to support each other. And if you do try this in with it in your classroom with your students, let me know over in our Facebook group if you are a part of our membership and you're an EB teacher, or if you're not, head over to our Instagram at ebacademics, send me a direct message, and I would love to read about how this goes with your students. All right, you guys, thank you so much for joining me today on the podcast, and I will see you guys next week. Bye, everyone.