Episode 438: Breakthroughs in Grammar Instruction: The 3 Must-Have Elements (Part 1)

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast episode, we're tackling one of the most common classroom frustrations: teaching grammar in a way that actually sticks. We discuss why students often forget grammar rules when it comes time to write and share a simple three-part framework that helps them understand, practice, and apply grammar with confidence. If you're looking for a more effective approach to grammar instruction this school year, this episode is for you.

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 📘 EB Grammar Program
https://www.ebteacher.com/grammar-program

Transcript

Why Grammar Breakthroughs Matter

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Well, hello, teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. I have a two-part series coming out for you now. Today I am airing part one, and next Tuesday I will air part two, and we are talking about breakthroughs in grammar instruction. So we are into the month of August, which I can't even believe. I just said that out loud. It has been a whirlwind. July happened in the blink of an eye. You know, the days are long, but the years are short. Isn't that true? I say that to myself all the time. So we are kicking off August together with a lot of grammar, back to school content because it's that time of year again. And maybe you're gearing up for the new school year, maybe you've already started, but either way, grammar, writing, batch planning, these are some of our favorite things to dig into on this podcast. And today I want to talk about the breakthroughs that you can have in your own grammar instruction. So there are three must-have elements that we believe in here at EB that are a part of our teaching philosophy. And I'm splitting this into a two-part series so that we can really dig in. So this week, part one, next week, part two, and let's dive in to 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 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.

The Real Classroom Grammar Struggles

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So the first thing I do is I want to talk to you about if any of this sounds familiar to you. And I ask that on purpose because I want you to know that I've been there, I feel your pain, I've been you, I've walked through that same exact frustration, and that's exactly why this podcast exists. So I can hand to you what I wish someone had handed to me. And I also know that this is what a lot of teachers are struggling with because we survey our teachers all the time and we ask them, what are you struggling with? How can we help you? And these are some of the things that we hear when it comes to teaching grammar. So this might sound like your grammar classroom. You might be teaching parts of speech to your eighth graders in March, and you're sitting there thinking to yourself, you should have learned this in first grade, right? Or second grade. I just did common nouns with my son in second grade and adjectives and adverbs. And it's like maybe they've learned it every single year and it just doesn't stick, right? Or maybe you're teaching seventh grade and you are still trying to get your students to put a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence and an N mark at the close of it. Between texting and however students communicate online now, I don't even know. Even the basics that we assume are a given just aren't happening for a lot of our students. Or maybe you're teaching common nouns, right? And your students have no idea what a common noun is, no idea what a pronoun is, not a clue. And the frustrating part is you've been hitting these exact concepts with them daily, right? Maybe you do it during bell work or warm-ups or all year long, and it feels like you've gotten absolutely nowhere. And I could keep going, right? And maybe you've asked your class which type of word adds description to a verb, and someone confidently says adjective, and you want to scream because you just said it's in the name, right? It adds to the verb. And you try to stay calm, but it's like, bro, we are ridiculously tired of seeing all of these issues when it comes to grammar. And yes, I'm gonna say bro, and that's okay if you're gonna judge me. It's part of my vernacular here in my house with my eight-year-old son is a single mom.

Why Teaching Grammar Feels So Hard

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And one thing that I want to talk about is like, why is grammar instruction so genuinely hard? Like, we sat with this question here at EB, and really, like as a team, what is it that actually makes grammar instruction such a pain for us? And here's what we landed on as a staff. So, first of all, there's the terminology, right? Adverb, preposition, gerund, verbal. To a middle middle schooler, those are basically a foreign language, right? Like it's it's whole jargon in and of itself. And then we have tricky pairs, right? We have effect versus effect or who versus whom. And English grammar really was developed out of a mashup of all of these other languages. And while it's a beautiful thing linguistically, it also means our grammar is full of rules and sometimes seemingly completely arbitrary rules that a 13-year-old is like, what? And just telling them to memorize it doesn't actually help anyone understand why. And so that's a problem. But then we also struggle with getting students to care. Most 12, 14-year-olds would rather be doing literally anything else than sitting there through a lesson on subject verb agreement. They are asking themselves, am I ever gonna use this? Why does this even matter? So when they don't care and they see no value in what we're doing, there's a problem. And then we have grading, right? You know, the feeling of working through a stack of essays and you are just like circling every single thing, it's it's just too much. Here's what's interesting though. I taught high school first before I came into middle school, and we really didn't teach grammar at that level. Or if we were supposed to, I definitely didn't. So don't tell anybody. It was in my first two or three years of teaching, I was still figuring out what I was doing. So to be honest, grammar just really wasn't a part of my middle or my high school classroom with juniors when I was started teaching that first year. And then I moved down into middle school, and my principal handed me a grammar textbook, and I remember thinking to myself, oh SH, you know what? I'm like, I gotta teach grammar. What the heck am I supposed to do with this? So I at 27 years old or however old I was at that point, like 40 now, which is crazy that that was so many years ago. But I had to relearn what a direct object was. I had to relearn what an indirect object was. When in my adult life, even as an English teacher, had I ever consciously used those terms? Never. I knew how to write, I knew how to speak properly, partly because I grew up with a mom who was a teacher and a grammar who was a teacher. And if I ever said me and my friends, my mom or grandma would be like, you and whom? And I'd say me and my friends, you and whom? My friends and I, right? And it was a whole thing in my household. And all that to say, grammar is just genuinely hard to teach well. It's not you, it's not that you're bad at this. It's that grammar instruction, done the way most of us were trained to do it, was never built to actually help our students. So here's what years and years and years of teaching experience taught our team at EB and what we put together. So between the years that I spent in the classroom myself and the work that I've now done alongside my with my staff, we have over, I don't even know, a hundred some odd years of combined teaching experience. We've worked with thousands of middle school ELA teachers. We started asking a different question. Not how do I get through this unit, but what are the actual breakthroughs? Like what are the difference makers when it comes to grammar instruction that sticks? And we at EB landed on three pillars.

Three Pillars That Make Grammar Stick

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And these three pillars eventually came, became what we call the EB Grammar framework. And if you've spent any time in our world, you know that frameworks are basically our love language. And if you want to see the full framework in action and you're an eB teacher, this is all in the eB grammar program. If you're not an EB teacher and you want to be a part of our membership, you can go to eBteacher.com forward slash portal. Um, and I don't know when we're opening registration next, so just put your name on the priority list so that you get an email when we do. But for today, I want to walk you through the structure of it because when you focus on these three pillars together, your grammar instruction becomes effective. And this is the important part, the concepts actually stick with your students beyond the end of unit test. Here's the trap so many of us fall into. We teach something, it doesn't get applied, we teach something else, they forget, we teach it again, it still doesn't land. But when we combine all three pillars, we break that cycle. Your students start to become confident, skilled writers who naturally apply grammar rules without you having to drag it out of them. And as an added bonus, it actually becomes enjoyable to teach, even if you don't like grammar, right? So it stops being this extra task that you're squeezing into an already impossible 37-minute class period or whatever the heck that you have. So the three pillars of the EB grammar framework are direct instruction, fun, hands-on practice, and then application to writing. So I want to talk about why you need all three of these. None of them work in isolation. It's like this ridiculous unicorn combination of things that individually sound too good to be true, right? Direct instruction or hands-on practice or application writing doesn't work. But together, they actually deliver. So if we only relied on direct instruction, which means standing up in front and lecturing on grammar rules, students hate it. Some of us love it because we're grammar gurus, right? But let's be honest, our students probably hate that. It doesn't stick, right? Direct instruction is is, it is genuinely important for understanding the rules. And grammar has to be addressed across listening, speaking, reading, and writing, but on its own, direct instruction does not give students enough opportunity to actually practice with that knowledge. You can teach a flawless lesson, they can ace the quiz the next day, and then they sit down to write their essay, and none of it transfers. That gap is exactly why so many of us feel like grammar instruction isn't working, even though we feel like we're quote unquote doing everything right. Okay. That's where pillar number two comes in. And this is fun hands-on practice. So at EB, we bring in games and hands-on activities to really create engagement, kinesthetic learning for our students to those grammar lessons that are sometimes boring, right? They hook our students on a topic that would otherwise put them straight to sleep. So think about teaching verbals. Would your students rather sit through a lecture and then fill out a worksheet? Or would they rather get into Teams for a fast, competitive review game? Right? They'd rather do the review game. But this is important, you can't just play games all day. Right? In real life, students aren't sitting around playing grammar games. The grammar game's intent and purpose is to help solidify the concept, but they need that direct instruction underneath that, or there's nothing to actually apply. Now, I want to be honest about something because it frustrates me every time I see this trend. The idea that we can just throw out direct instruction entirely in favor of mentor sentences or just games. And I experienced this firsthand the year that I taught fifth grade math, right? This was a subject that I'd never taught before. And we're now teaching fifth grade math through common core, which is not the way that I learned math a hundred years ago, right? So standing up there trying to teach it, I remember thinking to myself, oh my God, this is just like grammar. I could not hand my students a math problem and say, go emulate this and call that teaching. That is not instruction. For a while, there was this real push and education toward removing the teacher as the state sage on the stage, which I get, but when we swing all the way to one extreme, we stop actually serving the outcome we're after, right? Both things have to coexist together. So I think about math. We teach them the concept, the rules, we give them examples, and then they go practice with it. Grammar should be the same. We can't just give them mentor sentences and call it a day. Identify the verb. No, we got to teach them what a verb is first. I feel very passionately about this. Sorry for getting intense. So if you are working, especially with true beginners or your students who are really struggling, keep in mind that jumping straight into fast-paced games or straight into mentor sentences is just, it's just not gonna stick. They need that extra scaffolding to get their footing before we can practice with games. We have to have that direct instruction. That direct instruction is so important. So we have direct instruction as a first step, hands-on games as a second, and then the third piece is application to writing. So, what does it actually look like to take these concepts and get them into a student's essay? So if you are thinking about squeezing a grammar lesson into the middle of a big essay set assignment, I want to warn you that for beginning writers especially, that is a disaster waiting to happen. It's simply not realistic to have students dropped an essay on Wednesday, get a grammar lesson on sentence types Thursday, and then expect flawless application by Friday. That's not how our brains work. It's not how our students are going to succeed. And honestly, it's probably not how it would work for us as adults either if we were the ones learning something brand new under that kind of time pressure. So, how a student, or how is a student rather, supposed to correctly punctuate a compound complex sentence while they're still struggling to find solid evidence and write a solid justification. It's simply too much competing information for the same mental bandwidth at once. So the sequence matters. Direct instruction, then games, then specific application to writing. And here's the piece that people most often miss. Those games that you're doing with your students, they don't just exist inside of that one unit on pronouns that you did when you first introduced the concept. We're gonna pull those games back out again and again throughout the year. If you noticed students slipping on punctuation in March, go pull that punctuation game back out, run it again. Just like anything that is worth building, the fundamentals stick when you return to them again and again and again, not when you cover them once and move on. Like think about going to the gym. We tend to assume that doing a hundred different things will get us the results that we want, but it's actually the boring, consistent repetition of the same exercises over time that creates real change. The same thing with our students and grammar is true. It's not glamorous, right? But it is what works. So when we are doing this application to writing, we want to make sure that our students have not only had direct instruction, they've had at least two days of practice with the hands-on games. And then we're gonna apply only one teeny tiny little thing in application to writing to a maybe low, uh, what's the word I'm looking for? Um, gosh, I can't think of it. Low, not low impact. It's not gonna come to me. Low stress isn't the word, but you get what I'm saying. Low risk, not what I'm thinking of either. Um, something that uh is a writing assignment that doesn't hold a ton of weight, where they can practice applying that particular grammar skill into what it is that you are teaching. You guys are probably telling me exactly what it is, but I can't hear you because you're listening to a podcast episode. Okay, so where this leaves you, let's wrap things up.

The Yearlong Rhythm And Next Steps

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When you commit to weaving these three things together, direct instruction, hands-on practice, consistent application to writing, but not as three separate things, but as an ongoing rhythm throughout your school year, that is when you start to see real breakthroughs, right? Your students stop treating grammar like an isolated lesson that they forget the second the exit ticket is turned in, right? You start to feel confident, maybe even a little excited to teach grammar because you're not piecing something together from an old file cabinet or an old textbook or an old workbook or whatever you found on TPT at midnight, right? You're working from a foundation that is reliable, a framework that you trust. And that peace of mind matters far more than people give it credit for. It is the difference between spending your mental energy wondering, is this even gonna land? What do I even teach next? And simply following a proven sequence because you already know that it works. So next week we're gonna break down each of these three pillars in real detail, what direct instruction actually looks like in a 47-minute class period, what hands-on practice can look like even with minimal prep, and exactly how to weave application into the writing that your students are already doing. So I really want you to be able to picture this in your own classroom by the end of part two so you can start experiencing these breakthroughs for yourself and for your students that they can finally have the kind of grammar year that actually sticks. All right, if you are an EB teacher, this is all a part of the EB Grammar program inside of the portal. If you are not and you want to be an EB teacher, I'm not sure when I'm opening up registration again, but add your name to the priority list so that you can find out whenever I decide that that is and we can make that happen. Go to ebteacher.com forward slash portal and add your name to the priority list. All right, you guys, I will see you next week on the podcast. We are heading into part two of this series. Bye, everyone.