Teaching Middle School ELA
Welcome to the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, where we are dedicated to helping English Language Arts teachers create dynamic and engaging lessons for their students, while also managing the day-to-day responsibilities that come with being a Middle School ELA teacher.
As educators ourselves, we understand the challenges of finding a work-life balance that allows us to pursue our passion for teaching while also enjoying our personal lives. That's why each Tuesday, hosts Caitlin Mitchell and Jessica Cannata share practical and innovative solutions for managing your workload and staying inspired in your teaching practice.
Whether you are looking for fresh ideas to inspire your students, strategies for improving your writing instruction, or tips for managing your time more effectively, this podcast is designed to provide you with the tools you need to thrive as a Middle School ELA teacher.
Join us each week for curriculum and lesson ideas, classroom stories, and interviews with fellow educators who are experts in the field. We believe that with the right support and resources, you can create a classroom environment that encourages students to become strong and passionate learners.
If you teach reading and writing to middle schoolers and want to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in ELA education, then this is the podcast for you! Tune in every week and let us help you make a difference in the lives of your students and in your own teaching career.
Teaching Middle School ELA
Episode 292: Summer Lesson Planning Series: Rethink Your Weekly Lesson Plans (And Ditch What You Learned in College)
On this episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, Caitlin, Jessica, and Megan have a candid conversation about the shortcomings they noticed collectively between their individual experiences earning their degrees or certifications in education. Their revelations unveil a large gap in learning happening for teachers prior to stepping into their classrooms. You'll hear that the single most impactful lesson they wish they had mastered before stepping into their first year as a classroom teacher is how to batch plan lessons rather than focusing on creating individual units in isolation.
This skill of creating a roadmap of standards for a larger span of time actually provides teachers with a guide to follow throughout the year so that their individual units or resources have intentionality and purpose that in turn guarantees actual student growth throughout the school year. Developing a long term plan (a.k.a. Batch Plans) allows teachers to avoid the cycle of jumping from boring textbook lessons to browsing endlessly online during their weekends or re-inventing entire units on their personal time.
When teachers avoid the cycle of planning day-to-day, they'll also avoid burnout! You'll walk away with new insights on the benefits of avoiding burnout; including keeping great teachers in the classroom supporting students for years to come! You don't want to miss this episode!
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:
Well, hello teachers. Welcome back to another episode. Today we are talking about rethinking your weekly lesson plans and to ditch what you learned in college. This episode was actually really interesting because it allowed the three of us to sit down and really have a conversation about some of the things that we wished our professors had taught us in our certification programs, in our master's programs, because, quite frankly, a lot of the times we left those education programs and weren't adequately prepared for what life actually looked like in the classroom. It was a lot of theory, a lot of concepts, not a lot of true. Get your hands dirty. This is how we teach. This is the things that we can do effectively to be great teachers in the classroom. So today we're going to share what we wished we had learned from our own professors before we became classroom teachers. That would have really had just a huge impact on our first few years as educators. All right, you guys, let's go ahead and dive into today's episode. Hi there ELA teachers.
Speaker 1: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. All right, everyone.
Speaker 1:This is episode six of our summer podcast series all about our EB batch planning approach. We've been doing this whole series because it makes sense to talk about batch planning in the summer this is when you can actually sit down and plan and have some time to think about how you want your year to go but also because we are officially launching our EV teachers ELA portal come July 18th. So mark your calendars for that, add your name to the priority list for that. I'll include the priority list in the show notes that link for you so you can add your name to that. And if your name is on the priority list, we're doing a special thing where the first 100 teachers to join us are going to get 50% off their very first month in the portal, which is so exciting.
Speaker 1:I mean just to be able to come check it out and mess around with our lesson planning software, like it's really really stinking cool. Not only the planning software, but like the fact that you're going to have access to our entire curriculum and it's now a core curriculum for middle school ELA teachers. We have a whole fifth grade scope and sequence, a sixth grade scope and sequence, a seventh grade scope and sequence, an eighth grade scope and sequence, all of which are also going to be loaded into the lesson planning software to make lesson planning even easier for you, plus an entire teacher PD library that covers every single skill to teach you how to effectively teach those skills to your students. I mean, it's just above and beyond. And that's only the teacher version of the app. We also have a student version of the app that's available for schools through our all access license. If you're interested in learning more about that, you can go to schoolsebacademicscom. But we have student benchmark assessments. We're able to provide student data, we have student facing videos all kinds of incredible stuff.
Speaker 1:So just been just a remarkable year of built building at EB and just innovation, which I think is just so neat to get to be a part of, like the forefront of like let's do things differently than we've always done in education, especially around lesson planning. Like why, why this hasn't been done before, I don't know, but I'm excited that we get to be a part of it with with our teachers. So that's coming out your name to the priority list, um, and hopefully you've learned a lot about lesson planning on our summer podcast series and today we're going to round everything out with rethinking your weekly lesson plans. So if your college classes actually taught you anything about lesson planning, you are one of the lucky few, because I don't know about you, megan, or you, jessica, but I certainly did not have a class about how to lesson plan effectively, did you guys? Nope.
Speaker 2:And I'm going to be honest, I think it's because professors were never taught how to affect a lesson plan right, so they're not going to teach it?
Speaker 1:Yep, I completely agree, and it's possible that, like you did have one big unit, like we had the uh gosh T, what was it called? You're talking about the methods classes.
Speaker 3:Well, we had to turn four different projects into the state of California.
Speaker 1:What were those projects called? Oh gosh, I don't even remember. There was a T in it somewhere, I think yeah.
Speaker 1:It's going to come to me like right when we're done with this, Um, and it was like it was one lesson that took like to create the one lesson, not even a unit. It was a lesson for some of these that took hours, if not days or weeks, to complete, and so it was like, okay, a one day unit or a two day unit that was planning for for the longest time, and I'm like this is not. This is not what it's like, Like this is not feasible.
Speaker 2:At least I hope not, right Right.
Speaker 1:Yes, and so what we want to talk about really is you know, in college, if you have a master's degree or you have your teaching credential, you probably had lots of conversations and classes about objectives or student learning outcomes or assessments, maybe differentiation or how to work with ELL students or special education students or just a variety of kind of more methods, classes and theory classes, as opposed to anything focused on lesson planning and like look, that is all important stuff, that's all extremely relevant and necessary for us to be great teachers, and none of us were probably actually taught how to effectively plan multiple lessons, multiple units, and so what we wanted to do on this podcast series was really kind of take the guesswork out of how to do a lesson planning in the way that we've always been taught. So we want to kind of turn things on its head. We want you to ditch what you learned in college, which is planning, you know, one unit at a time, and then you're back on the hamster wheel because now you're on the next unit and you're like, oh my gosh, I got to figure out what the next thing is that I'm going to teach, and it just really leaves you scattered as you jump from this textbook to teachers, pay teachers, to your file cabinet, to the copy machine, to your digital planner book and back and forth. It really feels chaotic as opposed to something that is structured, that is streamlined, that is proven, that makes sense. And so, whether you're in year three of teaching or year 32 of teaching, that same routine has maybe happened to you, where, each week, either at school, you know you're trying to cram it into your prep period of what you're going to do the next day, or, if you're, you know, at home, you have kids interrupting you every couple of minutes asking you if you can make dinner and they're hungry. You need to still lesson plan and grade.
Speaker 1:And, like, I don't know about you, but in my first couple of years teaching, I had to look up every single word and all of the texts that I was teaching, because I didn't know the definition of every single thing and I knew my students were going to ask me I'm teaching the scarlet letter?
Speaker 1:I'm like, oh my God, I don't even know what that over that. So over the last couple of episodes, we really aim to show you that there is absolutely just a different way to exist as a teacher, especially when it comes to lesson planning, because this is the one thing that you really have control over is how you choose to lesson plan, and what we've talked about is a way to plan that can leave you with not only the most aligned and effective lessons that you've ever planned, but it's also going to change your life outside of school. You're not going to be working on the weekends anymore. You're not going to be working at nights anymore. You can be the teacher who leaves school at three 30 and still gets the teacher of the year award, because you set yourself up for success, because you've learned this new skill that is integral to your success as a teacher.
Speaker 2:So here we are on episode six of this series. Right, like Caitlin said, and if you're still listening to it, like we're confident you're ready to jump on the batch planning bandwagon or enter your batch planning era, whatever you prefer. You're ready to have your units mapped out for the year. You're ready to be intentional with what you're teaching each month and your lessons are going to be organized to naturally increase in complexity. You're ready to plan out your lessons around all the major holidays, the field trips, the assemblies. You're feeling pretty good. So now let's fast forward a bit. Okay, you've taken action. You've created that scope and sequence for your year and, from a bird's eye view, that scope and sequence looks great. Your units are labeled, you've got your standards listed, that field trip is already penciled in. But now what? What should your plans look like on a weekly level? Well, each day should actually be pretty detailed, like as in what pages you're going to be reading in your novel, or what handouts you're going to complete, or what games your students are going to play. That's the stuff you want to see at a weekly level, right, because that's what you need to have ready on any given day. So each day is going to be organized by your into, your through and your beyond lessons, which we've gone over in previous episodes, and it's the last step of that batch planning process that we're actually going to explain today. That's where you get into the nitty gritty of writing out those daily plans for each week and, of course, we say this to all our EB teachers at every batch planning event that we do. Those daily lesson plans should have some built-in floating days. So literally, when you're planning out your units for your year, you're going to leave some days completely blank in your scope and sequence, like nothing. In there you can write floating day, and those are going to allow you to have some flexibility within each unit. So let's say your class is struggling with a concept in one of your three lessons that you're teaching and you're like, oh gosh, okay, I'm going to need an extra class period to go over this with them. Well, that's what a floating day is for. Or if, all of a sudden, you get an email from your principal and they're like surprise assembly, this Friday we need you in the auditorium at 2.15. You're like great, that's when I was gonna have my students write their essay. Well, no worries, you've got a floating day at the end of your unit, you're just gonna shift everything a day. It's no big deal, it doesn't really mess with anything.
Speaker 2:So I put this in our notes. But I do remember this actually happening to me, where I was like I'm so organized it was like my sixth or seventh year of teaching and I had my plans laid out. I was like ready and of course it was an ELA unit. And I checked my email that morning and literally it said I need everyone in our like I don't know what do we even call it. I guess it was an auditorium. You need everyone there. What was it? It was the MPB, the multi-purpose. Yes, it was Good call. That would have never came to me Be there at 1030.
Speaker 2:We got like some funding and this group is coming and they're giving an assembly, a presentation on whale songs Like I kid you, not whale songs and I'm like that's what I'm being interrupted for, like that's what we're going to go do in my classes, like what? But it's like, okay, all good, we went down there, we learned about whale songs and how they communicate, and then we came back upstairs and I wasn't stressed about my ELA stuff because I already had a floating day for my next week in my plan book and I just shifted it, whereas before I would have been like, oh my gosh, it's going to take me a half hour now to reorganize. What can I cut? What don't we need to do? How can I cram it in? Didn't need to do that anymore. So floating days are an absolute game changer when it comes to lesson planning. Literally leave days blank.
Speaker 3:I love that. I was just watching an episode of Abbott Elementary the other night and I can't remember the first grade teacher's name, but he was like planning this like super detailed, like scope and sequence, and there was like no wiggle room whatsoever and I like I'm sitting at home watching it and I'm like he needs some floating days. So a few weeks ago, when we actually started this whole series on batch planning, we talked about how you need to pick a designated time to just start mapping out your lessons. So you know, maybe you're going to attend batch planning live in August and it's super fun and we encourage you to do that. But maybe you're picking a weekend of your choice where you know your spouse is taking the kids and you have a whole day free to just start scoping out your whole year. Or if you're going to use our EB Teachers ELA portal, maybe it's just half an hour one night where everything is planned for you in seconds because we have this super cool software that's coming out. However you do it.
Speaker 3:Basically this part of batch planning is covering the first three steps. So the first step is creating your year-long scope and sequence. Second step is making sure you're using those standards as your North Star, and the third step is just determining your into through and beyond lessons using our EB lesson planning framework. But in this last step, which is step number four, this is where you're going to create weekly lesson plans that can be done quickly each week, whether that's maybe Thursday afternoon, like Jessica did each week, or Friday after school, like Caitlin did, or any other time that works for you. So basically, you're taking one hour or so each week where you look at your high-level scope and sequence from step number one and you see what activities you have planned for each day and then you break them down for the week.
Speaker 3:So here's an example If you're doing a short story unit next week and your scope and sequence says, okay, monday is anticipation stations, tuesday we're reading and annotating, wednesday we're doing a silent debate, thursday's evidence tracker and then Friday we're writing a response to literature, then you will spend an hour this week doing any prep work for those upcoming lessons. So you're gonna create and print out your anticipation stations. You're going to write up your silent debate questions so they're ready to be displayed around your room. You're going to make copies of your evidence tracker, your graphic organizers for writing your rubric. All of those things are going to be done for your week.
Speaker 2:So it's really like your time to familiarize yourself, or re-familiarize yourself, with the unit that you planned out in your original scope and sequence and make sure you're confident with the content right, your materials are prepared, you're excited to teach, you've looked up those words like Caitlin mentioned, like you're good to go.
Speaker 2:So this step of the batch planning process really doesn't have to take long. If your original scope and sequence is already mapped out. You're not spending any extra energy figuring out what you want to teach and searching for materials or lessons, because that's already done. When you sat down to batch plan, you already got organized. Now you're just skimming everything over once more, making the copies if you need to, and then you always just rinse and repeat this final step. So what you do is every Friday afternoon or every Thursday afternoon whatever works for you you go back to your scope and sequence, you look ahead for the next week or the next two weeks, if you want, and then you see what do I need to prepare, what do I need to organize, and it makes it so much faster.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I love too about the software that we're coming out with is that you're going to be able so I don't know about you guys, but I always had to turn in my lesson plans the week before. So, like by Friday end of day, I had to submit the following week's lesson plans to our principal, to Chris. We had to submit them at my most recent school. I had to submit them at my high school. I did not. That was not a very well run or well oiled machine, but that's okay. Um, and what's cool is that with the software is that you're going to be able to print out your plans really easily from what's already in the app. So you're not like moving things over to like a different thing, or you know what I mean Like it's going to be really simple to print them out and send the PDF off to your principal or whoever it is that you have to submit your lessons to. And the other thing that I was just thinking about too with the app is because we have developers who are building it for us. It's like there are always going to be improvements and iterations to it, right? So, like what we're coming out with this summer is what's called the MVP, the minimum viable product. What's the thing that needs to go to market in order to be start to start to be used by people so that we can start to get feedback on, okay, what other features do we need? What else do we need to put into it, what else is going to improve this experience, et cetera. So, like that's, the cool thing for me is that there's always going to be iterations and improvements to the app based on what are the features that users need in order to be able to plan more effectively, and so on and so forth. So that's just like just a little side note into like the inner workings of what goes on behind the build of a new software. So that's going to be really cool is to be able to print out your lesson plans and just submit those really easily to principal, because that's what I had to do every Friday, like that was a part of my checklist Make copies, give Chris your plans uh, plans for next week, you know organize your desk, throw things away Like I always just had that checklist on Friday to go through to set myself up for success on Monday, um, which I think is just so important to do, because then when you close your door, you close your door in your brain too and like that switch goes off and you don't think about school at all over the weekend. So hopefully this podcast series the summer podcast series has been super helpful for you guys. It's been fun for us to record Like I don't know about you two, but I've seriously enjoyed recording all of these episodes Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And next week we're going to be talking about just a cadence that we suggest that you use for fitting all of the things into your ELA class. So we know so many of you have to teach reading. You get to teach reading writing, grammar, vocabulary, maybe some of us even spelling, and it's really helpful to have a cadence in which you teach everything. So, again, it's like these frameworks. The frameworks make such a difference so that you know, okay, every Monday I teach writing, every Tuesday I do this, or however it is, that you choose to create that cadence for teaching all of the things that you get to cover in ELA. That's what next week's podcast episode is going to be about.
Speaker 1:So, while the summer podcast series on batch planning has officially ended and we've put a nice little bow on it, we're still talking about something that ties into planning. That's really going to help you and I think it's just a difference maker. So, again, just a reminder that our new EB teachers ELA portal is available to the public. For those of you who are on the priority list, starting July 18th, you get in before everybody else. You get a special 50% discount if you are one of the first 100 teachers to sign up. So make sure that you add your name to the priority list so that you can get the special link and the special time that we will be releasing those 100 spots, because I can guarantee you they are going to sell out within probably minutes of us releasing it, because we have so many people who are just as excited about the platform and the software as we are. So add your name to the priority list. That's included in the show notes where you are listening to this episode.
Speaker 1:And thank you guys so much for joining us for this podcast series all about lesson planning. We really hope that it has helped you, has gotten you excited about lesson planning and this one thing that look, at the end of the day, when you have a system that's working against you, this is the thing that you can control, and this is the thing that's going to have the biggest impact on freeing up white space in your brain and in your in your life to just really thrive as a human, so that you can be the best teacher and the best version of yourself and really just love the profession and not have it be something that just sucks the life out of you. So thank you guys so much for joining us and thank you, megan and Jessica, for being a part of the convo. It's been really fun. It has been fun.
Speaker 2:Bye everyone.
Speaker 1:We'll see you next week on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Bye.