Episode 431: Get Your Students Actually Enjoying Writing with this FUN Activity

Another Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast episode, Most students can pull a quote. The hard part is explaining why that quote proves anything. We’re tackling the #1 skill gap middle school ELA teachers keep naming again and again: justification (also known as analysis or explanation) and we’re doing it with one of my favorite high-energy writing activities.

Grab the free download at ebteacher.com/pearls and join our FREE 3-day writing workshop at ebteacher.com/writing-workshop. If this helps your students, subscribe, share the episode with another ELA teacher, and leave a quick review.

Transcript

Welcome And How We Help

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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 Writing Series And Freebie

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Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. I am Caitlin Mitchell and we are continuing our July writing series, and I'm so excited about today's episode. Genuinely, this might be my favorite one of the month because I get to tell you about one of my all-time favorite writing activities. I mean, I have a lot of them, but this one is such a good one. You're gonna want to bookmark this episode and come back to it before school starts. And I also want to let you know that I'm going to give you a free resource, the resource that I'm gonna talk about in this episode. There is a free download for this one. And if you are an EB teacher, it will be already inside of your portal. So you can just go grab it in the portal. But before I tell you which one it is, I do want to start with this.

Why Justification Breaks Student Essays

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The number one skill that separates a leh essay from a good one, and the skill that when we surveyed nearly 500 middle school ELA teachers that came up over and over and over again, the skill that was the number one thing their students struggled with the most, and I'm sure you can guess it, is justification. Right? Explanation, analysis, whatever you want to call it in your classroom, it doesn't matter. It's the same thing, but it's the ability to take a piece of evidence and actually explain why it matters, how it connects to the claim, what it proves, how it answers the prompt, right? Most students can find a quote. They can locate evidence in the text. I mean, sometimes it's really bad evidence, but they can do it, right? But then they just like drop it in the middle of a paragraph. There's no context, there's no explanation, there's no connection. The evidence is just sitting there. Or they try to justify it, but their justification kind of sucks. So today, this activity that I'm giving to you is gonna change that. And I'm gonna walk you through the activity, but I also want to let you know that this is a free download if you go to ebteacher.com forward slash pearls. And let me make sure that that is actually plural. Hold on, let me type it into my computer. Yes, it is. So eb teacher.com forward slash pearls. And if you are an e b teacher, you can just search in your portal pearls in the resources section and it will pop right up. So some of you have maybe used this in the classroom with your students already. Um, hopefully it's like a good reminder to use it again this year. Some of you have maybe seen it floating around and just haven't actually put it into your plans. But I think this is such a great one to use, like right when you head back to school or mid-year when your kids need a pick-me-up or a reminder or whatever it is.

The Stolen Pearls Lesson Walkthrough

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So the activity is called the case of the stolen pearls. And I want you to imagine your classroom the moment that you say those words out loud. You come in, maybe you have a some of our teachers wear like a detective hat, they have like detective music or some things around the room to decorate or whatever. And you say to your students, class, you have been called upon to solve a mystery and watch what happens to the energy in that room. The kids who normally check out might sit up just a little bit more intrigued by what you just said. Our reluctant writers might be like not even thinking about being reluctant writers because nobody, and I mean nobody, well, I mean, I don't want to say like for sure, but most people cannot resist a good mystery. And this is such a good one. So the setup's great. So your students are given a short story about a detective who is called into River Falls High School, and the principal there, Mr. Alvarez, reported to the detective that his wife's pearl necklace has gone missing from the school safe. So he had put it there earlier in the day, planning to retrieve it before his anniversary dinner that evening. But then when he went to go get the necklace, it's gone. Well, there were three teachers who were on campus when the pearls disappeared and who would have known that they were in there. And now they are the suspects. So your student's job, obviously, is to figure out who did it. And the thing is, is that they have to prove it. They have to build a case, they need a claim, they need evidence directly from the story, and they also obviously need justification. Those two or three sentences that explain exactly how that evidence proves that their suspect that they chose is actually guilty. And if it sounds familiar, it should because that's what they're doing is building an essay, essentially, right? They're building a claim, they're supporting it with evidence, justifying that evidence. It is literally the same exact structure as a literary analysis essay. Except right now, it doesn't feel like that. It just feels like a mystery, it feels like a game. And that framing changes everything. So I want to walk you through how this actually runs in your classroom because the structure of this lesson is kind of part of why it works so well. So you're gonna start by passing out the story, and I want you to read it out loud together and the whole class reads together. So that whole class read sets everyone up with the same information, right? You can answer questions or whatever it might be, like clarify words or phrasing. And that is great for your writers and readers who aren't that strong because no one is left out if they can't access the text independently. So everyone's really working from the same foundation if you do that read together. After you read it together, you put your students into small groups, like three or four students, and you give them their mission, which is to figure out which teacher stole the pearls or which, yeah, I guess teacher stole the pearls. So you're gonna give them an evidence tracker, and this is essentially a graphic organizer that walks them through exactly what they need to do, right? They need to write their claim, which is I believe this teacher, whoever they chose, stole the pearls. Then they identify two premises, which is two reasons why they believe the suspect that they chose is guilty. And then for each premise, they have to find one piece of evidence from the story. And then they write two to three sentences of justification for each of those pieces of evidence, evidences, for each of those pieces of evidence and each premise explaining how that supports their reasoning. So they're really writing like a two-paragraph essay, essentially. Well, two-body paragraph essay, right? They're not really writing an introduction. And here is the secret sauce of this activity. The thing that makes this so effective as a writing lesson is that we give students a two-sentence justification framework right inside of the graphic organizer. So they're not staring at the blank space after their evidence, like trying to figure out how to do the justification or analysis or explanation, right? They have that structure, they have that model, they know what those sentences are supposed to do, and they're just filling in the content. And this is the skill that we are building, right? This might be training wheels for some of your students, and that is fine, right? If you're an eighth-grade teacher or ninth grade high school teacher, you might not need to have those sentences, right? And you can just edit them out. But a lot of our students do need those sentence starters and they need those training wheels, especially if we're going to do this at the beginning of the year. We notice that they're not doing a good job with justification. Why would we not give them that help if they actually need it? Because I just I only side note that because I see people saying things all the time on social media. I'm so sick of seeing students say, like, this proves. Well, sometimes they need to say that so that they have a way to like start their thought process and eventually we could teach them to remove right those sentence starters, but they're just training wheels for them. So I want you to maybe change your perspective on that. If that's something like you're kind of dug your heels in around, right? Um, okay, so they have the structure, right? They're just filling in the content. And those two sentences, the one that explains what the evidence means and why it matters and how it answers the prompt, right? That's what we call justification in the EBW approach. And once students learn how to write those two sentences in the context of a mystery where they actually care about like proving that they chose the right suspect, they can write them in an essay for the rest of the year. The skill really does start to transfer because it starts to make sense for them in their brain. So then once every group has finished their evidence tracker, they're gonna write up their case report. And this is my favorite part because a case report is essentially an argumentative paragraph. Like that is literally all it is. It is a structured, evidence-based, argumentative paragraph, but they don't really know that, right? It doesn't really feel like that to your students. It feels like they're detectives, they're filling out an official case report, and that framing alone makes them take it just more seriously. They want to write more carefully, they're having fun throughout the process. And then after the groups are done, you'll have a representative from each group share their case report out loud with the class. And then you can even keep like a running tally on your board of how many groups think it was teacher A, teacher B, how many think it was teacher C. And the anticipation builds because students are genuinely invested in like whose reasoning holds up. And then you actually reveal the culprit. So here's what I love about how this is set up. You are going to make it clear to students from the beginning that there is a correct answer and that you will tell them what it is, but that's not actually the point of the assignment. The point is the quality of their justification. So it is completely okay if they don't choose the right suspect as long as their evidence and justification are strong and logical, right? So a student who built a beautifully reasoned case for the wrong teacher is obviously far more impressive than a student who guessed correctly, but like really couldn't explain why. So this is a genuine lesson in what good writing actually looks like. And it's not about having the right answer, right? It's about building a convincing argument. And your students are actually gonna start to see that through this activity. They'll understand it in a way that like no amount of direct instruction about essay structure is gonna teach them because they learned it by actually doing it, right? By actually starting to integrate it.

Transfer To Essays And Next Steps

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And then the moment you absolutely do not want to skip is that you're going to tell them the truth about what you just did. You're gonna say, by the way, what you just wrote, that case report, that's an argumentative paragraph. That structure that you use of claim, premise, evidence, justification, that is the exact same framework that you're gonna use for any literary analysis essay, any literary analysis paragraph. And you already know how to do it. You just did it. And what's really cool is that something shifts because the story that they've been telling themselves, that like I'm not a good writer or writing is hard, or I don't know what to do, or I don't know how to start, or whatever it is, excuses that our students tell themselves, that story just kind of got disproved because they have evidence now, their own evidence actually, that they can do this, that they can build an argument, that they can justify their reasoning, right? They just wrote a paragraph that made sense and held together and made a case. So they are writers. And they just needed like a different angle in order to have that kind of revealed to them. So I think that's really neat. So this activity is incredibly versatile, which is another reason why I love it so much. Like I said, you can use it at the beginning of the year when you're introducing literary analysis writing for the first time. It is the perfect hook because it gets students excited about writing before they can like even start to fight you on it. But it also works mid-year if your students are already writing but their justification is weak and you really need to come back to it and give them that extra support. It's a really like fun low-stakes activity that targets that specific skill and rebuilds their confidence around it, right? So, either way, what I can promise you is that the day that this is in your plan book, you're gonna be excited to go to school. And that's a huge win. And your students are gonna feel that excitement and they're gonna be asking you after they do this, when can they do another lesson like that one? And that, when we're talking about writing, is a massive, massive win. So here's what I want you to do right now. I want you to go grab the free activity. It is available if you go to ebteacher.com forward slash pearls. It has everything that you need to teach it. If you're an eB teacher, just go into the portal and search pearls and resources. And then if you want to go even deeper on the EBW approach and how we teach writing here at EB, the full evidence-based writing framework that this activity is built on, make sure that you join my free three-day writing workshop. Go to ebteacher.com forward slash writing workshop. Wait, writing dash workshop. I'll put it in the show notes for you. And you can register for my free live workshop that starts July 21st. So it's where I'm gonna walk you through our whole system. I'm gonna give you things that you can implement it in your classroom with this fall. And it is just so much fun. We also give away a MacBook Air, which is a total bonus to joining. So I'm gonna put both of those links in the show notes for you. Make sure that you go grab them and I will see you back here for the next episode. All right, if you use this lesson with your students, please, please let me know. If you're not an EB teacher and not a part of our membership, send me a message on Instagram at EB Academics. I read our DMs and I will respond to you. Sometimes I even will send you like a voice message back because it is faster for me to talk than to type for anyone else. I use voice messages all the time with my friends. And then if you're an EB teacher, obviously post and share in the EB teacher community. All right, you guys, I will see you in a couple of days on the podcast. Bye, everyone.