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 293: Not Enough Time in Your Class Period? Listen to This
On this episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast, Caitlin focuses on best practices to actually "fit it all in" when planning your ELA lessons this year. She prefaces this episode with a message about the variations in class time length we often see across middle schools. Some ELA teachers have 40-minute class periods to work around while others might find themselves with 90-minute blocks to fill. No matter what situation you find yourself in, it is important to walk into planning your ELA lessons with a positive outlook for what is possible and motivation to simply do the best you can with the time you've been given.
As you listen you'll learn key strategies to make any class length work for you and your students in a way that actually supports student growth. Drawing from research and personal experiences, Caitlin spends time walking you through exactly how embracing constraints and focusing on what you can control will actually transform your classroom experience in major ways.
Before wrapping up this episode, you'll have the opportunity to evaluate how using the ELA standards as your goal and developing a clear plan of teaching these standards with engaging resources will streamline your planning process and yield more successful learning outcomes for your students! Caitlin is breaking it all down and even giving a peek behind the scenes on how the EB Teachers' ELA Portal can support you in "fitting it all in" this school year!
You won't regret tuning in for this strategy-filled 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 and welcome back to another episode. I am excited to dive into another solo episode with you guys today. Um, and I love this topic. I was so excited writing this for you guys and getting it ready and all of my notes and all of that stuff. Um, because one of the most common messages that we get from teachers is asking us for suggestions about fitting everything that they need to into a given class period. And maybe you can relate.
Speaker 1:It's like you're in some sort of race against time. You're determined to cross the finish line before the bell rings because, no matter what the time of year, there's always something to do right. There's always a novel to work through or a grammar exercise to complete or the argumentative writing unit to finish, like just before students go off to spring break. There's new vocabulary words every single week. There is so much going on all the time, right, and while there are some of you who have a long 95, 120 minute class period, there are so many teachers that are telling us I've got a 42 minute class period and I see my kids four times a week, and I know that's frustrating and it is what it is right, so we got to make the best use of what we have. So whether you're a teacher who has 42 minutes and literally that's just, we can all agree that's not enough time. Or you have 90 minutes and you're like I have too much time. Right, it is what it is. So what we want to do in today's episode is share some strategies with you for getting in control of your class periods, for offering a way to look at a suggested cadence for working through your curriculum, the standards, um, and hopefully this will spark some ideas for you for what you can do in your class period. But what I want to preface all of this by saying is is yes, you might have a 42 minute class period, you might even have a 35 minute class period, and again, it is what it is right. There's nothing that you can do about it other than just do the best that you can. And whether that means that you know what, you might not fit it all in, but you're going to try your hardest, that is good enough.
Speaker 1:So I just want you to hear that from somebody, because I know a lot of us have administrators, um, or colleagues, colleagues, or we go to school where it's maybe not super supportive, and maybe you've asked for help and you haven't heard, you know, haven't felt heard or seen by anybody, and you continue to feel like I just don't have enough time. And I will just say that everybody feels that way. It is the number one complaint that we hear from middle school English teachers is there is literally not enough time to fit in all the standards that I need to cover in a year and to help my students get great scores on those state tests. And so, with that being said, if it's everybody's problem, it's just the problem and that's all we can do about it. And, in fact, actually, I think just accepting that it is what it is makes it a whole heck of a lot easier to start to take the pressure off of you.
Speaker 1:And I'll give you an example from my own life. There is a thing in running a business called state sales tax, and it is a huge pain in the butt, like it is a massive nightmare, and it takes me so much of my time, way more than I feel like it should, and it is just a hassle, right, and I was talking to my dad about it, who for a long time you know it worked in business, uh, across the country and all of the different States. And I asked him. I said, dad, is this just a thing, that it's just a pain? And he's like, yeah, it is. It was a pain for me and I was like, okay, at least I know, and now I can move forward from here. And so I want you to hopefully feel that way too, that it just is what it is right.
Speaker 1:A lot of us do not have long class periods. Okay, I know that that's the case. Now, what can I do? That's within my control, because I don't have control over that, and complaining about it isn't going to do anything positive. It's just going to make you angrier at the situation. Right, so just accept it and let it be, and now let's control the things that you actually have control over. That will then help you inherently feel better and less angry about the fact that you do have a short class period, because we can all agree, 42 minutes is not enough time, 60 minutes is not enough time, and it is what it is.
Speaker 1:So I want to first talk about why schedules, why routine, why cadence, why all of this stuff is so important, because that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. So I did a little bit of research for you guys and I found just this really kind of interesting little paragraph from Head Start Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center, and they shared that, just like adults, children feel more confident and secure when their daily activities are predictable and familiar. We know this and it's important to reiterate. A consistent daily schedule and step-by-step routines give children a predictable day. Schedules and routines help children feel in control of their environment, feel safe, secure and comfortable, know what is happening now and what comes next, know how to do an activity or a task and engage in their learning. And as you hear all of that, you're probably thinking that, oh my gosh, the same is true for you, right? That this is where we see progress is in the consistency of a schedule that we create for our students and for ourselves. So having a consistent daily, weekly and monthly schedule is going to help you have a much less stressful, predictable, in-control schedule experience of your class periods, of your ELA schedule, of your planning. And I want to give you an example about why having a cadence and why having a consistent structure is so important for you.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to relate a lot of things in this episode to the gym and to nutrition. Just bear with me if that is of zero interest to you, because there's a lot of parallels that I think are helpful as a metaphor. So, when I first started going back to the gym about a year and a half ago, I would go every single day, and I did full body workouts every single day, and it was way too much. I was putting way too much stress on every muscle, every body part, and I was not able to see results. I wasn't able to see what I was going after, and I think the same is true with our students. We cannot teach every aspect of ELA every single day. What we can do, though, is we can create a cadence or a structure around how we're going to set up our monthly or weekly cadence so that we can see consistent results for our students.
Speaker 1:So so, going back to my metaphor, to the gym example, instead of doing a full body workout every single day, I first sat down with my trainer and I asked okay, well, what are my goals for the gym? Why am I even doing this? I want you to think about that, too, for your class periods, right? So my goals for the gym was that I wanted to build lean muscle. I also wanted to work on my fast twitch muscle fibers, so like speed, and I wanted to gain, like high intensity speed, like I wanted to be more of like a sprint athlete than a marathon athlete. Right, I did not want to work on endurance and I did not want to work on long distance running, like I have zero desire ever in my life to run a marathon. Don't want to do that.
Speaker 1:So, because I had my goals, I was now able to create a weekly workout structure that helped me attain those goals. It was very clear what I needed to do in order to meet my goals, whereas if my goal was to run a marathon, my training and workout routine would be totally different. Same thing with nutrition here, because my goal was to build muscle Now I have my goal I had to eat a lot of protein and because I also wanted to do like high rocks, conditioning, work on speed, all that type of stuff, I also needed to make sure that I was eating a lot of carbohydrates and was eating enough calories to sustain those levels of workouts. And the same exact thing is true for you as a teacher, and you can start to do this with your standards as your goals. So think of standards as being your goals. Right and that brings me to tip number one with what I want to talk about in today's episode with fitting everything into your ELA schedule.
Speaker 1:You have to determine what your goals are. Those are very likely your standards, and when you use the standards as your guide or as your goal, you are able to cut out anything that isn't necessary or anything that's not going to help you reach those goals, aka getting your students to master the standards. So if you aren't using the standards to guide you, you'll be like I was when I was first starting to work out and you'll be aimlessly doing full body workouts plus way too much cardio, wondering why you aren't building muscle at the gym, no matter how hard you're trying, because you are not trying towards your goals. You're just spinning your wheels going in a place that doesn't matter. So clarity with the standards as your goals, as your guideposts, is so important here. That is the thing that you can.
Speaker 1:So when you sit down to plan for a specified period of time, you want to start with your standards, and that's why in our EB Teachers ELA portal, we actually suggest our teachers begin with the skills or standards section of the portal. So there's this whole section within the portal that has all of the skills listed out. So when a teacher first joins the portal, within the first like 10 minutes, we tell them think about the next skill that you want to cover with your students. Go to the skills section, click on that skill and then view the related resources that go with that skill. So here they're picking a standard or the skill that they want to address, and then they are finding the resource or the activity that they need to address that standard versus the other way around, versus maybe seeing something on Instagram or Pinterest or whatever that has distracted you and taking your attention away from the standards. You're like, oh, that looks like fun, that's great, and is it going to meet your goals? Right, it might look like fun for me to go run two miles. Okay, it doesn't actually at all. Run into miles sounds awful. But if I did that, that would take away from my goals, because my goals are to build muscle. Well, if I do too much cardio, I'm going to counteract the building of muscle, right? So it's important to understand what your goals are. That's why the standards are so, so important.
Speaker 1:The other thing that I want to add to this too, that also relates to fitness and nutrition, is that tracking your standards is extremely important because this is going to allow you to fit it all in right as much as you possibly can. We actually have a free standards checklist. That's a part of our free batch planning guide that we can send to you, so I'll include that information in the show notes for you so that you can use that at your disposal. And if you're a portal member, the standards checklist is already a part of your EB digital planner, so you don't need to go download the free batch planning guide. But just as a little side note for tracking your standards using that standards checklist in that free download is so important because when you track, you know what you're doing. This is the same as nutrition, right. Most people have a propensity to underestimate how many calories they're actually consuming in a day. We also have a tendency to overestimate how many good nutrients we're getting in a day, right, which is interesting. We're like we're inherently positive in that regard, right? We think we're doing better than we actually are.
Speaker 1:So when I first started tracking my nutrition, it was actually eye-opening. I wasn't going to get anywhere close to my goals, my fitness goals, doing what I was doing. But because I then started tracking, I now had a true picture of what was going on with my nutrition and why I wasn't hitting my goal. And the moment that I did that, that I started tracking, everything started to change for me in my fitness journey, and the same is going to be true for you in your batch planning journey. You will begin to realize that there are standards that you've just forgotten about or standards that you spend way too much time on right.
Speaker 1:So I think about this with nutrition right. I'm looking at my fitness pal, nutrition tracker, my calorie tracker, my macros tracker, and I have no problem getting in the amount of fats that I need in a day, but I don't get enough carbohydrates to fuel the type of workouts that I want to do. And this was so interesting to me. The other day I was doing this and I was about to eat um two turkey burgers, so I had eaten one, and then I put all the information into my fitness pal and I realized that if I ate the second burger, I would not hit my calories goal, I would be way over on my fats goal and I would be really under on my carbohydrates goal. So actually the thing that I needed to eat instead was something that was much higher in carbohydrates and lower in fats in order to produce a better workout the next day.
Speaker 1:So the same thing goes with tracking your standards that you're hitting with your students. You might think that you're doing a good job, which we're all doing a great job. We're doing a good job, and we can do a better job and have more control over what we're doing, what we're teaching in our classroom, when we start to track what's actually going on right. So if you plan without the standards as your guide or as your goal post or as your goal in general, you're going to be running really, really fast and you're going to end up nowhere. And so all of this ties into this next thing that I want to talk about of having a monthly and weekly schedule or a cadence for your ELA class period and then sticking to it.
Speaker 1:Right, the standards are your goals, and once you have your goals, you can decide how much time you're going to dedicate to each part of ELA to reading, writing, grammar, vocabulary, et cetera. So every year at our batch planning live events, I always share an example cadence for a month's worth of lesson plans and every single year, without fail, we will have teachers in the comment section that are shocked to see how little time is spent on grammar. But if you go, look at the standards and you use these as your goals, you'll see that grammar is a very, very, very small piece of the puzzle. So why would I spend an inordinate amount of time on grammar when I could be utilizing that time more wisely to better hit my goals and the standards? And I know some of you are going to say well, but students can't write coherent sentences, so I have to spend time on grammar.
Speaker 1:Yes, that is true, I 100% agree with you, and that's why it's so important to teach grammar in a structured way, with games, hands-on games and application to writing, having those as a key part of your grammar program. We've talked about this on the podcast before. It's integral to what we do at EB. If you're an EB portal member, you know that that's exactly how we teach grammar inside of the EB grammar program, and that's why it is so important to know this information, to have this type of stuff at your disposal, so you have the standards as your goals.
Speaker 1:Well, from there we're going to create our monthly or weekly cadence, and what this means is that you are going to create a structure or a routine for what you're covering on which days of the week and which days of the month. So, for example, you might teach reading on Mondays and Tuesdays and writing on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and then Friday is reserved for grammar. That's just an example. Do not quote me on that. You can use it if you want, if it works for you, but so on and so forth. So when you go to plan your lessons, you simply stick to that structure, and then there is no second guessing yourself. Once you've put it into place, right, students know what to expect on which days of the week. It makes planning a whole heck of a lot easier for you, and it also makes it so that you're not trying to crunch reading, writing, grammar and vocabulary every single day into a 42 minute class period, because that is not going to happen. That is just not happening. Don't even try to do that. You will just destroy yourself if you're trying to do that. Not worth it. And so that brings me to my next point.
Speaker 1:When it comes to fitting everything in, you cannot do all of the above. I mean, maybe you can, but I don't think that you should. But you can do whatever you want, but we would suggest not doing all of that without batch planning. So if you try to do what I've suggested so far on a daily or a weekly basis, you're really missing the point and creating way more work for yourself than you need to. But again, you can do whatever you want. But we really believe, like batch planning is so integral to your success as a teacher we have a whole EV batch planning framework that we teach Like it is so integral to what we do and we actually spent a lot of time talking about that on episodes 287 to 292. So if I would invite you to go back, take a listen to those if you haven't already. But we really believe, and I will stand by this this is the hill that I will die on.
Speaker 1:Batch planning is not only the single most effective way to get your nights and weekends back, but it also ensures that you are intentionally planning in advance. This is helping you fit in all of the skills, all of the standards, everything that you need to cover as a middle school ELA teacher. So I'm going to give you a quick overview If you didn't catch the last few episodes or this is your first time listening to the podcast. You've never heard of batch planning before. Oh my gosh, your life is about to change as you go down a rabbit hole of batch planning. Holy cow, it's the best thing ever.
Speaker 1:So batch planning is essentially sitting down for two days, or every quarter or so, or every semester, wherever you can do it, and planning out content, your curriculum for the next period of time, whether that's four weeks, two months, the rest of the year if you are pro batch planner, whatever it might be. But this means that you need to know exactly what standards you're covering on any given unit. You also need to know what your into activity is going to be to hook your students, what your through activities are going to be to practice those standards and then what your beyond activity is going to be to assess your students. All of those things into, through and beyond activities. Those were on the past few episodes on the podcast. So batch planning really is being intentional with what you teach and that allows you to cover all the content that you need to. Because if you are planning on a week-to-week basis or, in some cases, on a day-to-day basis. Maybe you think you know what kind of skills or standards you're covering and you can guess how long each unit will take, but it's very different to actually see your units mapped out for months at a time and what standards are being covered and when. So, just like I talked about with tracking your calories on MyFitnessPal holy cow, it's an eye-opening experience. Tracking your calories on MyFitnessPal holy cow, it's an eye-opening experience.
Speaker 1:And, like I said before, batch planning is just so integral to what we believe successful teachers do that here at EB, our framework is a foundational piece of the puzzle for our teachers inside of our portal. It is one of the very first things that we suggest our EB teachers learn how to do, because it's nice to have access to great resources and curriculum, but if you don't know what to do with it, it doesn't matter, right? Just like having access to a nice gym doesn't mean you're just going to know how to see the results that you want. Like I've worked out before, I was an athlete growing up and I went to this new gym. That was awesome and I was doing things that were not helping me meet my goals. Right, I had to be taught by somebody who knew the ropes, who knew what to do, who knew what my goals were and how to get me there right? We've been doing this for over a decade now. We've literally helped tens of thousands of ELA teachers around the world. So please take the time to go download our free batch planning guide. If you haven't already done that, start to read through that. Use. The standards checklist makes such a difference. And if you are an EB teacher who is in our portal, who has access to the portal, and you still haven't watched those batch planning videos inside of the planner section of the portal, this might just be that little nudge, that little kick in the pants for me to go do so.
Speaker 1:Okay, last but not least, the final general tip for fitting everything into your ELA schedule. This is very simple, um. What is the word? Simple but not easy? Right, it's a simple concept. It can be easy, um, but you gotta be intentional with it, and that is spiraling. So spiraling is a concept that we often hear in math, right, especially in elementary school. Second graders always seem to have homework pages where, like, the first few math problems come from the day's lesson prior and et cetera, and so on and so forth. Well, at EB, we teach you to do the same exact things for your ELA class period.
Speaker 1:So, like, what would happen if you consistently had your students practice narrative writing? Or what if you intentionally built in multiple compare and contrast or expository or descriptive or literary analysis writing lessons? What if, two months after your grammar lessons on the four types of sentences activities, your students revisited that same concept with a quick game? What if you came back to those skills time and time again? What would happen? Right, most ELA teachers, most of us, we just have this tendency to do this. We compartmentalize things. Right, we'll teach narrative writing here. Okay, done, little bow on that, we'll forget about that, about that literary analysis writing over here, then argumentative at the end of the year, and boom, that's it.
Speaker 1:Well, that doesn't help your students. They can't learn a concept one time and then always expect to master it. Right, they need consistent practice. So, for example, going back to the gym, I wanted to be able to do a pull-up last year and I had to practice every single day. Well then, once I started being able to do one, then iup last year and I had to practice every single day. Well then, once I started being able to do one, then I was trying to do two every single day, and so on and so forth, and now I'm at a point where I can do quite a few in a row, but it's because I practice them all the time. It wasn't like, okay, I got the pull-up and now I'm not going to do it anymore. Right now it's just a part of who I am and what I do, and so the same thing goes for our students needing that consistent practice.
Speaker 1:So if your students are not coming back to those particular standards or skills or to that particular writing style time and time again, I think you're really missing out on the ability to cover more content with your students with an efficient use of your class time. So hopefully, as you're listening, you're starting to kind of see the connections here amongst these tips, the standards, your goals, your cadence, spiraling all of that stuff. One thing that I will say about just the spiraling concept with your curriculum is that you are accounting for spiraling when you batch plan, because you're able to look at the next few months and say, okay, I'm not just going to teach narrative writing one time, I'm going to do a deep dive at the beginning of the year and then maybe a month later, I'm going to schedule in a day or two refresher on this particular lesson, or even a one class period refresher on this particular lesson, because I want my students to continue to practice leads to practice transitions, etc. So it's when you start to combine all of these things, all of these strategies, that you really are going to start to feel confident and in control of your teaching and accept the fact that your class period length just is what it is. And you're not alone. Every single teacher that I talk to always complains about how there is not enough time. So it is a universal theme and just accepting that inherently is going to subconsciously take a lot of the pressure off of yourself to try to fit it all in when you have 42 minute class periods. It just it is what it is right.
Speaker 1:And it's also really why we created our EB Teachers ELA portal because, like I said, it's one thing to have great resources.
Speaker 1:It's a whole other ballgame to actually know how to plan with them, how to put them into practice in your classroom. So if you want help in quickly and easily mapping out your own schedule for the year, based on your unique class period lengths, then make sure that you go check out our EB Teachers ELA portal. We are actually currently open for enrollment this week until July 25th, if you're listening to this episode when it airs. So now is the time to go join so you can head to ebteachercom forward slash portal and you can register today, and we actually have a special discount that we are running, um, since this is the first time that we are opening the portal to the public. All right, you guys, I really hope that this episode was helpful for you. Let me know over on Instagram at EB academics maybe your favorite thing about today's episode. I would love to hear from you. All right, you guys, have a great week and we will see you next week on the podcast.