Episode 426: If Your Students Only Write One Essay This Year, THIS is the One!

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA podcast episode, Caitlin shares why evidence-based writing is the one writing genre every middle school ELA teacher should prioritize. Discover how focusing on literary analysis can build confident writers, strengthen critical thinking, and create transferable skills that benefit students across every subject—all while making writing instruction simpler and more effective. 

Join us this July for our FREE Writing Workshop: https://www.ebteacher.com/writing-workshop

Transcript

Welcome And Mission For ELA Teachers

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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.

July Focus On Writing Confidence

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Well, hello, teachers, and welcome to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. I am Caitlin Mitchell, if you don't know who I am, and I am so excited about this month because all of July we are going deep on writing. We're gonna be talking about writing instruction, writing results, writing confidence, all of it. And I know some of you may have just heard me say writing and had a little stressed response in your body, a little tightening in the chest. And I want you to know that I see you, I've been you, and this is exactly why I'm so fired up about what I'm sharing this month. Because by the end of July, my goal is for writing to feel like something completely different to you than it might feel right now. So I want to kick things off with a question, and I want you to actually answer it in your head. So don't just let it like slide by, like, I actually answer this question. If you could teach only one writing style this entire school year, which would you pick? Narrative writing, argumentative, expository, persuasive, research, descriptive, just pick one. Because here's the thing most teachers spread their writing instruction across every genre of writing all year long. And what ends up happening is that students get a surface level experience with everything and a deep experience of nothing. They do a narrative unit, then they do a persuasive unit, then maybe some research writing. And then every time you switch genres, you're essentially starting over, right? You're reteaching structure, reteaching process, or reteaching how to even approach a blank page. And that is exhausting for you. And quite frankly, it's disorienting for our students. So I want to make a case today for one specific writing style, and one that in my experience and in the experience of tens

The One Genre Question

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of thousands of EV teachers across the country and around the world has the single greatest impact on student growth as writers. It is the one that, when you commit to it consistently, can totally transform not just how your students write, but how they read, how they discuss, how they think, all of the things. And that genre of writing is evidence-based writing. We call that the EBW approach here at EB Academics. Now, before I lose any of you who just thought, okay, but my students can barely write a paragraph, like evidence-based writing feels like a stretch. I want you to stay with me. Because I promise you, by the end of this episode, you're gonna see why evidence-based writing is actually the most accessible entry point into strong writing that exists, especially for middle schoolers. It is not the hardest, it is the most accessible. And I'm gonna show you exactly

Stephanie’s Turnaround With EBW

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why. First, I want to tell you about Stephanie. Stephanie's one of our EV teachers, and her story just is genuinely so good. I wanted to share it with you guys because it captures everything that I believe about what great writing instruction can do for a classroom. So when Stephanie was hired for her current position, she'd never taught a single ELA class in her life, not one. And maybe you're a brand new teacher listening to the podcast this summer. And she was brand new to this subject, brand new to the grade level, and thrown into the deep end, which been there, done that. And she struggled, like struggled so hard in those first few months in the classroom and the first year that she almost quit. And I mean, like, she was that close to walking away from the whole thing before Christmas break. And listen, if you've ever been in a version of that place, you know how real that feeling is. Like, you know what that feels like, the moment where you think, like, I can't do this anymore. But then one evening, she stumbled across the EBW approach. And she says what she found was so much more than just a filler lesson to get her through another day on the job. And fast forward three years, Stephanie is still in that classroom. She still uses the EBW approach, and the feedback that she's gotten from her students, from her colleagues, from her parents, from her admin, in her own words, has been amazing. And this year she actually told us the following. She said a high school English teacher reached out to her specifically to ask what curriculum she uses because one of Stephanie's former students, who is now a freshman in high school, was literally teaching her classmates how to properly write responses to literature and cite textual evidence. Let that sink in. A ninth grader walking into a new school, confident enough in her own writing skills to show other students how it's done. And that's because of what she learned in Stephanie's middle school classroom. And I just think that that is such a great example of the ripple effect of when we teach evidence-based writing well and consistently with our students.

The Claim Evidence Justification Core

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So I want to talk about like why evidence-based writing really also like literary analysis, or you can use this for informational text, but I'll use the terms literary analysis and evidence-based writing kind of interchangeably. But why literary analysis specifically? Why evidence-based writing specifically? Why is this the one genre that does all of it? And the thing that most writing curriculums seem to get wrong is that they treat every writing style like its own separate island. Persuasive writing is in its own corner, and teachers spend their whole year just like island hopping between writing styles, and students never really build any momentum because they're always starting over. And so here's what nobody tells you the heart of almost every academic writing genre is the same. It all comes down to making a claim, supporting it with evidence, then explaining and justifying that evidence and connecting it back to the claim. Like that's it. That's the core. Argumentative writing, claim, evidence, justification, persuasive writing, claim, evidence, justification. Yes, we also have with argumentative writing a counterclaim, but still compare and contrast, same thing. Claim, evidence, justification, problem solution, cause and effect, research papers, they are all rooted in that same fundamental structure. And literary analysis is where students learn that structure the most naturally and most effectively. Because within the EBW approach that we teach at EB, students learn to build an essay around a claim about the text, and then they find specific evidence from the literature to support it, and then they justify why that evidence actually proves their point. And that justification piece is the skill that really separates good writers from great writers. And it's the piece that most students, one, have never been explicitly taught, but two, are not given enough practice with at all. So when your students build that muscle in literary analysis, it transfers everywhere to all the other writing styles. You don't have to teach evidence and justification from scratch when you get to argumentative writing because your students already have that skill. We're just helping them apply it into a new context.

Make Writing Easier With Pre Reading Prompts

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Now, here's the other reason literary analysis is the most accessible writing genre for our middle schoolers. And I think this is the piece that gets often overlooked. It's that your students are going to already be doing the work before the essay even begins, before they even start writing. So think about how literary analysis assignments actually unfold in your classroom. So before students write a single word of their essay, what has happened up until that point? They've read the text together, you've had discussions about it, they've done activities connected to it, right? Maybe they've annotated it on Socratic seminars or silent debates or characters at characterization charts, whatever your process looks like, right? They've been like living and breathing this text. So when it's time to write, they're not facing a blank page and a topic that they know nothing about, right? They are coming into the writing assignment with a ton of background knowledge, right? Shared vocabulary from your class discussions, maybe a handful of pieces of evidence that they've been developing and finding as they've been reading. Okay. So the way that we like to set this up at EB is to give students a text-dependent writing prompt before they even start reading. So that as they move through the text, they're actively hunting for evidence that connects to that prompt. Right? So a simple example that we use all of the time for any piece of literature could be which character trait best describes and insert the character's name. That's it. So before you read, you would give your students that question. Well, now as you're reading, students are already thinking about the character traits that might describe this character. They're already noticing evidence, they're already forming opinions. You might even do a characterization activity. You might have a class discussion where students share what they found. And so by the time the essay comes around, they are ready. They have ideas, they have evidence, they have a point of view which might become their claim, right? The writing becomes the expression of thinking that has already happened. So they're not starting from nothing, right? They're starting from a ton of background information already. And as the year goes on and the prompts get more complex, that same process builds and deepens, right? Students get better at hunting for evidence. They get better at justifying it. They get better at formulating their claims and their premises. So every essay in that case is not a new starting point, right? It's the next opportunity to get better at writing. And you start to see something really beautiful happen, right? Students stop dreading writing assignments because they know what to do, right? They have a process, they have a framework, and that all creates confidence in our students, which inevitably creates stronger writing, which again creates more confidence. And so it becomes this cycle. And it's a really, really cool one to see in class.

How Evidence Skills Transfer Everywhere

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So I want to share one more story because this one I think is really powerful. So Jess is someone in our membership. She was observing a fifth grade classroom during a Socratic seminar on Thank You Mam by Langston Hughes. And she told me how she was genuinely blown away, not just by how these fifth graders were discussing the text, but by how they were using evidence. They weren't just saying, like, I think Roger's a good person, right? They were saying things like, I think Roger's character shows redemption. And here's the specific moment in the text that supports that. And here's why that matters, right? This is in fifth grade, in a class discussion, not even in a written essay. And what's happened is that the skills have become so embedded into the classroom culture through consistent literary analysis writing and discussion that they just show up naturally in a Socratic seminar. And the cherry on top with that whole story was that those same students were using the exact same techniques in their social studies classes and their science classes. We have so many stories of other teachers who come to our ELA teachers and are saying, What are you doing in your writing class? Because I'm finally getting focused, well-structured written responses from your students. What did you change? And what changed was that these students had internalized how to construct an argument with evidence. And once that skill lives inside of a student with their writing, it goes with them everywhere. It is totally transferable to all other subjects. And that is what literary analysis writing does when you commit to it.

Go Deep Instead Of Doing Everything

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So here's what I want you to sit with as we kick off July together. You do not have to do everything. I don't want you to think that you have to cover every single genre with equal depth and equal time. In fact, trying to do that is probably one of the reasons writing instruction feels so overwhelming for you. Because you're constantly starting over with new structures, new vocabulary, new expectations. So my invitation to you is what if instead you went deep on one thing? What if you committed to literary analysis writing as your anchor, as your foundation, and then let everything else build on top of it? What if your students finish the year not having written every genre, but have truly learned how to write? Right? They're confident writers, writers who construct an argument, writers who know what to do with evidence, writers who show up in ninth grade and teach their classmates how it's done. That is possible. I have watched it happen in classrooms around the country, around the world, and it starts with making the decision to commit to the right foundation.

Free Workshop Invitation And Wrap Up

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So in a couple of weeks, I'm actually offering a free writing workshop where I go deep with the EBW framework. I work through all of this with you of why having a consistent repeatable structure is the thing that makes all of this actually sustainable in your classroom, what it looks like. So make sure that you sign up for that workshop and grab your free spot, go to eBTeacher.com forward slash writing dash workshop. We'll make sure that we put that in the show notes for you as well so that you can snag it easily. But my goal is for you to feel confident as a writing teacher so that you know exactly what you're teaching, you know exactly how to get your students to formulate claims, premises, find evidence from the text, and justify their reasoning and how to make it work in your classroom, no matter how short your class periods are, no matter what mandated curriculum you're required to use, this workshop is going to make a difference for you. So I really hope to see you there. Again, that's ebteacher.com forward slash writing workshop. All right, I'm so glad you're here for this month of July. Focus on writing. It's gonna be a good one. And I will see you on the next podcast episode. All right, bye, everyone.