Teaching Middle School ELA

Episode 291: Summer Lesson Planning Series: Taking it to the Next Level: Designing Effective "Beyond" Lessons

• Caitlin Mitchell • Episode 291

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Throughout this summer podcast series, we've taken a deep dive into the EB Batch Planning Framework as well as the 3 types of lessons every single ELA unit should include being both rigorous and engaging. If you need a quick refresher, be sure to pop back a few episodes to catch up!

In this episode, we break down the third and final type of lesson we call "BEYOND" lessons. It's within these lessons that students get authentic opportunities to apply their knowledge and challenge themselves! You'll be tempted to think of these lessons as assessments, but we discuss engaging ways you can turn these lessons into more than just a pen-and-paper assessment. At the end of the day, a quality beyond lesson is really a chance for your students to showcase what they've learned in various ways.

We also encourage you to ask "Chat GPT" for a list of fun assessment ideas on the days that you feel overwhelmed or stuck looking for fresh ideas. AI is not going away, and it's going to be a great tool for us as educators to utilize in the years to come.

To wrap up this episode, Caitlin and Jessica, take a moment to share how incredibly easy and accessible the EB Teachers' ELA Portal makes utilizing the Into, Through, Beyond framework in each of your ELA Lessons. From providing next-level ELA units to accessing scope and sequences built into the platform, you'll find your planning process will take far less time and your instructional quality will skyrocket! (Not to mention, your students will actually have fun while they're learning! Win-win!)

Tune in today and walk away fully prepared to use this framework with your own ELA lessons!

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!

https://www.ebteacher.com/free-10-tips-for-Batch-Planning

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:

https://www.ebteacher.com/ebtc-priority-list

Speaker 1:

Hey there, teachers. Today we are continuing our summer podcast series with the final type of lesson that every ELA unit should include. These lessons are often the exciting opportunities for your students to really showcase what they've learned in a creative way. So we call these lessons the beyond lessons, because they should stretch your students beyond just a pencil and paper test and truly challenge the application of their learning. All right, you are going to love these lessons. Let's go ahead and dive into today's episode.

Speaker 1:

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. Welcome back, everybody.

Speaker 1:

We are on now episode five of what we are dubbing our summer podcast series, all about our EV batch planning framework. It is the thing in order to make teaching more enjoyable for you, easier for you, better for you. I mean, if you're not batch planning, I don't even know what you are doing with your life, because it is the best thing in the entire world. So if you haven't listened to the last four episodes on the podcast, we started airing this series at the beginning of June. So head back to that first episode that aired at the very beginning of June to kind of get up to speed with what we've been talking about on the podcast here.

Speaker 1:

So the last two weeks, though before this episode, we've been talking about our framework within the framework. So we have our EB batch planning framework that has four steps to it, but then we also have a framework within that. That's our lesson planning framework, and that lesson planning framework includes the into, through and beyond lessons and these are all a part of step three of our EB batch planning process. So, in case you missed it, step one is creating a general scope and sequence. This is like think big picture, you're just penciling in unit titles. Then step two is determining your standards and step three is actually mapping out those standards, aligned lessons for each unit, using the Into, through and Beyond framework. So absolutely check out the last few episodes, starting at episode 287. It's all going to make so much more sense to you, but today we are diving into the Beyond lesson of any unit and just coming to hand it over to you to get us started. Perfect.

Speaker 2:

So the Beyond lesson is typically an assessment of sorts. It's your opportunity for your students to showcase, like, what they've learned throughout all the through lessons, showing off their mastery of the standards. And just like the into lesson, just like the through lessons, your beyond lesson should absolutely be rooted in the standards. It's our way of being intentional. So I want to give you some examples of activities that you might find in a beyond lesson, and usually this is like one class period, maybe two depending. But it might be a literary analysis essay that your students are writing, or a final exam that they take. It could be a presentation that students have been working on over the past few days, or even weeks, and now they're going to present it to the class. It could be a student-created video, it could be something else, it could be a combination of those things. So there's lots of flexibility here, but the important thing to remember is students are showing off what they've learned. So what does planning out a Beyond lesson actually look like? Well, first, of course, you're going to choose the standard that your assessment will address. So over the last few weeks, we've been talking about our hypothetical short story unit for the lottery, and Megan, I think, shared this last week, like what if your students did a literary analysis essay, right, an RTL as we call it at EB? So we're going to go with that.

Speaker 2:

So, knowing that that's what students are going to be working on, your standards are likely going to include a writing standard all about writing arguments to support claims with clear and relevant evidence. Right, it's like one of the most, I feel, like, well-used standards. So that standard in particular, and all its substandards, you know if you're familiar with Common Core, they lend themselves perfectly to an evidence-based essay. So you find those standards, you kind of jot them down, you know that that's your focus. And once you know that that's the standard that you're going to cover and how your students are going to demonstrate mastery of that right in their text-dependent essay, then you come up with your writing prompt or your essential question for that essay.

Speaker 2:

And I want to point out here that, even though we're talking about coming up with this question now, because we're talking about beyond lessons, ideally you want to actually determine this question before anything else in your unit, because if you listened last week when we were talking about the through lessons, all your through lessons are building up to this. So of course you want to give your students opportunities to practice whatever it is you're assessing them on in the last week activity, the beyond lesson. So that's why we say, like, come up with your question before the unit even begins. That way it drives all the activities that you create throughout the entire unit. I hope that makes sense.

Speaker 3:

It does. So let's get back to the lottery. So since students, in order to show that they've met or exceeded that standard that you've chosen, will have to find logical evidence to support their claim, it's critical that the question you create be text dependent. So here's an example of a strong, essential question that you could steal and use for your own unit on the lottery. So in her short story, the Lottery, shirley Jackson describes a particularly violent tradition that takes place in a seemingly cordial village. Identify the three most compelling details that Jackson includes in her description that contribute to the reader's shock at the conclusion of the story. Be sure to include evidence from the text to support your reasoning. So we've been kind of on this theme for the last few episodes of how lesson planning should look and feel different in 2024, right, and this is just another example of that. So if you're not utilizing AI to help you come up with essential questions and writing prompts, you're definitely missing out, because they help you create these and kind of cut down on the amount of time you're spending really using brain power to think about these essential questions and you can use them to help differentiate for students. So that's a pretty lengthy, essential question you might be able to scaffold that and use AI to help you for students. So that's a pretty lengthy, essential question. You might be able to scaffold that and use AI to help you do that. So once you've determined your essential question, pencil that beyond lesson into your scope and sequence Remember that's what you did in step one of the batch planning process and then you're going to estimate how many class periods this beyond lesson might take.

Speaker 3:

So if you're teaching eighth graders, like I did, and this lesson is going to be done at the end of the year in May, it might be very reasonable to expect students to complete an in-class text-dependent essay in just one class period. And in fact that's what I did with my eighth graders all year and I said that from the beginning and they just knew that that's how a class was going to roll. If you're teaching sixth graders, they might struggle a little bit more with writing. So this same beyond lesson may take two class periods. Maybe you're taking one class period to review the writing prompt and for students to kind of outline their evidence, and then you're taking the second class period for them to actually write the essay. So, finally, you're going to prep any handout or any other materials you need for this lesson, and in this case it might be, you know, a writing graphic organizer, a standard aligned rubric that's going to help your students kind of pace through that essay.

Speaker 1:

All right. So that is a complete short story unit, right, planned out using the into, through and beyond framework. So you had your popcorn predictions activity at the beginning for the into lesson and then we talked about through lessons last week on the podcast and that would be your beyond activity and you can choose, like Jessica said, a variety of different beyond activities as well. This is just one simple example and this is just one, though of many units that need to be planned for the year, right? So this is what you would work through for all of your other units throughout the course of your school year. Well, so if you're batch planning, you can rinse and repeat right, you can rinse and repeat a lot of these different concepts. So you'll then move on to, okay, your next piece of literature or your next ELA topic. Then you'll go find the standards that you need to cover, you'll start figuring out the into, through and beyond lessons and you'll plug all of those into your scope and sequence and, like I talked about on some previous podcast episodes, like, that's why our EB teacher planner, like our physical planner that we created, is built with the scope and sequence at the beginning of the planner, because that makes sense for planning. I think I said this on a couple episodes ago. Like a planner is great, but a planner is not going to solve your problems. Right, knowing how to effectively plan is going to solve your planning problems and that's exactly why we put this podcast series together. But that's also why we created our EB Teachers ELA portal with our new lesson planning software is to make all of this so much faster and easier. And in fact, at the end of last week's episode, jessica, you asked me to describe like how the whole thing works and I walked you guys through like how we like from step one of the scope and sequence part of the app works with then breaking it down into your weekly lessons. If you didn't go listen to the end of last week's episode and you want to learn more about how the app works, go listen to that and you'll start to kind of visualize how the app is going to make planning just so much faster for you guys. And I'm so excited.

Speaker 1:

Like to build, and it's one thing to like come up with an idea. It's another thing to like build the software to make that idea real. Like it's just I just remember sitting with the developers and being like is this possible? And they're like, literally anything is possible. It's just a matter of time, effort, energy and money. And how much it's going to cost to build. And like if I told you guys what the build of this costs, like you might die. Like my mom was like, oh, was it like $5,000? I'm like that would be nice. Like not even close to that. You know, well worth it. Well worth it.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and one of the things that I will say about this that I am most proud of of going into this app is Jessica. You and I know just over the years just how like it's a worry. We own a business, right, we own a company. We have 16 employees, we have salaries and all of these expenses that we pay for every day to make sure that this company exists in the world. And Jessica and I I just want to give kudos to us We've always done a really good job of making sure that we protect the cashflow of the business, so that not having enough money to pay for the things that we want to do is never a problem, because I've never wanted to have an investor come in and invest in the company to then dictate what we do and don't get to do Right.

Speaker 1:

And that was what one of our teachers asked when I was sharing about the new software, which is like oh, I hope you guys don't ever get too big. And my response to that was that's exactly why we are a small, female owned and operated business is because we know what's best for teachers and I don't ever want to have to answer to somebody who only cares about making money back on their investment. Making money back on their investment, right, um, so it. This is. The build of the app is has been a huge financial risk for the business and it is 1000% worth it because it is so remarkable in it's just what's the word like? Innovation of what it's going to be able to do for teachers in the classroom. You know, and like right now we're building it through the lens for middle school English teachers. Like imagine what's possible when we can bring that to all teachers and bring lesson planning. It gives me goosebumps.

Speaker 1:

It's like changing things. It's exciting Totally and to get to be like a part of that, together with thousands of other teachers who are part of this mission too, like it's just such a mission and impact driven, like purpose that we get to do. And yeah, it's like a lesson planning software, but it's not. It's like what the lesson planning software does for people, right? So, anyways, if you didn't listen to the end of last week's episode, go listen to it. I explained how the software works.

Speaker 1:

Um, so some important things to keep in mind for this step of the batch planning process, of the Into, through and Beyond, as we kind of wrap up today's episode. When choosing the order of your units, you want to keep in mind the complexity of the texts your students will be reading and the tasks involved. This is really important. So one unit might be better suited for May, and that might be because at the end of the year your students are more proficient at various standards, while another unit is going to work better at the beginning of the year, when these are like new standards they've never seen before, been introduced to before. So, for example, you might teach House on Mango Street at the beginning of the year in eighth grade because it's a short text, they're easy vignettes to cover themes of personal growth, self-discovery. That's a very appropriate unit as you get to know your students at the beginning of the year, whereas something else might be reserved and better suited for the end of the year, when your students have more knowledge. You know them better. You've created a safer, more psychologically safe learning environment as you've gotten to create class culture over the course of the school year. So remember, before planning, you want to consider your assessments right, this beyond lesson, how you're going to assess students' knowledge, so that all of your through lessons align with that end in mind. So once you decide what that beyond lesson will be an essay, a test, a project, all of those then you can start planning activities and lessons that are going to set your students up for success for that assessment.

Speaker 1:

So next week on the podcast, we are rounding out our summer podcast series, all about our EB batch planning framework and we are moving into now kind of like your weekly lesson plans. So we've been talking about things from like a unit view, from a scope and sequence, high level overview. Well, now we're going to move more granularly into your weekly plans and we're going to ditch some of the stuff that you may have learned in college. So we're going to invite you to just kind of rethink the way that you've always done things. So definitely make sure that you join us for next week's episode and, if your name is not yet on the priority list for our EB teachers ELA portal, make sure that you get your name on the list, because you are going to be able to join the portal earlier than everybody else, and that's going to be like very soon.

Speaker 1:

So, like June, july we're talking about July like 18th, 19th. So mark your calendars for those two days and be on the lookout in your emails. If you were on the name, your, if your name, rather, is on the priority list, because you are going to get, obviously, priority list access and a super special discount for your first month in the portal by adding your name to the priority list. So that is definitely worth it to at least come check out the app and see what it's all about. All right, you guys, we'll see you next week on the podcast and thanks so much for joining us today. Bye, everybody, bye.