Episode 434: Increase Students Writing Scores in 30 Minutes or Less

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast episode, we're diving into one of the biggest challenges middle school ELA teachers face: finding enough time to teach writing without spending hours grading. We'll explore why these two struggles are actually connected and share two practical strategies to help students become stronger writers while making your writing instruction more consistent, efficient, and easier to manage. If you're ready to spend less time reteaching and more time seeing real growth, this episode is for you. 

Want to take the next step? Join our FREE Writing Workshop this August and discover a proven writing framework you can start using in your classroom right away:

👉 https://www.ebteacher.com/writing-workshop

Transcript

Welcome And EB Academics Mission

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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.

The 30 Minute Writing Promise

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Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. Today we are talking about increasing your students' writing scores in 30 minutes or less. And I love this episode's title, and I love what I'm gonna talk to you about because it is going to be such a game changer in your classroom. Now, I want to start today's episode with two different scenarios, and I want you to listen carefully because one of them, or maybe both of them, might sound like your

Two Painful Writing Day Scenarios

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life. So here's scenario number one. It's writing day in your classroom. You're going step by step with your students, you're walking them through how to add the header, the title, the intro paragraph, you're reminding them to indent. You're talking about punctuation, you're walking around the room, you check their screens or their papers, you correct as you go. And after all of that, right, after doing it all together in class with you right there, you look around and half your students don't have anything close to what they're supposed to have on their paper. And you think to yourself, at this rate, getting through a full essay is going to take days. And you are already dreading the next writing unit before you've even finished this one. That is far too common in way too many classrooms. And I'm not going to go off on a tangent on this, but my students wrote their in-class essays at the end of a big unit in a 50-minute class period. Piece of paper, book, question, go. No electronics, no computers, no multi-day writing the essay in class and at home, none of that. All-timed writing in my classroom. And it made a huge difference in my students' growth. Maybe we can talk about that on another episode. That's scenario number one. Scenario number two, it's now Sunday afternoon. You sit down with this stack of 34, 32, 27, however many students you have, text-dependent essays on the outsiders. And within the very first few papers, it might even be the first one, you already know that this is gonna suck. There are no in-text citations. There's some evidence, but there's no introduction of the evidence. There's no justification anywhere in sight. They're not answering the prompt. There's punctuation errors, spelling errors, capitalization errors, things that you know you reviewed with them. And you're sitting here thinking one of three things. Either your students didn't pay attention, or they didn't care, or, and this is the one that really stings and is not the one I want us to come back to. Or maybe you are thinking that I'm just not good at teaching essay writing. Because if I were, wouldn't they have gotten it by now? Oof, I hate that one. Because then what happens is you spiral. Maybe I wasn't clear enough. But why didn't any of them come to me for help? Not a single student asked for extra support. No one came to me outside to talk about their paper outside of class, right? Maybe, maybe I need to go over this again. Maybe it's just gonna take them, or maybe these students can't learn. I sure hope you don't say that. And if you listen to this episode, you probably don't, if we're being honest, right? Neither of those scenarios are good ones. And if either of them made you nod or you felt it a little bit in your body, then this episode is gonna help you. And the next episode that I'm dropping a little bit later is gonna help you too. But today I'm gonna talk about in under 30 minutes two strategies that you can use that are going to make those two scenarios a thing of the past. Not someday, not after a year of overhauling your entire curriculum, but like this school year with students in your classroom that you with time that you already have that you're already dedicating to writing. Okay.

Free Three Day Writing Workshop Invite

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Now, before I dive into this, I do want to invite you. I'm doing one more writing workshop. Our July writing workshop was so well received, we got so many requests to do a second one. So if you go to eBTeacher.com forward slash writing dash workshop, I'm hosting one more before we head back to school. It's a three-day writing workshop, and I'm gonna give you all kinds of resources, examples, go into this more in depth with you, visuals to share, all of that type of stuff. And it's gonna be extraordinarily helpful if you still struggle with writing. Even if you're a current eB teacher and you're a member of our community, you may want to come to this as well.

Survey Results Time And Grading

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Okay, here's something that kind of prompted this episode. We recently surveyed, and I've talked about this before on the podcast, over nearly 500 middle school ELA teachers. There are 481 responses. And we asked, what is your biggest struggle when it comes to writing instruction? And the number one answer by a significant margin was time. Almost one in four teachers said that they simply don't have enough time to teach writing the way that they want to. The second biggest struggle was grading. The mountain of papers that takes up your entire Sunday and still leaves you feeling like their writing is not improving. And here's what I want you to notice about those two answers. They feel like separate problems, but they're actually the same problem, just showing up differently. When you don't have a system, when writing instruction doesn't have a clear, consistent, repeatable structure, everything takes longer. You reteach from scratch with every single writing assignment. You conference individually because students have all different questions about all different things. And the essays come back all over the place because there was no shared framework that your students were using. And then as a result, grading takes forever because you are now responding to chaos as opposed to responding to a framework. So the two strategies that I'm sharing today fix both of those problems at the same time, and they're so easy and you're gonna love it.

Strategy One Use One Writing Framework

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Okay, so strategy number one, and I will say this and take this to the grave until I'm blue in the face. You have to be using a proven writing framework, and you need to apply it to every single writing assignment, every single one. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I talk about our EBW approach. EBW stands for evidence-based writing, and I talk about it constantly. I talk about it on our YouTube channel, I talk about it with our EV teachers, and there's a reason for that. The heart of the EBW framework consists of four things: you have claim, premise, evidence, and justification. A student's position in response to a prompt and then how they back it up with evidence and explain why that evidence actually matters is the reason for this framework. It gives them clear language to use when responding to a prompt. So that structure, claim, premise, evidence, justification needs to become so deeply ingrained in your students and in you that it's used automatically in your classroom. Not because you reminded them, not because it's on the rubric, but because it's simply how they write. It's simply how they think. It's a part of who they are as students in your classroom. So even though the EBW approach is an evidence-based writing approach, it's really a thinking framework for our students. Because here's the thing: for that to happen, for it to become like a part of who they are and what they do, students need to be using this framework far more than just once or twice or even four times a year when they're writing big essays. They need to be using it weekly, dare I say, even daily. Whether they're writing a full literary analysis essay, a shortened written response to an informational text, or even just a structured activity where they've practiced finding and citing relevant evidence from the text, the framework needs to show up consistently. Like it is the backbone of your entire reading and writing curriculum, week after week after week. Because here's what repetition does that one-off assignments never can. When students use the same structure repeatedly, they stop spending their mental energy on how to write the essay and they start spending it on what they actually want to say. So the structure becomes automatic, right? It's like driving to work that you've done a hundred times. You don't even have to think about it anymore. Sometimes you don't even remember how you ended up there, right? Because you're thinking about other things. And it's the same thing with our students. They just write because their brain is free to think about other things because they have this structure. Claim, premise, evidence, justification, right? That is what we want for your writers. We want the framework to become so familiar that when they sit down to write, they're not just staring at a blank page trying to remember what comes first. They already know. And so they can focus on building a stronger argument, finding better evidence, crafting more sophisticated justification sentences. The structure becomes the foundation, not the hurdle that they have to jump over to even get started writing. And practically speaking, this is what ends that Sunday grading spiral, right? When every essay is built on the same framework, you, as a teacher, have a shared language for your feedback. You're not trying to decode like 34 completely different approaches to structuring an essay. You know exactly what you're looking for. And so the grading gets faster, the feedback gets cleaner, and the next essay gets better because students understand what they're being evaluated on and you understand what you are evaluating students on.

Why Repetition Makes Better Writers

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Strategy number two, you're gonna integrate the EBW framework into every single thing that you do, not just writing assignments. And this is the strategy that I think is the most underutilized and the most powerful. So I really want you to sit with this one and seriously consider how you're gonna bring it into your classroom. What happens is that most teachers think about writing instruction as this like separate activity. It's what you do during your writing unit or during your writing time. It's the essay assignment, it's the writing workshop day. And everything else, the discussions about the text, the activities, the seminars, the silent debates, that all is viewed as separate. But what if it wasn't separate? What if every single thing that you did in your ELA classroom was actually consistently building the same skills your students need to write a great essay? Here's what I mean: the components of the EBW framework, making a claim, supporting it with evidence from the text, justifying your reasoning, those are not just writing skills. Like I said, they are thinking skills. They are discussion skills. They are skills that show up every time a student opens their mouth to participate in your class, if you require them to. Small group discussions, whole class discussions, Socratic seminars, silent debates, one pagers, graphic essays, think pair share, speed debates, class games. I could go on and on and on. Every single one of those is an opportunity for students to practice building an argument with evidence, but it's all without the pressure and high stakes of a formal essay. And when they do that, when claim, premise, evidence, justification becomes the language of your entire classroom, not just your writing assignments, but your whole classroom, something remarkable starts to happen. Students stop seeing writing as this separate, scary, high-stakes thing that only happens at the end of a writing unit. They start seeing it as an extension of something that they do every single day. Because it is. The essay is just the formal version of what they've been practicing all day long, day after day, week after week in your classroom. So therefore, their writing improves because they're essentially writing every single day, just not always in essay form, just not always in a written paragraph form. And when the formal assignment comes around, they're not starting from zero. They're reaching for the foundational skills that is already practiced, that they already are familiar with, that they can build on top of. And this is gonna make your grading exponentially easier because you're able to give real-time feedback during these class discussions. You don't have to have your students write a paragraph a day

Strategy Two Make Framework The Culture

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that you have to grade or look at or read. That's not happening. It's happening informally in a verbal speaking and listening capacity in your classroom. So those are your two strategies. Use a proven framework for every single writing assignment and integrate that framework structure into everything else you do in your classroom. And you rinse and repeat it and you do it consistently all year long. When those two things happen together, when the framework is both the structure of the essay and the culture of the classroom, your students' writing success becomes inevitable. And I don't use that word lightly. I have watched it happen way too many times to say it any other way. Now, today's episode was all about the why behind these two strategies. The Thursday episode or the next episode is all about the how. So I'm gonna walk you through two specific low prep activities that you can bring right into your classroom that put both of these strategies into action immediately. So make sure that you're subscribed and that you're waiting in high anticipation for that next episode that we'll be airing. And again, make sure that you come to my three-day writing workshop where I go into this even further. You can see all of this in action. Go to ebteacher.com forward slash writing workshop. It is our last free live workshop of the summer, and it's gonna be the best experience you do all summer long. All right, the link to that is in the show notes, and I will see you guys on the next episode of the podcast. Bye, everyone.