Episode 440: Breakthroughs in Grammar Instruction: The 3 Must-Have Elements (Part 2)

In today's Teaching Middle School ELA podcast episode, Grammar shouldn’t live on a worksheet and die on a quiz. We want middle school writers who can actually use conventions, sentence structure, and punctuation to communicate clearly, with purpose, and for a real audience. That’s what drives this part two breakdown of our grammar mini-series: practical, classroom-ready moves that make grammar transfer into student writing. 

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Transcript

Why Grammar Must Transfer To Writing

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. We are here in August, and like I mentioned last week, we are talking a lot about grammar and a little bit of back to school content this time of year. Last week I gave you part one of this mini-series, which was the three must-have elements for real breakthroughs in your grammar instruction. If you haven't listened to that one yet, go find that episode first because today is going to build directly on it. Part one is going to give you the foundation that you need before we dig into today's episode. So if you haven't listened yet, go back and listen to last week's and then come back and listen to this one. So this is part two of our little mini-series on getting real breakthroughs and grammar instruction because we want the kind where your students are actually applying what they learn in their writing, not just memorizing it for a quiz and then forgetting that it exists. Because at the end of the day, the entire purpose of grammar is to help our students communicate better. So if it's not making its way into their writing, then what are we even doing, right? So last week I introduced the three pillars. We talked about effective direct instruction, engaging, hands-on games, and then application to writing. So today I'm going to break down each one in detail so you can actually picture what this looks like in your own classroom. And I will say this up front, everything that I'm going to walk you through is exactly how we've built out our EB grammar program inside of our EB Teachers ELA portal, which is our membership as well as our curriculum where we work with schools and districts. So if you are not a member of that program yet, you can go to ebteacher.com forward slash portal and add your name to the priority list. And if you are an eB teacher, this is what the EB Grammar Framework is built on. So this should help you implement everything that you have access to as a member of the portal. 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.

Pillar One Direct Instruction Done Right

SPEAKER_00 2:57

Okay, so let's dive into pillar number one. So pillar number one is direct instruction, and direct instruction really has three different components within it. So we want to make it interactive, we want to make sure that we scaffold the learning, and we also want to connect it to real life. So we'll start with the first one, which is making it interactive. A lot of the times I think that we revert back to direct instruction, really just being this one-way street, right? A lot of us grew up with the concept of the sage on the stage model as kids in the classroom. We talked a little bit about that before. And instead, we want to really invite students to participate, to ask questions, to build in interactive note-taking. So we found that it's incredibly effective when students aren't just listening to you explain a concept or trying to take notes in a blank workbook or notebook rather, but that they're actively taking guided notes alongside your direct instruction. So we actually set this up exactly that way inside of our EV grammar program, where students are actively listening for keywords that they fill in their guided notes, kind of like Mad Lib style as you teach. And what I love about this is because one of my biggest struggles when I was in the classroom was that when I was teaching a concept and I'm writing it all on the board, I'm saying something important out loud, and I'm thinking I'm getting it into my students' heads or into their notes at least, but half of my students completely missed what I was saying. So not only do they not have the notes in their notes to be able to reference, they're not even getting the concept at all from the start, which defeats the entire purpose of direct instruction. We also want to take into consideration that not every student is a strong note taker. Yes, we want to teach them this skill. Yes, we want them to become strong note takers because strong note-taking is very important for life. Although with AI note-taking nowadays, we don't really even need to take notes anymore. Oh my God, we're not even using our brains for that. Um, but what I love about this is that the Mad Lib style kind of guided notes structure gives every single student in your classroom a scaffold, which matters a lot once students move into practicing the concept independently or even applying it inside of their writing assignment because they need to be able to come back to the correct, complete information. And if we don't have that in their notes with guided notes, then they're totally missing the boat. So we want to make it interactive with those guided notes. The Mad lib style is great. We also want to scaffold the learning for our students in the direct instruction. So grammar can be very overwhelming. We talked a lot about that last week. So it's essential to really break these complex concepts into smaller, more digestible pieces. So that looks like starting with the basics and then gradually increasing the difficulty as students build confidence. So let me tell you what this looks like.

Scaffold Skills Without Starting Over

SPEAKER_00 5:55

Here's something that I want you to actually do this week. I want you to go pull up your grammar standards for your grade level, whatever set you're working from, whether that's Common Core, Ortiques, Florida Best, whichever one applies to, which honestly don't even get me started on how many different versions we now have, kind of defeats the whole purpose of the Common Core standards that we originally came out with, but that's a rabbit hole for another day. When you actually sit down and you read your grade level standards closely, you will see that they build on each other year to year, right? Sixth grade leads into seventh grade, leads into eighth grade. And when you use the standards as your north star, you're gonna see that scaffolding your grammar instruction becomes so much more manageable. Because a lot of us think that we have to start over from the beginning, that when we go back to school this time of year, that we have to start completely over with nouns and pronouns and verbs and all of that stuff, and then slowly work our way back up to gerunds and verbals and the more difficult grammar concepts come January or February or whatever it might be. Well, that's not actually what the standards ask of us, and it's not the approach that we take at EB. Something that is important is yes, the foundational knowledge matters, right? Students do need to know what a noun, a pronoun, all of that stuff is. But there's a smarter way to build that in than starting from scratch every single year. So, two things that you should consider or can consider doing. Number one is a back to school overview lesson on the basics. So we're talking about starting the school year with parts of speech. We have some great activities that are focused on parts of speech. I think there's like an arcade lesson here. Actually, let me go look it up inside of the portal really fast. So if you are an EV teacher, depending on your membership level, um, let me type in uh what did I just say? Parts of speech. Yeah, so we have a parts of speech arcade unit, a parts of speech splash bash unit, a parts of speech bootcamp, a parts of speech state fair. We also have a parts of speech pool party unit. We have so many different units inside of the portal that you could use if you are an E B teachers portal member. And that is a great, you know, couple days unit, three or four days that you're gonna do with your students that are the foundations before you head into the school year. So that's one thing that you want to consider doing. Well, the second thing is that you wanna consider before teaching a unit on a more complex topic, like let's say verbals to your eighth graders. Your eighth graders might need a refresher on verbs first before you get into verbals. So you gradually build back up to that, right? We're gonna do verbs as a reminder and then verbals. So students actually have like the footing to understand that this that distinction. So that's exactly what we teach our teachers to do is before diving into verbals, you want to circle back to verbs first every single time because setting, um rather skipping that foundation is gonna set everyone up to struggle later. So two different ways that we can scaffold the learning for our students, despite our standards not even covering our basic parts

Standard English And Dialects In Context

SPEAKER_00 9:08

of speech. So last but not least with direct instruction is we really want to connect it to real life, right? Beyond giving students relevant examples, it's important to talk to our students about why using standard grammar in their writing actually matters. And I want to pause on the word standard here because depending on where you live, you and your students likely speak a non-standard dialect of English. And that dialect is there's nothing wrong with it, right? In California, I actually got someone said something on um our three-day writing workshop this July because I use the phrase you guys a lot. It's a California dialect thing, and I don't even realize that I'm saying it. And the teacher in the comment section was upset with me for saying that. And, you know, our team had a whole conversation about it. And I think that it's important to understand the distinction of these dialects because it's part of the riches of language, right? We're not asking our students to abandon their speaking, right? They're speaking their non-standard English, right? We're simply adding standard English as a tool that helps them communicate clearly with a wider audience. And I want to bring this back to my personal experience that I had when I studied abroad in Italy when I was 20, when I was in college. So when I was studying Italian, I was taught proper standard Italian. And what was interesting is when I'd go speak standard Italian in Rome, half the time people couldn't figure out what I was saying, or I couldn't figure out what they were saying because they spoke Roman Italian. They spoke, they spoke a dialect of Italian, right? And if I went somewhere else in the country, there's a completely different dialect again. So everyone could like kind of understand me because I was using the standard form, but I couldn't understand them because they were speaking their regional dialect back to me, especially if they didn't have standard Italian, right? So that's a great real world example of exactly what standard English does for our students, is it's the version that's understood broadly, even while their own dialect stays exactly as valid as it always has been, right? We're not trying to take away from any of their dialect that they use, right? We are adding to their understanding and expanding their ability to communicate with a wider audience. And it's even, I mean, interesting in in parts of California, right, we're so different. So I want you to give students real examples of where standard English is expected. Job applications, maybe in interviews, maybe in business communications, maybe in academic writing, legal documents. Everywhere the written word shows up, you want to make sure that your students can have these conversations about this. That, you know, do we want to use standard English here? Or would we use our dialect here? And what's appropriate? And giving students the ability to move back and forth between and amongst the different dialects that we have, right? Um, so I love this because I think it's really important for our students to see firsthand that providing them with standard English is helping their future self in some capacity. Because at this point, almost all communication is written. It's it's wild how often we are using written standard English to communicate in some capacity. So that's pillar number one is direct instruction that has three layers to it of making it interactive, scaffolding the learning, and then connecting it to

Pillar Two Games That Reinforce Grammar

SPEAKER_00 12:58

real life. Okay, pillar number two is fun, hands-on games. So grammar games are incredibly powerful. They are a great tool for reinforcing skills in your classroom. So if you're not already playing games in your classroom, I really want to encourage you to try it this year because games can make learning genuinely enjoyable for our students. Not only that, but they help keep our students focused. That hands-on element helps concepts also stick in a way that a worksheet is never going to manage to do. And students also are going to remember the experience of like physically working through a concept, and that memory is gonna carry over into how they apply it in their own writing. So students are gonna remember that they played steps and slides to work on active and passive voice when they're 20, right? They're gonna remember playing that game, but they're not gonna remember the worksheet that they did. So I think it's just really important that we incorporate games where we can in something like this because it can be so redundant and boring and not do anything for actually helping our students remember these concepts if we're just doing worksheets all the time. The other thing I love about games is that games make differentiation so much easier, which is something that we all know matters, but we also know that differentiation can be extremely hard to execute on a consistent basis. So, what you can do with the games is you can offer a simpler version for some of your students and a more complex one for other students. So you can have them play in pairs, you can have them play in small groups. And a game gives students immediate feedback, right? They instantly see whether they actually understand a concept, and that tells you as the teacher whether they're ready to move toward the next step, which is application to writing, whether they need to play these games again, or whether you really need to go back to the drawing board and go all the way back to direct instruction before you can continue moving forward. So it's really flexible and responsive teaching when we are using grammar games in our classrooms.

Two Simple Games You Can Use

SPEAKER_00 15:02

I want to give you two games that you can use in your own classroom. And if you're an EB teacher, just know that all of the standards have an EB grammar game, two different ones, actually, three different ones that go with it, all in the portal. So don't overlook those. Make sure that you use them with your students. The first one that I want to share with you is called Close the Gate. And so this is that dot game where you put all the dots on a piece of paper and you connect the dots using lines to try to make boxes and you put your initial inside of the box that you close. Hopefully you know what I'm talking about. Um, and so basically it's the same concept, but in this situation, students have to answer a grammar question correctly in order to draw a line that connects the dots. Like that's the only difference. And so this is great because you can pull questions straight from your grammar workbook, you hand out a simple dot grid, and that's it. You can even have Chat GBT or Claude or whatever AI tool you're using nowadays to come up with more questions if your grammar workbook doesn't have enough. The second one is tic-tac-toe. Easy peasy. Take a turn. A player has to correctly answer a grammar question and then identify it in a sentence or fix a grammar error or whatever it might be. Again, your workbook has the questions ready, or you can generate more with chat or with AI. And it's literally that simple. So it's tic-tac-toe, but they can't play until they get the question correct. So easy, right? Such a fun way to incorporate a different way to play grammar games than some complex thing. Okay, so pillar number two is games. Pillar three is now application

Pillar Three Apply Grammar In Writing

SPEAKER_00 16:38

to writing. And this is likely the whole reason that we are even teaching grammar in the first place is that we want students to take what they've learned and apply it seamlessly into their own writing. Yes, it's great when a student aces a grammar quiz, but the real test of learning grammar happens in their actual written work. So I want you to picture this. You've done your direction instruction, you've played your games until students are confident with that particular skill, and they've shown mastery on a simple exit ticket. Well, now they're ready to actually apply that skill into their writing. So at EBE, we teach our teachers to focus on one skill or maybe a small handful of skills at a time, whatever is realistic for where your students are. And we want to have our students apply that skill to their next writing piece. So for example, once students understand types of sentences, we're gonna hold them accountable for correctly punctuating dependent clauses in their writing. If they're not quite there yet to, let's say, dependent clauses, we can have them simply highlight an independent clause or two independent clauses in their writing. So this is a great way to differentiate for our students and give them a more attainable way to show that they understand the concept in practice. And this is where at EB, our application to writing checklist becomes so useful. So we have an application to writing checklist for every grammar skill, and we hand ask our teachers to hand this out before any writing assignment, whether that's a literary analysis essay, a personal narrative, maybe they're just writing a small paragraph response, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. But after we've taught a grammar concept, we're going to hand out an application to writing checklist that is focused just on that specific concept. And the application to writing checklist is laid out in three columns. So on the left is the focus skill. Let's say that we're using conjunctions. Then in the middle is a quick writing check that students can run their draft through, whatever writing piece they're producing. And it might have a checklist that says, like, coordinating conjunctions are used correctly in my writing, and they're writing check. So instead of looking for all the grammar concepts, they're only looking for coordinating conjunctions or subordinate conjunctions or whatever it might be. So students go back into their essay or to their paragraph and they check themselves against each prompt in that middle column. Then we have a right-hand column, and that is what we call the challenge column. And so this is an optional stretch goal for our students. So the checklist in this case might say use and underline three coordinating conjunctions and two subordinating conjunctions in your writing. So now we're making sure that students have more than the ability to just identify it, but they are using and underlining a variety of these skills in their writing. And so this builds in differentiation pretty much automatically, right? One student might be working from the writing check column in the middle, and another from the challenge column on the right hand side. And neither one has to know that they're working at a different level. You can simply circle what each student needs to focus on. So if you don't have the resource inside of the EB grammar program as a member, if you're not a member of our membership, you can absolutely build your own version of this. But the key is consistency. You want to give an application writing checklist out before every single writing assignment that is focused on the grammar skill that you just taught. So that way students aren't, you know, naturally expected to think, oh, I gotta make sure that I'm using commas correctly or subordinating conjunctions correctly or whatever it might be. The standard of the application writing checklist, rather, is going to guide them toward what we want them to focus

Reflect On Impact And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 20:36

on. Okay, so bringing it all together, at the end of the day, it is the combination of all three pillars: direct instruction, engaging games, and application to writing that creates that real transformation in grammar for our students in our classrooms. It's not just in how you personally approach teaching grammar, but it's in how your students learn it, right? How they're actually going to use it in your classroom. So I'd encourage you to take some time this week to reflect honestly, right? Is what I'm doing currently for grammar actually making an impact? Is it actually moving the needle? Am I seeing it show up in my students' writing? Because the real measure isn't if a student can pass a multiple choice test on verbals, right? What matters is that they can use verbals correctly in their own writing to communicate effectively. Because at the end of the day, like that is the goalpost is effective communication. Period, end of story. Not being able to identify a gerund, but the fact that we can communicate effectively. So if you want all this already built for you, right, you can find the full eB grammar program inside of our membership. If you go to ebteacher.com forward slash portal, you can add your name to the priority list for when we open up registration again to the public. All right. Next week I have Genevieve, our membership manager, back on the podcast. We already recorded this episode and it is a fabulous episode. I'm going to invite you to listen to it. This is five easy ways to use EB with her district mandated curriculum. So she's giving you specific examples of how she utilizes EB that are very small adaptations that you can make if you have a district mandated curriculum and you are trying to weave in as much EB as possible. All right, everybody, have a wonderful rest of your day, and I will see you next week on the podcast. Bye, everyone.