On this episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, we're taking a deep dive into the core of our ELA lessons which we call "Through Lessons"! These lessons are the "meat and potatoes" of our lesson planning recipe meaning they are made up of rigorous activities that allow students multiple opportunities to practice their skills in an engaging way! You'll learn the components of a "Through" lesson and our tips for creating your own to cover multiple skills! We'll also take a moment to share how the EB Teachers' ELA Portal is making this entire process practically seamless and efficient! (We're talking lesson plans and activities ready to go in minutes!)
This episode is sure to leave you ready to get a head start on your lesson plans for the fall!
FREE RESOURCE: Curious about trying Batch Planning this summer? Simply click the link below to grab our 10 Tips to Get Started Batch Planning and take a look at how easy it can be to begin!
Batch Planning is the ONE thing you can do now that will have the biggest impact on your entire school year!
BIG NEWS: The EB Teachers' ELA Portal will officially be open for enrollment this summer! If having access to ALL of the items below sounds helpful to you, then we invite you to take a quick moment to add your name to our priority list today! Are you ready for:
Hundreds of ready-to-go ELA lessons
A robust Core ELA Curriculum that includes reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary covering all of the ELA standards
Innovative digital lesson planning software
Hours of on-demand PD videos
A community of thousands of supportive ELA teachers from around the world
Pretty incredible, right? Click the link below to add your name to the priority list today:
On this episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, we're taking a deep dive into the core of our ELA lessons which we call "Through Lessons"! These lessons are the "meat and potatoes" of our lesson planning recipe meaning they are made up of rigorous activities that allow students multiple opportunities to practice their skills in an engaging way! You'll learn the components of a "Through" lesson and our tips for creating your own to cover multiple skills! We'll also take a moment to share how the EB Teachers' ELA Portal is making this entire process practically seamless and efficient! (We're talking lesson plans and activities ready to go in minutes!)
This episode is sure to leave you ready to get a head start on your lesson plans for the fall!
FREE RESOURCE: Curious about trying Batch Planning this summer? Simply click the link below to grab our 10 Tips to Get Started Batch Planning and take a look at how easy it can be to begin!
Batch Planning is the ONE thing you can do now that will have the biggest impact on your entire school year!
BIG NEWS: The EB Teachers' ELA Portal will officially be open for enrollment this summer! If having access to ALL of the items below sounds helpful to you, then we invite you to take a quick moment to add your name to our priority list today! Are you ready for:
Hundreds of ready-to-go ELA lessons
A robust Core ELA Curriculum that includes reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary covering all of the ELA standards
Innovative digital lesson planning software
Hours of on-demand PD videos
A community of thousands of supportive ELA teachers from around the world
Pretty incredible, right? Click the link below to add your name to the priority list today:
All right, everybody, welcome back. This is episode four of our six-part series on our EB batch planning framework. It's like our summer podcast series, all about planning, which we just love here at EB very much, so much, in fact, that we wrote a book about it. So the last few weeks we've been talking about our EB batch planning framework and really the magnitude of the game changer that it is in terms of mapping out effective standards, aligned lessons yes that. And also freeing up so much of your time during the school year, not just like your physical time, but like your mental white space and the time that you're spending thinking about teaching, so that you can really thrive as a teacher. I mean, we don't want great teachers leaving the profession. We want you to stay in the profession but love the job right and not be like miserable trying to make it to the end of retirement Right.
Speaker 1:
And frankly, you know it's 2024, which is crazy in and of itself. Can I just tell you, as we talk about like the fact that it's 2024, I on Friday was working out with one of the college students, came back from college and I'm working out with him and my trainer and I'm like how old are you? Oh God, he's 19. I am twice his age and I know 38 isn't even old, like I don't feel old by any means, but I'm just like, oh my God, I'm twice. I'm almost 20 years older than this 19 year old.
Speaker 2:
The fact that it's 2024 is wild to me and that, like yesterday, was 2019.
Speaker 1:
I mean, is wild to me and that, like yesterday, was 2019. I mean, I'm just like I know, I know the collective time warp that.
Speaker 1:
COVID did to all of us. So it's 2024, right? There is absolutely no reason that you should still be planning Like you did when you first started teaching. There is no reason to be giving up your Sundays or your evenings to painstakingly plan your next unit. And that's why we have our EB batch planning framework and that's also why you know we've really been sharing about our EB teachers ELA portal, because this portal is an app, it's a software in conjunction with our curriculum, with the whole goal of cutting your lesson planning time from hours each week into a matters of seconds. So, basically, the way that the lesson planning software works and what I told our developers and I've shared this before on the podcast is, I said, if it takes a teacher eight hours to plan a semester, I want to take that eight hours and make it happen in a matter of minutes. How do we do that? And that's exactly what we set out to do and that's what we're talking about. It's 2024. Like, the technology exists. That's why we've created this to make lesson planning so much faster.
Speaker 1:
We've taken, like, the hard parts of teaching and made it easier for you so that you can just focus on being a great teacher, you know and also being a great person outside of the classroom, doing the things that you love outside of school. So that's all the things that we're talking about in this summer podcast series. So last week we got into the framework within the framework. So we have our EB batch planning framework, but then within that framework, we also have what we call the into, through and beyond framework, and last week was all about the into part, the into lessons, the into part of that framework. Well, today we're going to walk you through the through portion. So if you haven't had a chance to listen to last week's and the two other episodes that aired before that in June, I would highly suggest you go back through those and listen to them in sequential order because they build upon each other.
Speaker 1:
So, while you can learn to create your own through lessons, you can a hundred percent do this on your own. It really is going to be so much easier for you and faster literally, like I said, seconds, ultimately minutes when you use a software that does all of the heavy lifting for you, and that's that portal that I'm talking about, or EB teachers ELA portal. So I'm actually going to share the link for the priority list, cause that's coming out like soon like two and a half weeks, maybe three weeks, from when this episode airs as to when you'll be able to get access to that, some of our EB teachers are already in their beta testing the software and it's just really cool to see it happening in action. So we're gonna talk to you about through lessons and you can totally create these on your own, but if you don't have to like, why would you Just let us do the work for you, right? So, jessica, let's dive into what through lessons are, let's talk about this, let's provide examples, et cetera.
Speaker 2:
Let's do it Okay. So through lessons, like Caitlin said, I think, in the last episode, actually that they're like the heart of your unit. This is where your students get multiple opportunities to practice the standards as they continue to interact with whatever text you're reading. So these lessons in particular should be planned with the end goal in mind. Whatever your students will be doing to wrap up the whole unit whether it's writing an essay, doing a presentation, whatever that may be the through lesson should be building up to that, setting them up for success.
Speaker 2:
Through lessons are multiple class periods, multiple lessons, and they immediately follow the into lesson, like we talked about on last week's episode. So, like I said, there's typically multiple through lessons. It can be a rigorous activity. It can be reading the pages of the story and annotating it. It can be answering text-dependent questions, doing some research, prepping for a group project, creating a model, playing a game, preparing for a mock trial, participating in a Socratic seminar, doing an escape room, like there are so many different options for through lesson and you might be doing a combination of those throughout a particular unit.
Speaker 2:
And going back to our example about the short story for the lottery that we've been walking you through, let's say you want your students to wrap up that unit by writing a literary analysis essay. So you know that's the end goal. Then what you're going to do is you're going to plan out your through lessons. You're going to ask yourself what skills do my students need to practice in order to confidently, to successfully write that text-dependent essay for the lottery? So, like you know your essential question for that essay what can I do to get my students ready for that?
Speaker 3:
And I love this because it's backwards planning and it's best right.
Speaker 3:
You're already thinking about how you're assessing students and you're building that, building them up to that assessment, which is great. So if your students are going to be writing an essay, let's say, about the three most compelling details in Shirley Jackson's story excuse me that contribute to the reader's shock at its conclusion then students will need to practice finding evidence from the text as well as analyzing details in the story that may contribute to the reader's shock. So any through lessons that you're planning should cover these skills, again building them up to that final essay. Here's the process for planning your through lessons. Then, keep in mind that it may take multiple class periods to provide students with the lessons necessary for them to feel really successful when they go to write that final essay. For example, if you are planning a novel unit instead of this you know fake short story unit on the lottery, your through lessons might actually take weeks and include days where your students are actually reading the novel right, but let's go back to the lottery. So, just like you did with the into lesson, you're going to choose the standards that you're covering for your through lessons. And again, the lessons students complete in this phase should ideally be scaffolding their end of unit assessment, which in this case is an essay. So each lesson you plan may cover one particular standard or you might address multiple standards.
Speaker 3:
But since in this unit students are writing a text-dependent essay, to wrap everything up, your standards are going to focus on citing textual evidence and argumentative writing.
Speaker 3:
So you want to know to Jessica's point, you want to know that essential question or that writing prompt that your students are going to be answering in that final essay. It's going to help you plan better and if they know that essential question at the beginning, it's going to help them think through their reading and their writing better. Then you'll start planning multiple lessons. That supports students' mastery of these particular standards. And since you already know your writing prompt for the student's final essay, your through lessons will align to that question. I always like to think of the essential question as like your guide through the unit. So, for example, one of your through lessons will be to read and annotate the lottery. As you read, you could have students note instances of foreshadowing and suspense, because this is going to come in handy when they go to write their final essay and they need to include evidence from the text showing how Shirley Jackson described details that lead to your ultimate shock at the conclusion of the story.
Speaker 2:
And I think it's important to note here, like probably that essay that students are working on that's going to focus on writing standards, right, and maybe some finding relevant text evidence standards, but those probably aren't the only standards you're going to cover throughout the whole unit. So you have probably been gathering other standards that you want to cover as you're sitting down to map out your scope and sequence. So let's say you're like okay, one of the other standards I need to cover or I want to cover with this unit is something to do with characters, right, it's a character-driven activity that I need. I want to hit that standards. So that might make sense to have another through lesson for that particular standard. So you might, for example, to make it really engaging for your students, have them do an interview with some of the characters in the story there's Mrs Hutchinson and there's Mr Summers and you could give them some open-ended critical thinking questions. Or, if your students are ready for it, they can come up with the questions themselves. Like you know, does the lottery tradition ever alienate members of your community? And then they could take turns answering it. They could present it to the class. Now you're tying in speaking and listening standards, right, so it's really just important to think about. What other standards do I wanna cover that? Yes, maybe aren't perfectly aligned with that final essay students are doing, but it's still gonna help them understand the text better so that they are just way more prepared when it comes to finding the evidence for that final essay.
Speaker 2:
I hope that makes sense and you'll see, with this interview activity right, students can support their inferred answers with evidence from the text. So it's giving them that practice again, helping them be set up for success. So I just wanted to point that out. So once you've determined your through lessons, you've got them all ready, you pencil them into your scope and sequence. You might want to prep your handouts or at least kind of like get them started and you're ready to go. Then you're ready for the beyond lesson and I, caitlin, I would hope you would speak into just a second again about the new platform and preparing the through lessons, cause, like we said, this can take a lot of time if you're doing it yourself. So how, as a teacher, does it help me if I'm using our software?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, absolutely so well. The curriculum team already wrote all you guys have already written all of the three lessons. You've written all of the curriculum, right? So that makes it a whole heck of a lot easier. So essentially, I think I explained this on last week's podcast episode, but there are two sections or two views basically of the planner, of the scope and sequence. So there's the scope and sequence version where you can see, like at a high level overview glance, that the lottery is going to cover from, you know, may 2nd to May 18th, and it blocks out those dates on my scope and sequence calendar. So, kind of like if you were looking at a Google calendar, you would see that like that part of your reading unit is blocked out for the lottery, right.
Speaker 1:
And like I literally press something and it just like yeah, so like if you're, if your unit starts on May 2nd, you would like click on May 2nd, that like box, basically that is in the column for. So think of it like Google sheets. So like your column is your subject. So it's like reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, and you can add as many columns as you want to or don't want to, depending on how many subjects that you teach. Or if you're a fifth grade teacher and you teach social studies, you could have your column for social studies there, et cetera. So you have your column for reading and I would go to my column for reading and I would click on May 2nd and a modal it's like a pop-up window will pop up and it'll ask me when I want that unit to end. So if I'm picking the unit to start May 2nd and I just pick the date May 20th for it to end and then I type in the lottery into this box that pops up and the system will pull our lottery unit and drop it into that modal. So the system knows that, like, this unit that EB has created from their curriculum ties into this particular planning block Are you following what I'm saying? And then it'll also pull in all of the skills. So, like, all of the skills that have been tagged, that are like the main skills for that unit, are going to show up so you can see like, oh, I'm covering these particular skills, or you know standards if you need to, whatever, and so then you'll click save and it saves it to that section of your scope and sequence.
Speaker 1:
But then when you go to the weekly view of the planner, the weekly view is going to speak to the scope and sequence view. Are you following what I'm saying? And it will pull in for, like my eighth grade class, it'll show me the lottery is for those particular dates that I'd selected and it'll break it up into. However, the scope and sequence is planned on our part. Okay, so cool. Does that make sense? Yes, okay, it's hard to describe it without, like showing it to you. Do you know what I mean?
Speaker 1:
But hopefully I'm just picturing the magic happening and I'm like, oh, like this seems silly, but like you can change the colors too, Like the developers and they showed us that originally, I was like you guys, it's really ugly but you know we as teachers, we know it.
Speaker 2:
It's fun to do the stickers and the colors we like that you want to enjoy what you're looking at and teaching for 180 days.
Speaker 1:
It's so funny. They're like we know that they're like that's a really easy change. They're like what really matters are the data structures. The amount of times that I heard the word data structures and the amount of times that they're like well, the data structures make that really difficult. I'm like I don't care about the data structures. I'm like you just got to figure out how to do this and they do. They're amazing and they do and they're the best. I mean, they just like they. They put up big I can't hide what I'm thinking so like they can see the look on my face sometimes and they're like but we can change the colors, don't worry.
Speaker 1:
It's really cool and I'm really excited to start to get it into the hands of more teachers as we start to roll it out to more teachers. So yeah, so if your name is not on the priority list for our new EB teachers ELA portal, get your name on the priority list, if anything, just for this software that we're developing, let alone the fact that you have an entire middle school ELA curriculum at your fingertips that we've created, and we also are building out a teacher PD video library. So, like, every single skill is going to have a video that teaches you how to teach that particular skill to your students in your class and explains it further for you. So, like, our whole goal is to just make teaching as enjoyable for you as possible. Um, all right, so that's the through lessons. Next week we're going to go back to the EB lesson planning framework, which is the into, through and beyond, and we're going to finish everything out with the beyond lesson. So make sure that you guys join us for that.
Speaker 1:
Um, we have, I think, one other episode after that as a part of this six-part series and that's talking about rethinking your weekly lesson plans. So we've been talking about our EB batch planning framework. We talked about the scope and sequence, the standards. This is now the framework within the framework of the Into, through and Beyond, and then that last episode it'll be episode two 92 is all about rethinking your weekly lesson plans. That's also a part of our EB batch planning framework. So hopefully we see you guys next week on the podcast. If this has been helpful for you, please share with another middle school ELA teacher so that they can start to adopt this way of thinking and this framework into their planning as well. All right, thanks so much for joining us this week and we'll see you next week on the podcast. Bye, everyone.