Episode 417: The Real Reason Your Students Aren't Retaining What You Teach (And How a Simple Framework Fixes It)

Do your students struggle to retain skills from one unit to the next? You're not alone.

In this episode, I explored why standards mastery often feels out of reach for middle school ELA teachers and uncovered the planning habits that may be standing in the way. I discussed three common beliefs that prevent students from achieving true mastery and introduced the Into, Through, and Beyond Framework—a simple but powerful approach to curriculum design that prioritizes retention over coverage.

You'll discover:
✅ Why teaching a skill once isn't enough for mastery
✅ The difference between covering content and teaching for retention
✅ How spiraling content helps students build lasting skills
✅ Why rinse-and-repeat activities save time and improve learning
✅ How to create a curriculum that feels intentional instead of reactive

Whether you're building your own curriculum or navigating a district-mandated program, this episode will help you rethink the way you plan so your students can experience deeper learning and long-term success.

🎉 Join us for our FREE Summer Workshop, register at ebteacher.com/workshop, where you'll learn practical strategies to engage students and help them master the standards with confidence.

Transcript

Summer Workshop Invite And Giveaway

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Before we dive in today, I want to make sure that you know about something that's happening this summer because I do not want you to miss it. The week of June 22nd, we are hosting a completely free workshop week. We have five live sessions. There's one every day, and you can pick which one you want to come to. And all of them are built around our three proven steps to finally engage your students and get them mastering the ELA standards. And we are opening a private pop-up Facebook group community on June 18th. We have a ton of bonus trainings, giveaways. I'm giving away a MacBook Air to one lucky teacher. We do it every summer. It's my favorite thing. And it's happening inside that Facebook group all week long. So it is a full event. It is free. It is so much fun. And it's gonna get you excited about next year, even in June. So head to evteacher.com forward slash workshop right now to grab your spot. The link will also be in the show notes for you. And I really hope to see you there. All right, let's dive into today's episode because what I'm about to share with you is actually the foundation behind everything we're going to be building together that week of our free workshop. Okay, let's get started.

Why Standards Mastery Feels Elusive

SPEAKER_00 1:18

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. So I want to ask you something kind of uncomfortable, which is good because the discomfort is where we grow. At the end of this school year, maybe your school year is about to wrap, and honestly, any school year if you reflect back, how many of your students do you truly feel mastered the standards that you taught them? Not just completed the units, not just passed the assessments, but like actually mastered the skills. Like you could hand them a brand new text in September of next year, and they'd be able to write a solid literary analysis essay without you having to reteach a single thing. For most teachers, if we're being honest with ourselves, the answer is probably like not as many as we had hoped. But here's what I want you to know: this is not because your students aren't capable, and it's certainly not because you aren't a good teacher. It is honestly because of the way most of us were taught or not taught to plan. And it has a fundamental flaw built right into it. And that's what we're gonna get into today. By the end of this episode, I want you to have a completely different framework for how you think about your curriculum. I want you to think about you're gonna have one that is specifically designed to help your students actually retain and master what you're teaching them and not just move through it and not just go through the motions.

Two Common Planning Traps

SPEAKER_00 3:52

So I want to paint a picture of how most middle school ELA teachers approach lesson planning. And trust me, this is just how it goes after 11 years, gosh, 12 years of working with middle school ELA teachers, tens of thousands of them from everywhere in the United States, across the world, every background possible. This is what we're we're dealing with. Okay. And tell me if either of these sound familiar. The first teacher that we talk to is the teacher who flips through their anthology and picks out units that look interesting or that maybe you've taught before, that you learned in school. And then you finish one unit, you move on to the next, you hope things wrap up neatly, like right before a break, and then you have a writing unit somewhere in there, a novel unit or two, maybe some poetry, and you buy some things on TPT to fill the gaps. And after a few years of doing that, right, you get into a routine, you have an order, it's familiar. It basically works, but when you really stop and look at it, and I mean really look at it, it's a little bit haphazard, right? It's basically a checklist, cover narrative, check, do the short story units, check, get through argumentative before June, check, and you move from unit to unit, hitting some standards along the way and just hoping you cover everything else before the year ends. Well, we also have the flip side of that, where you are required to use a curriculum from your district, and you know it doesn't work, but because you are up against a system that basically is holding you hostage to teach this thing that you don't want to teach, you get incredibly frustrated and you don't even know if you're hitting standards. You're hoping also that you're covering everything if you just follow what they're doing. But you also know that student engagement sucks, right? It's horrible. And so we have teachers on both ends of this spectrum where they're putting things together on their own and it's haphazard because it's challenging, because you haven't been taught how to plan effectively, or you're being handed a mandated curriculum that you know is not working for your students, that you know is not getting them to master the standards, and you also know is absolutely making them hate English because it makes you hate teaching English. We don't want to be doing that, right? It's exhausting, it is demoralizing. And so here's what I want to talk about. Here's what I think is really going on, even

Three Beliefs Blocking Mastery

SPEAKER_00 6:14

in both of these scenarios. And it comes down to a few beliefs that are so embedded in the way that we think about teaching, it's like a systems problem. So most of us never even question them, right? It's just like a part of the everyday vernacular of being a middle school ELA teacher. Belief number one that I hear a lot, and look, there's nothing wrong with these beliefs. They're just beliefs that are maybe not serving us that we can change so that we have a more empowering belief to help us become the teacher we want to be. That's what this is all about, right? So, belief number one that I hear a lot is, well, I taught it, so they learned it. This is the assumption that a unit is a complete learning experience, right? If you believe that you taught narrative writing in October, you're like, well, my students know narrative writing, and I covered it. I felt this way. I had this belief when I was in my first few years of teaching. I'm like, but I taught this to you, bro, right? But just because we taught something doesn't mean that they actually mastered it. Right? One exposure to a concept is almost never enough to create mastery. It creates familiarity, right? Which is great, but mastery requires repetition over time. We'll talk about how to ameliorate and change this belief in just a moment. Belief number two is, excuse me, this is handed down to us from our districts, from our, you know, head of our department, from our principal, whatever it might be. You might believe that my job is to cover the curriculum, especially when you are handed basically like an open court model of curriculum that you have to be on this page of this day and there are no questions. Don't ask questions. So you believe that, like, okay, well, my goal is coverage. And when so when your goal is coverage, it's like you're always moving forward. You have to finish this unit, start the next one. And a coverage mindset, circling back to something that you already did can feel like you're going against the grain, you're the black sheep, you're the one that's causing problems. But covering content and teaching content are two very different things. And you know that, especially if you're listening to this episode. And the third belief, and I'm this person when it comes to organizing my life, so I understand this. But the third belief is if I had a best, better lesson plan template, I'd be more organized. Right. I have this belief with just like organizing being a parent and a single mom and like running a business. I'm like, okay, if I just get the right planner, I'll be more organized. And it's like, that's not really how it works, right? Templates can help, but we have to have like a systematic framework for how your units connect to each other in order to make sure that we are actually planning in a way that feels cohesive, right? Because templates really are just a prettier version of like a checklist, right? So I want to discredit some of these beliefs and give you a different belief that's more empowering. Because a lot of this work, I can give you the strategies, I can give you the step-by-step framework, but a lot of it is gonna be about what you believe is possible or not. Like at the end of the day, that's just how it works as a human being. If we don't believe that it's actually gonna make a change, we're not gonna do it, right? So I want to start with the first one. This idea that teaching it means that they learned it. So think about how you learned something that you're really genuinely good at, especially batch planning. If you've only batch planned once, did you learn it once and then get really good at it and never revisit it? No. You come back to it time and time again, slightly different contexts, you build on what you already know, right? So some of our teachers who come to batch planning live, they're like fourth or fifth batch planning live, they're like, oh, I get it. It finally clicks, it makes sense to me. But the first time they did it, I taught them everything, but it doesn't actually create mastery, right? Mastery is built through repeated practice, not through a single unit followed by never touching it again. So I want to give you a simple example. If you did a three-week narrative writing unit in September and your students wrote one narrative essay, that is one exposure. Even if it went great, even if their essays were beautiful, they had one practice rep. And when you asked them to write a lead in March, they have totally forgotten what makes a strong one. They might even have forgotten what a lead even means, quite frankly. But what if every few weeks after that unit was taught, you spend one class period or half of a class period just on one narrative skill, right? You might do a quick 15-minute lesson on leads, a quick 15-minute lesson on dialogue, a lesson on transitions. We're not talking about full narrative essays, but just targeted practice so that by the time May rolls around and narrative writing is on the state test, your students have done these skills eight different times in different contexts with different texts, right? That is allowing them to move toward mastery. Now, the second belief that your job is to cover the curriculum, this one breaks my heart. Teachers are working incredibly hard. You're moving through content at a pace that feels responsible, that feels thorough, or that is mandated to you. And your students still aren't mastering the standards at the end of the year. And it's not because you aren't trying, it's because coverage and mastery are not the same destination. And our districts don't understand that, right? That's very frustrating. So the third belief, excuse me, pardon me. The third belief is that a better template will fix it. And I want to be super direct, Coach Caitlin, loving on you with honesty. No template is gonna save you if you don't have a framework for how your units are supposed to connect. A template is like a container, but a framework is the thing that tells you what to put in it, in what order, and why. And that framework exists and it changes everything once you have it and once you actually do it. So, what I want to give you today is a way of thinking about your curriculum that makes everything more intentional. Your planning, your teaching, and your students' learning.

Into Through Beyond Framework

SPEAKER_00 12:25

It is called the into, through, and beyond approach. And once it clicks for you, you're gonna start seeing your entire curriculum differently. And if you've heard me talk about this before, it is still worth listening to because a lot of the times we hear it and we forget about it, right? Mastery is being exposed to something time and time again. So basically, here's how it works simple, straight up version is that every unit has three different phases. The into lesson is the hook. It gets students curious and activated at the start of a unit. The through lessons are the heart of the unit. This is where you're doing like the deep standards aligned work, the actual teaching, reading the text, practicing of skills. And the beyond lesson is the application. And this is where students take everything that they've learned and they do something with it independently. Into, through, and beyond. That's it. But the magic isn't just in understanding the framework, it's in what happens when you combine it with spiraling content. So I want to give you a couple of parts to this that are really, really helpful. So part number one is to spiral your content. These are in your through lessons and even in your into lessons and your beyond lessons, if we're being honest. But let's say that you just finished a literary analysis writing unit, right? Your students learned how to write strong claims, they found evidence, crafted introductions, conclusions, they used transitions, justification, right? It was a great unit, and now you're moving into a short story unit. So here's what most teachers do: they close the book on literary analysis writing and they move forward. But what actually creates mastery is spiraling that content back in. So a few weeks into your short story unit, or even a week into your short story unit, you could give your students a brief through lesson where they practice writing claims about this new text. They're not writing a full essay, they're just writing claims. And a week or two later, you might do a quick lesson on finding strong evidence from the story. And then maybe later, at the end of that unit, they just write an introductory paragraph. So you're not reteaching the whole literary analysis writing unit, but you are giving students practice reps with the skills that they already learned applied to a new piece of content. And every time you do it, it gets a little bit more automatic, a little bit more natural, a little bit closer to mastery. And over the course of a year, students might write three or four

Spiral Skills For Real Retention

SPEAKER_00 14:56

full literary analysis essays plus a dozen or more targeted practice lessons hitting those individual skills. That is a completely different level of exposure than a one and done writing unit. So if you don't do this, your students will keep starting over from zero every time you want them to write an essay. You'll keep feeling like you're reteaching things that you've already taught because you are, but you're not doing it in a way that is spiraling it to allow them mastery. And what happens is your end-of-the-year assessments will keep showing gaps, and that feels impossible to close in the time that you have left. And it's super frustrating because you're like, bro, I already taught this to you. And we get to take a step back and be like, okay, but how are we actually teaching it to our students? Are we teaching it for coverage or are we teaching it for mastery? The second thing that I want to talk about is spiraling your activities and rinsing and repeating things. So here's where it gets even better. And honestly, this is the part that saves you so much time when you come to planning. So it's not just the content that you can spiral, it's the activities themselves. So inside of our E B Teachers ELA portal inside of our membership, we have what's called a rinse and repeat activities guide. And it's basically a bank of into, through, and beyond activities that work with almost any text or unit. So these are activities you can teach once, and then you can use them again and again all throughout the year. And in fact, I believe, let me just double check, I am giving those resources away at our event. I am.

Rinse And Repeat Activity Routines

SPEAKER_00 16:32

Um, our rinse and repeat activities guide is a part of our summer workshop that we're doing. So make sure that you sign up for that. Come join us for the week. Go to eBTeacher.com forward slash workshop, and you'll get 12 rinse and repeat activities that is this bank of into through and beyond lessons that you can use with any text or unit. So I want to give you an example of one of them. If you've listened to the podcast for a long time, you've heard me talk about this one. And it's one of our into activities, and it's called popcorn predictions. And basically how it works is before starting a new novel or text, you give each student one intriguing sentence that you pull from your text. And then students pop around the room sharing their sentences with each other and they make predictions about what the story might be about. It's engaging, it gets students curious, it takes almost no prep. And the first time you do it, right, you spend a few minutes explaining how it works. But every time after that, students already know the drill. You just swap out the sentences for the new text. And honestly, you can even have AI pull the sentences for you so you're not flipping through the book. But of course, you want to check AI's work always. And that one activity you can run six, eight, ten times over the course of your year. And each time it takes less prep and less class time because the routine is already built in. Students already get it. And that is really what a systematic curriculum actually looks like. Not a different lesson every single day that you're scrambling to find on a Sunday night, right? You want to have a smart set of high-quality activities that you return to with intention across different texts and units all year long. So if you don't build this, what happens is you keep treating every single unit like it requires a brand new set of activities. And you spend your Sunday night scaries, right, searching TPT for something that fits and you exhaust yourself, and your classroom will feel like a series of disconnected events instead of one coherent building experience for your students. It makes such a difference. All right, here's the last piece that I want to talk about. And it's one of the most powerful things about having a framework in place with the Into, Through and Beyond. When you're planning lessons through the lens of the Into, Through and Beyond

Batch Planning With A Birdseye View

SPEAKER_00 18:45

approach, you are mapping out your whole year all at once when you sit down to batch plan. And you start to see things that you would never notice when you're planning week to week because you have this bird's eye view. So you see that you've hit literary analysis writing four times, but you have not circled back to narrative writing since the beginning of the year, right? Or you'll see that you have six through lessons on reading for evidence, but zero beyond lessons where students actually apply that skill independently. You'll see a six-week stretch where every single lesson is a through lesson, a through lesson, a through lesson. And your students are probably exhausted because there's been no hook, no application, no break. So the framework gives you a lens. And that lens lets you look at your curriculum just not as this list of things to cover, but as an intentional arc that's designed to actually move your students forward. And that is the difference between a teacher who's just getting through the year and a teacher who finishes the year actually being like, damn, I think my students mastered a lot of these skills, right? That is a totally different feeling. So if you don't have this lens, what happens is you keep planning reactively. You're filling gaps with whatever it seems like fits and hoping that the pieces somehow add up to something meaningful. And they might, but they might not. And you really won't know until it's too late to change it. So we don't want to be reactive in our planning. We want to be proactive in our planning. So as we wrap up, here's what I want you to take away from

Key Takeaways And Free Workshop CTA

SPEAKER_00 20:21

this. The reason that your students aren't retaining what you teach them isn't because they can't. It's because the system that most of us were handed does not include a mechanism for retention or mastery. It is a coverage system, not a mastery system. And that's like the big capital S system that we are all working against, right? And so when you can build a curriculum around this into, through, and beyond approach, and you spiral your content and you spiral your activities throughout the year, everything changes, right? Your students build on skills instead of starting over every single time. Your planning becomes a system instead of a scramble. And you actually finish the year feeling like your students got somewhere. That's the version of teaching that you got into this for. And it all connects with what I'm doing this summer because we're going all in with our workshop. Again, the week of June 22nd, we're hosting a full week of live training. There are five different sessions to choose from. There's one every single day. And each one builds on the last. It's all centered on our three proven steps to finally engage your students and get them mastering the standards. And like I said at the beginning, we are also opening a private pop-up Facebook group community on June 18th. We are hosting bonus trainings, giveaways, a whole lot of community. It's honestly one of my favorite parts of the whole week is our Facebook group. Teachers show up, they connect with other ELA teachers who get it. And by the time everything starts, everyone's fired up and inspired and motivated. So if you want to walk into the next school year, August and September, with a real plan, a systematic, engaging, standards-aligned curriculum that's actually designed to create mastery for our students. This is where we start to build it together. And it is free. So head to ebteacher.com forward slash workshop to grab your spot. The link is in the show notes. And the registration gets you into the workshop and into the community. So don't just register and forget about the community. I want you to show up. You're going to want to be here for this one. I am so stoked about it. All right, you guys, that's it for today's episode. But I will see you later this week with a great episode coming on Thursday titled You Didn't Become a Teacher to Feel Like This. So here is how to get back to loving it. I can't wait to be with you for that one. Have a wonderful rest of your day. And I will see you later this week on the podcast. Bye, everyone.