Episode 429: Is the Reason Your Students Struggle With Writing Simpler Than You Think?

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast episode, watching a class freeze at a blank page is one of the fastest ways to lose your confidence as a writing teacher and it’s also one of the most preventable. I’m breaking down the evidence-based writing approach (EBW) and why it works as a thinking framework, not just an essay format, so you can stop reteaching the same skills from scratch every time you assign a response. 

If you want to go deeper, I’m hosting a free live writing workshop starting July 21 where I’ll walk you through the framework and how to integrate it across your ELA block. 

Join our FREE 3-Day Writing Workshop here: https://www.ebteacher.com/writing-workshop

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Transcript

Late Night Hello And July Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Caitlin here, and I just want to preface this episode with apologies if my voice is a little bit lower than usual. Recording late at night, son and dog are asleep, and I'm trying not to wake them up, which seems to be the standard operating procedure these days as a single mom, but we're still gonna record and we're still gonna have a great time. So I'm so excited because this month of July, we are talking all about writing. Writing instruction, writing with confidence, all of it. And I could not be more excited because this is genuinely one of the things that is my favorite topics to talk about. I loved teaching it when I was in the classroom. And I just love how much our EBW approach if impacts students in the classroom. If you're an EB teacher, you know this. If you're a part of our membership, our world, the EBW approach and our writing program just makes such a difference for students in the way that they write. And I was recording something for our upcoming workshop, or putting my slides together rather for upcoming workshop. And it really dawned on me that, like what we talk about here with claim, evidence, premise, justification, all of that stuff that I'm gonna get into in today's episode. It's really a thinking framework. It's not just a writing framework. And I think when we bridge that gap between how we think and what we write and how we write, it makes it make so much more sense to students. We're not writing an essay, we're just articulating our thoughts. And the EBW approach gives students a framework through which to kind of filter the way in which they communicate what they're thinking, their experience, their opinions, whatever it might be. So this is one of my favorite things in the entire world.

Free Writing Workshop Invitation

SPEAKER_00 1:46

But before I dive in, I want to invite you to join our three-day writing workshop. It's happening starting on July 21st. If you go to ebteacher.com forward slash writing dash workshop, you can reserve your spot for free. Lots of free resources that I'm giving away, lots of giveaways, all kinds of fun things. It'll be a great three days together. I promise you it'll be your favorite thing that you do all summer. So definitely make sure that you go sign up for that if you haven't already. Again, that's ebteacher.com forward slash writing dash workshop. And I will include it in the show notes for you as

The Confidence Question For Teachers

SPEAKER_00 2:18

well. All right, before I dive in, I want to ask you a question and I want you to get real with yourself, right? That's how we grow is by truly being able to reflect, truly being able to have the awareness of where we get to improve and things along those lines. So I want you to really, really think about this. When was the last time you genuinely felt confident teaching a writing lesson? Like, not just like, oh, I know what I'm doing, but like actually feeling it. You know what you're doing. Like you've got it, you're the goat, your students know what they're doing. Like this thing is working. And if you had to really think about it, if you're not sure you can even point to a specific moment, then this episode is definitely gonna help you. And honestly, even if you can point to a moment, this episode is still for you because what I'm sharing today is the thing that made all the difference for me when I was back in the classroom. And now, like I said, for tens of thousands of EB teachers across the country and around the world, like this stuff works. Okay, so let's get 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.

From Winging It To A Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 4:32

So I want to take you back to a specific summer. It must have been, gosh, 2012, maybe, which feels like so long ago because it was, but that's wild. And I had just wrapped up a school year where honestly the writing instruction in my classroom was a mess. I walked into teaching seventh and eighth grade after having taught high school with no, they gave me no curriculum. It was like, oh, there might be some books in the closet that the other teacher used, but you can kind of do your own thing, which was amazing. And also like, okay, what the heck am I supposed to do? And I remember like I was trying to find stuff online and piecemeal things together and all this sort of stuff. And I realized that no one had ever really like taught me how to teach writing. Like I knew what good writing looked like as a teacher. I loved literature, I loved writing, I loved talking about it. But how do you actually like systematically teach a seventh or eighth grader to build an argument? How do you teach them to find evidence? How do you teach them to write a conclusion that just doesn't end with, you know, our favorite adage of thank you for reading my paper? And I just didn't have a roadmap for that. And like my master's degree is in secondary education with an emphasis in English, and I was not taught how to teach writing, which is crazy. And I was really winging it. Like even when I taught high school, I was winging it. And the winging it for me made it feel like every time a writing unit was to be taught, I was like, oh great, here we go again. And so the summer after that first year, I sat down and decided to build something. And we call it now the EBW approach at EB Academics. It stands for the evidence-based writing approach. And I remember going into that next school year after having spent the summer working on this, feeling like a little bit nervous, but mostly excited, thinking, like, okay, let's see if this thing actually works. So I taught evidence-based writing all throughout that school year. Like it was consistently in my classroom. It wasn't just a singular unit. And if you fast forward to the end of that year, my principal called me out at our faculty meeting to talk about our test scores. And like, I want to be super clear. Like, I could give to I could care less about test scores. Like, I really don't care. And also I understand the importance of it sometimes. Let's I just don't want to get too far into how I feel about all of this because I can go on on and on. But I was stunned to see the immense growth that my students saw in just a year. Like I actually thought it was wrong. Like, I'm like, they must have made a mistake. My seventh graders to their eighth grade year in writing grew like four grade levels. It was wild. And like my principal wanted to know what I was doing because he was like, Well, you need to go into all the other classrooms and teach everybody else to do this too. And when I sat down and actually thought about it, the answer was really simple. It was a framework. It was using evidence-based writing, but not just using evidence-based writing to teach writing, but using this concept of this thinking framework of evidence-based writing, really evidence-based thinking, all throughout my classroom. It was a consistent, repeatable structure that we used every time we were discussing any type of literature or nonfiction, it didn't matter, in class. And that story that I experienced that I just shared with you, that is exactly what I want for you. Like that is 1000% possible. And it's interesting because my mom taught fifth grade and third grade for 25 years. And when we first came out with this, and EB Academics was first born, and we were teaching other teachers like very back in the infancy of EB 12 years ago. I remember my mom being like, oh God, I hated teaching writing. I never knew how to get students to write anything, anything that sounded good. And it just never made sense. And she's like, if I had had what you are teaching now, it would have made teaching writing so much easier. And the thing that is crazy to me, I just don't understand why people just aren't doing this. Like, why is everybody just not using this approach to teaching writing? And so I know some of you might be thinking, well, Caitlin, that's because my situation's different, right? My students are so far behind, or my kids don't even want to pick up a pencil or barely have enough time to get through or read aloud. Like, forget teaching the whole writing process. And like, I hear you, I really do.

Time And Grading Are Symptoms

SPEAKER_00 9:06

In fact, we recently just surveyed, I think it was 481 middle school ELA teachers. And I asked, what is the number one biggest struggle when it comes to teaching writing? And you know what the number one answer was? It was time. Nearly one in four of those teachers surveyed said you simply don't have enough time to fit writing in the way that you want to. The second biggest struggle was grading and feedback. Like the mountain of papers obviously never seems to shrink. And here's what struck me about those answers. Both of those problems, the time problem and the grading problem, are actually not problems. They are symptoms of the same underlying issue. And that issue is not having a framework for teaching writing. Like, think about that. The time problem and the grading problem are symptoms. They are not an actual problem that can be solved without solving the root cause, right? So when you don't have a framework, when you don't have a very clear, repeatable structure that your students internalize in everything that they do, not just in what they write, but in how they talk, what they discuss, the way that they present. If you don't have that, then you are consistently reteaching. You are consistently re-explaining. You are conferencing with every single student because they all have different questions about different things because there's no shared framework to anchor them. And that is what eats your time. And then when the essays come in, they're all over the place. Different structures, different formats, no common language to give feedback with. And that is what makes grading feel impossible. So a framework, if you think about it from this perspective, doesn't actually add more to your plate. It takes things off of your plate and it alleviates those symptoms. We still have to grade, but grading is going to be a hell of a lot faster. And I want to show you exactly how to do this. And I want to actually give you a piece to try of this on your own before the podcast even ends today. So I want to talk about what the EBW approach actually does. And I mean, like very concrete, concretely, I want to discuss this because I don't want to just throw like educational jargon and buzzwords at you. I want you to understand the mechanics of why this works.

Fixing The Blank Page With TAG

SPEAKER_00 11:21

The first thing a proven writing framework does is it eliminates the blank page problem. And you know exactly what I'm talking about. You give a writing assignment, you can't say, okay, let's get started. You know, you got you think that you've set your students up for success. You've told them all the things that indent, and this is your heading, and don't use personal pronouns or whatever all of the things are, right? And you hand it out, and then you immediately have students asking you about the prompt. Or you have a room full of students who are doing absolutely nothing and are like, I don't know how to begin. And that's not laziness, like per se, maybe in some of our kids, but that's paralysis, right? They literally don't know how to start. And from someone who's written a book, who I swear I will never write a book again, but sometimes I feel like I have to, that is so daunting to look at a blank page and not know what the heck to say. And you are paralyzed. And for our students, that feeling is completely preventable. And within the EBW approach, our we teach our students that every literary analysis essay or even nonfiction response to informational text starts the same way. You begin with a tag, and the tag stands for title, author, genre, and you use that to introduce the text and set the context. It is ridiculously simple. Like it almost seems too simple. But what it does is it gives every single student, from your highest achiever in your class to your most struggling writer, gives every single one of them an immediate entry point into their essay. Nobody is staring at a blank page, wondering what to say. They know. And they always know. And that changes everything about their own confidence, about the energy in the room when you give them a writing assignment. So I want to give you a first actionable step, and I want you to actually try this. So I need to think of the very first writing assignment on your calendar for the school year. Before you hand it to your students, you're gonna model the tag sentence yourself out loud. Title, author, genre. That's it. And that one sentence modeled one time totally removes that blank page problem for an entire class. You don't need the whole framework built out to test this. Just try this one piece next time and notice what happens for students. They start to be able to get into their essay. And from the tag, students then move into a brief summary of the text. Then they have a clear, focused claim. And then each part of the framework is a building block, and each one leads naturally into the next one. So instead of your students having a pile of thoughts that they don't know how to organize, they have a roadmap, right? The introduction includes a tag, summary, claim. The body paragraphs include a premise, intro to evidence, evidence justification. It's a literal step-by-step guide that says, here's where you go next. Here's what this paragraph needs to do, here's how to weave your evidence in. You're not just gonna drop a quote in the middle of nowhere with no context or explanation, which we can talk about another day. But it is so important because this is teaching our students that they can essentially just plug and play what they're thinking. Right? It teaches them exactly how to introduce evidence, exactly how to explain it, exactly how to connect it back to the claim. And when students actually do that, their essays transform and the symptom of grading horrible essays, them taking forever, goes away. Or at least it gets lightened.

Teacher Confidence Sets The Tone

SPEAKER_00 14:54

And now here's the second thing I want you to hear, and this one is close to my heart because a proving framework doesn't just increase your students' confidence, it increases yours. Because when I finally had a clear structure to teach writing and a clear sequence to follow, something in me totally changed. I stopped rushing through writing, like we just gotta get this over with because I just want to talk about literature, right? Like, I just want to talk about the human spirit and transcendentalism and like, yes, and Caitlin, like we also have to teach our students how to write. And so it was really cool for me because I slowed down with my writing instruction in order to speed up. Yes, it took me more time at the beginning of the year to give all of the building blocks of this, right? The whole framework and teach it to them step by step by step by step. But what happened is my confidence went up because I knew what I was doing. And so my energy went up because I was excited, because I was confident and I started to love it because my students started to get it. And when my energy went up, my students felt it. And so it's like we all just started having more fun in my classroom. We started doing graphic essays, we started doing one-pagers, like all of these things that are fun and creative and make class feel alive, but also still have students formulate a claim, find evidence from the text to support their position and justify their reasoning. It's all happening all the time. And when your students always are feeling that positive energy, that shifts something for them. Because instead of dreading units, like your energy was initially showing, like, oh shit, I gotta teach writing, right? They're gonna feel that. Like they know, they feel it the moment you introduce an assignment. But if you walk into that room knowing exactly what you're teaching and exactly why you're teaching it, that comes through too, right? They are borrowing from your confidence, and it changes what's possible. And I think about this too, just to go off on a little side note. My son's therapist, we've been working with her with his anxiety, and um oh no, I take that back. This actually came from a parenting program that I went through called Space. I don't know what space stands for, but it's for parents of children who have severe anxiety or OCD um tendencies. And one of the things that she really honed into us was that when our kids are anxious, we have to be so confident in their ability to do it because they borrow their own confidence from us. So if my son is nervous at a restaurant, we went out to dinner last night and there were a lot of people there, and he was like, Mommy, I feel really nervous right now. You know, he's eight. He's like, I feel really anxious. There are a lot of people around. And I'm like, I know, buddy, I notice all the people here, and you know, I know it's hard for you, and you 100% can do this. You've totally got this. And so it's like he's borrowing from my confidence that he can do it. And he trusts me. And our students do the same thing with us. And so I think it's really important for you to understand that your confidence or lack thereof comes across to your students, regardless of whether or not we are saying anything. And look, this isn't just like my story about success in writing and feeling confident, whatever. This is what we see over and over and over and over again from EB teachers all across the country, all around the world. In fact, one of our teachers, Bridget, actually shared with us, I don't know if this was recently or last year, that after implementing the EBW approach, her students' test scores beat the state, district, and school averages. We had another teacher, Tracy, share in our community that her seventh grade students ranked number one in their entire county. And this is just because we're utilizing a framework and we're giving our teachers and instilling this confidence in them that they can do it. And then there's Megan who actually worked for us for a brief period of time. And I love Megan, shout out to Megan if you still listen to the podcast. She actually used our framework for herself in grad school so that she could keep her writing focused and on point. Like that tells you something right there. This isn't just like a middle school tool, it is a transferable set of thinking skills that is applicable through high school, college, and beyond.

A Framework That Transfers Everywhere

SPEAKER_00 19:22

And so the last thing that I want to leave you with today, and I think this might actually be the most important piece, is that the best frameworks are the ones that transfer. Meaning you teach it once up front at the beginning, you spend a ton of time on it, and then it pays dividends across every genre of writing that your students will encounter. Right. So with the EBW approach, it's built around claim, premise, evidence, and justification. How to use evidence to support a claim and explain why that evidence matters. And guess what? That skill, argumentative writing, persuasive writing, cause and effect, compare and contrast, research papers, all of it. And not even just writing, discussions in class, Socratic seminars, silent debates, answering simple questions, like it's happening all the time. So you're not just teaching a one-off skill. You are teaching your students a fundamental writing and thinking competency that they will use for the rest of their academic lives, right? You teach it once, you reinforce it consistently, and then every time you introduce a new style of writing, your students aren't starting from zero, right? They're building on something solid. They get to focus on the nuance, right, of that new genre, the persuasive language or the counterclaim or the research integration, because that underlying structure, that underlying framework of evidence-based writing is already in their bones. Like they just remember it. And that is what it means to get the best writing results that you've ever seen. Not just better essays, but better writers, right? Writers who know what they're doing, they feel good doing it, writers who walk into a timed writing assignment and think like, I've got this, I don't even need the whole class period, because they have the framework in their heads and they have the confidence in order to actually implement it in their writing.

A Simple Action Plan To Try

SPEAKER_00 21:12

So before you go, I want to give you a quick action plan for this upcoming school year. I want you to pick one writing assignment and I want you to model the tag sentence out loud before students start writing and notice what happens. And then write down what you notice because that is your first piece of evidence that having a framework, even a tiny piece of a framework, changes everything. And you don't need to overhaul like your entire writing unit tonight, though you could. You absolutely could, and you can just do what we say with the evidence-based writing approach. A lot of the times it's we just need to try one piece of a system to see something different instead of having no system at all. So here's where I want to point

Register For The Live Workshop

SPEAKER_00 21:51

you to next. I already talked about this at the beginning, but I'm hosting a free live writing workshop, starts July 21st. This is the place where I'm gonna walk you through more about the EBW approach, how we're gonna integrate grammar, and how to include this thinking framework in every capacity of your ELA class so that you can actually like see it in action. You're gonna understand the structure, and you're gonna walk away with a plan for teaching writing next school year that actually works, right? I just don't want to give you a collection of ideas, but I want to give you a real, implementable framework. So it's totally free. It's live, it's designed just for middle school ELA teachers. So again, to register, go to ebteacher.com forward slash writing-workshop. I would love to see you there. And I absolutely mean that because every time I get to introduce a teacher to this framework for the first time and I watch it click in the comments, it never ever gets old for me. It is the best thing. All right, you guys, that is a wrap on today's

Wrap Up And Next Week Teaser

SPEAKER_00 22:49

episode. I will see you back next week talking more about writing. All right, everybody, have a great rest of your day. Bye, everyone.