Episode: 411: How to Keep Students Engaged When Everyone (Including You) Is Done

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast, I share the most powerful lever I’ve seen for middle school ELA engagement: making engagement your north star. Not entertainment. Not fluff. Engagement that lives right alongside rigor and standards-based instruction. When students are genuinely invested, they learn more, they push through hard parts instead of shutting down, and their growth actually shows up in their work. And here’s the part every teacher wants to hear: engagement also makes classroom management easier, because so many “behavior problems” are really boredom problems in disguise.

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Transcript

Two Versions Of The Same Morning

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Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Caitlin here, and today we are talking about how to keep your students engaged when everyone, including you, is done. I've been seeing on social media, some people have a week left of school, some people have four weeks left of school, like my son's school. We don't get out until the middle of June, beginning of June-ish. And wherever you are, as we head into the end of the school year, I hope that this episode serves you and it's one to hold on to and something to really think about in any time of the year, but especially this time of year. So I want you to think about two different versions of the same morning. So I kind of want to set the scene before we start today's podcast episode. So in the first morning, in the first version of your morning, let's imagine this. You wake up before your alarm, not because you have to, but because something in you is like ready to go. Like you're thinking about the lesson that you planned. You feel that little like buzz of excitement in your chest or like butterflies in your stomach that I get. And that morning you walk into your classroom, you look at those desks, and you think, yeah, yep, today is going to be an amazing day. That's version one. Sounds pretty good, right? Let's go to the other version. Let's go to the opposite of that. In the second version, the alarm goes off, and your first feeling is, ugh, no. Just dread. And it's not because you don't care. It's not because you're a bad teacher, but because you know today is gonna be another exhausting exercise in trying to get 30 middle schoolers to engage with something that they'd rather ignore while simultaneously managing behavior, parent emails, and wondering if any of this is actually working. Now, both of those mornings are real, right? Most of us have had both. And today I want to talk about the single most powerful lever that you can pull to make that first version more of your normal and not the exception. And it's honestly it's simpler than you think. Maybe you know where I'm going with this. So let's dive into today's episode.

The EB Mission And Support

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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. I

The True Load Teachers Carry

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want to just be honest for a second about how much teachers are asked to carry. And I know this, obviously, because I was a teacher, but I was reminded of it this weekend we had our festival of fun at my son's school. And I just volunteered for one little thing, but I just saw the magnitude that went into this event of the parents and the teachers and just everyone involved. And it's like we're not just doing our little contribution to the festival of fun. It's like we are all contributing at massive scale. And I think about that as teachers and what it takes to run a school and what it takes to run a classroom and all of that stuff. Like it's never just the thing that you sign up for, right? It's never just teaching, it's all of the other things, right? Lesson planning is a part of teaching, grading is a part of teaching, parent communication is a part of teaching, IEP meetings, yard duty coverage, the PD that you got to go to, that is a waste of your time, the committee work, the report cards, the curriculum mapping, all of the things, right? I could keep going and going and going. You know that list better than anyone. And on top of all that, right, you're supposed to stand in front of a room of 12 and 13-year-olds who are running on soda and questionable snack choices and late nights on iPads and social media and all of the things that we deal with nowadays. And you're trying to make them care about theme versus topic. Like, no, that ain't happening sometimes, right? It is a lot. It's genuinely, legitimately a lot. And I'm definitely not here to minimize that reality. And sometimes we have to laugh at just like the comedic reality of what we face as teachers. And I don't want to minimize that at all. Sometimes laughing is the best medicine when it is tough. But I do want to tell you that there is one shift and one lens that you can apply into your classroom that does not add to the weight of teaching. It

Engagement As Your Guiding Lens

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actually lifts it. It makes it feel lighter, it makes it feel more fun, it makes it feel more free. And that shift is making engagement your north star as a teacher. We talk a lot at EB here about making your standards your north star when you're planning. And that's absolutely essential because we want to make sure that we're actually planning for the standards. And also when we make engagement our north star and super important to what we're doing in your classroom, a lot of things change. And before I go further into the episode, I do want to be clear about something. And when I talk about engagement, I'm not talking about entertainment. That's a totally different thing. There's nuance here. I'm not saying like throw out your standards and just make things fun. Rigor matters, standards matter, right? That is the foundation. But when rigor and engagement live together in the same exact lesson, that is where the magic happens. And that ripple effect goes so much further than you might expect. So I want to walk you through what I've seen, what the research consistently shows when teachers commit to viewing every single lesson through that engagement lens. First

Learning Management Joy And Impact

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and foremost, your students actually learn more. Now I know that this sounds obvious, but it is worth saying very clearly when students are genuinely engaged, when they are invested, when they are curious, when they are competitive, when they are creative, they pay attention, they participate, they push through the hard parts instead of shutting down. And the growth shows up in their work because they were present enough to actually absorb what you taught them. They were there. They participated in the lesson because they were having fun, because they were actively engaged. The second thing that you're gonna see is that your classroom management gets a heck of a lot easier. We hear this over and over and over again from our EB teachers. I cannot tell you how many behavior problems are really just boredom problems in disguise. When students are in the middle of something that genuinely has their attention, a competitive game or like a mystery to solve or a debate that they actually care about winning, they literally don't have the bandwidth to be disruptive, right? They're too busy learning, they're too busy being students, they're too busy being actively engaged. So engagement is classroom management. They are not separate things. Yes, there's all kinds of other classroom management things that we could talk about, but this is a huge lever to pull when we talk about our students having problems in class. Bro, they're bored. They don't want to be there. Let's get them engaged and they're learning. Let's do something that's worth doing in class. And that's not to say that what you're doing isn't worth doing right now, but I'm just giving you a different perspective, right? Some tough love because that's what helps us grow. That's what makes us better. And third one, this one's for you. Just as important as the classroom management getting easier, you start to love your job again. Creating lessons requires creativity when you want it to be engaging, right? And creativity can be energizing, right? When you're designing a mock trial or you're building a Socratic seminar or you're crafting an investigation trail around a text that your students are going to lose their minds over, right? You are growing as a teacher. You are building skills, you are becoming someone who is genuinely excited about Monday morning. And that excitement, when you walk in to bring a freaking awesome lesson into your classroom, your students feel it. They always feel it. My favorite poem to teach when I taught juniors in high school. I was just talking to someone about this literally yesterday at the gym. They asked me what my favorite poem was Love Song of Jail for Proof Rock, T.S. Elliot, hands down. I loved teaching proof rock. And my students knew. And as lame as that poem could have been for juniors in high school, guess who loved it? All of my students, all of my juniors, all of my students, because I loved it. They saw my passion and it rubbed off on them. And so, like, that is huge for you, for you to get excited to go to class every single day. Fourth, your relationships with your students deepen when you make engagement front center. So think about those end-of-the-year notes that you receive, the ones that you like save. I know some of us have like special journals that we put them in. And the chances are that they mention something very specific, a specific project, a specific activity, a lesson that made them feel something. Right? Students don't bond with you over worksheets, they bond over shared experiences. And engagement is what creates those experiences in the classroom. Now, fifth, you might feel the impact of your work. And this is the one that matters the most to me. Teaching can feel invisible sometimes, right? You put in the work, you wonder, oh my God, is any of this landing? But when your lessons are engaging, when your students are thriving, when they're meeting standards, when they are developing a genuine love for reading and writing and ELA and the stories that you've chosen and the poems that you're teaching, you feel it, you see it. And that sense of impact is what keeps you in this profession and in love with it. Right? We want you to fall back in love with teaching, the way that we thought it was gonna be before we ran into the system, right? That just makes teaching challenging. So

Low Prep Engagement That Works

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right now, I know some of you are like, okay, Caitlin, this is great, but I'm already running on empty. Like, there's no way that I have the time or energy to overhaul everything that I do. And I get that. I hear you, I totally do, right? We're at the end of the year, we're in that last mile. I think I've said this recently on the podcast, like my dad always said, the last mile of the race, that's when champions are born. Like that's when we dig deep and we keep freaking going, right? But here's what I want you to know about engagement is that engagement does not have to mean elaborate or, like I said earlier, entertaining. It doesn't have to mean hours of extra planning or a complete reinvention or re-haul of your curriculum. You don't have to do that. It can mean simply taking the textbook questions that you have to teach that you are already going to assign, and maybe you turn them into a silent debate instead. It can be that simple. It can mean adding a two-minute competitive warm-up before a grammar lesson that's like gets students out of their seats and competing with each other. It can mean framing a writing assignment as a mystery that your students have to solve rather than a prompt that they have to respond to. Right? Those are small things. And as we know, small hinges can swing big doors. I don't know if you've heard that phrase before. I love that one. You don't have to do everything differently, right? You just have to start asking one question about what you're already doing. Is how can I make this more engaging? Like let that question be your guide. And that question asked consistently will transform your classroom. Not overnight, but it will steadily, undeniably do it in ways that you will feel every single morning when you walk through that door and you are freaking stoked to teach that lesson. It makes such a difference for you and such a difference for your students. So if

Episodes To Revisit For Ideas

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you're not sure where to begin, I have some episodes that I'm gonna encourage you to revisit. I'll put these in the show notes for you too. But here are some of my favorite episodes to revisit if you want practical, low prep ways to bring more engagement into your classroom right now at the end of the school year. So episode 222 is all about using music as an easy engagement tool. Love that episode. Episode 205 covers engaging ideas for short story units. So if you're teaching a short story right now at the end of the school year, that's a great one. Episode 197 gives you three low prep ways to create defining moments in your classroom. And then episode 146 is all about hooking students at the very start of a unit because how you open the lesson changes everything that follows. Like I love those. Hooking students at the beginning, game changer. So start with one of those episodes and see what happens. So I started this episode with two different versions of the same morning. And I want to end here. The version where you wake up excited, where you walk into your classroom with energy and your students walk out having genuinely learned something, or they don't even want to leave to go to recess or PE, that is not a fantasy. That is not reserved for the teachers who somehow have it all figured out. That is available to you in your classroom with your students, even at the end of the school year. It literally starts with one engaging lesson and then another and then another until one day you realize that those good mornings have all of a sudden become your normal. That is what we're building toward. That is the goal. That is what we want for you. And that's what we do here at EB. And I'm so glad that you listen to this podcast. I'm so glad that you're building it with us. And

Summer Plans And Next Week Preview

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I have tons of amazing things coming for you this summer, all about engagement, writing. I have to say, tease. Excuse me. I'm not gonna edit that out. Anna, let's not edit that out. Um, I have tons of exciting things coming for uh for you this summer, focus on PD. We're talking about engagement, writing, all kinds of good stuff. So definitely make sure that you're checking your emails, you're following us on Instagram so that you get the announcements when all of the information comes out for registering for our PD. But we're gonna have a fabulous summer together. But until then, you are in the home stretch. This is when champions are born. Make sure that you join us next week on the podcast. I have two of our staff coming on to record next week's podcast episode with me, and we are gonna talk about what they would have done differently this year and what they are choosing to keep for next year. And it's gonna be a fabulous episode. All right, you guys, thanks so much for joining me. Here's to a fabulous rest of your day, and I'll see you next week on the podcast. Bye, everyone.