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 294: Use These Four Words Everyday With Your Students and Watch Your Test Scores Skyrocket
On this episode of The Teaching Middle School ELA Podcast, Caitlin is revealing four terms that you can begin incorporating inside your ELA classroom that will directly impact your students' test scores. Yes - this is a HUGE promise to make, and she's not shying away from keeping it. Caitlin will break down this promise with confidence because she isn't only speaking from her personal experience. As a team, we hear from ELA teachers every single year who have seen their students' test data skyrocket after using EB Resources and Strategies consistently. So when Caitlin shares a strategy like the one featured in today's episode, we know it works based on the feedback of thousands of ELA Teachers.
After listening you'll learn how incorporating the use and application of four simple terms across your writing and reading lessons will bring cohesion to student learning and boost their comprehension!
So, what are these four words?
Claim
Premise
Evidence
Justification
Tune in to learn exactly what each of these terms means and how you can easily incorporate them into virtually every ELA lesson you use. Once you develop the habit of using these terms in your instruction, you might be shocked at how quickly your students will begin using them as well!
Your students' test scores will thank you for listening in on this episode!
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https://www.ebteacher.com/free-10-tips-for-Batch-Planning
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Well, hello teachers, and welcome back to another episode of the Teaching Middle School ELA podcast. I am solo again today and I'm excited to dive into today's episode and hopefully the promise of this episode really caught your eye. So these four words that you can use every single day with your students are going to have a massive impact in your classroom and, yes, well, test scores will likely skyrocket, because utilizing these words is just an incredible foundation for your ELA class period. Um, I think it's important to note that this isn't just my experience with what I'm about to share with you today. This isn't just Jessica's experience. This goes for so many of our EB teachers. One of our EB teachers shared with us that her seventh grade scores increased by 13% from the last year, from the previous year when she got her test scores back. Another EB teacher shared that her students' test scores beat the state, district and school percentages. And then another EB teacher, who was sharing about her students standardized test scores, also shared that in the first year that she used our EB academics reading and writing which is this what I'm going to talk about today these four words, um, with more fidelity that her students scores as a group almost doubled. So this isn't just an anomaly with me, with Jessica, this is so so many of our EB teachers. That's just three examples, but it just goes to show how important a foundational language is in your classroom and using frameworks that are consistent. So, at the end of the day, right, test scores are not everything by any means, and sometimes, even with all of the review that you do, the reminders of getting a good night's sleep to your students, right, the healthy breakfast, all of that stuff it's still very possible that your students' test scores are not going to be what you had hoped for, and when that moment comes, it's very important that you're not disheartened by it, because I want you to know that learning still took place, whether or not they learned about narratives properly, or they know what a claim is, if they learned how to be a good person, if they learned how to not give up, if they learned what it means to be resilient, if they had fun in your class, if they made friends in your class, if they felt confident in your class. That is so much more important, right? I know that test scores are what so many principals, admin, districts, whatever, like. There's so much pressure for them to um, quantify success based on test scores. But that's not the end. All be all right.
Speaker 1:One of our speakers at batch planning live in winter talked about like, what if we measured student success based on how happy they were, based on how joyful they were, how would we perform on those tests? And so I just think about, like, in the larger grand scheme of things of life, what are my students actually walking away from my classroom with? And sure, if they do great on their test scores, bonus points to them. But I just think, like some of the people that I've come to know in my life in entrepreneurship and the business world, some of these people like, didn't even go to college, right. Didn't do well in school, hated school, in fact, right. We're just like, so not your typical a student or the student that performed well on the test. So I just want you to remember and you know this, and I think it's just important to hear it again reiterated to us that test scores are not everything, that student success can be measured in a variety of different ways. Test scores are just, unfortunately, how the system has made it for us to deem success for our students. So, with that being said, I do want to talk about these four powerful words that you can use literally every single day in your classroom with your students, and it's going to help them show growth on those end of year tests, like those three teachers that I shared, like my experience. But, more importantly, it's going to help them learn, it's going to help them grow and they're also going to have fun in your class. The four words that we're going to talk about what I love about them and this is something we believe very wholeheartedly at EB these four words really help connect reading and writing. So we believe at EB that what students read about, they should be writing about, and I know that that's not always the case in middle schools. It might not be the case in your classroom, right. You might have a reading teacher at your classroom and in your school and you might be the writing teacher, or vice versa. Maybe you are lucky enough to teach both. But we really believe that when students are writing about what they're reading about, this gives students a common language to use in both classes and all aspects of ELA, which then becomes ingrained in their everyday literary discussions, in their reading assignments, in the essays that they write about and so on and so forth. It is so invaluable.
Speaker 1:It's actually so interesting to me that reading and writing are not taught together by the same teacher, because I started teaching high school before I taught middle school and it was just English. It was just your English class, that was it. And I know there's AP language and AP literature, but in the regular freshman classes and the honors sophomore classes and honors juniors that I taught, it was just English. And it was really neat to get to constantly be working on our writing skills and our discussion skills that we use these four words that I'm going to talk about with the things that we're reading. It just made sense to me. So when I came down to teach middle school for the first time and these two classes were separate, I was like what? I was very confused. I didn't even understand that concept because that was just never my experience, even as a student. That wasn't my experience. So when I came into my new school, where I met Jessica and we taught across the hall from each other, I just told the principal I was like, look, I'm going to teach reading and writing together and he was like, okay, no problem. And sure enough, my students soared. So even if that's not your experience.
Speaker 1:Maybe you are just the writing teacher, maybe you are just the reading teacher? Um, I'd invite you to really collaborate with your counterpart. You might be in a situation, too, where you're like but Caitlin, the reading teacher, sucks at my school, right, she doesn't want to do anything with me. Um, I still would invite you to consider opening up a dialogue as to how you two can work together, because, at the end of the day, right, if we can bring these four words into our everyday language, with our students, in both reading and writing, it's just going to benefit them at the end of the day. Okay, so the words that I'm going to talk about I'm going to give you in just a second. I feel like I'm continuing to drag it out. I apologize. Hopefully I have you at the edge of your seat really wondering what these four words are.
Speaker 1:But what I love about these words is it creates consistency between reading and writing and it reinforces students' understanding of so many skills that come with these four words. So when students see and hear these terms used consistently, they are more easily able to grasp their meanings, their applications when you use a common language in ELA, and so do your colleagues in subsequent years, so not just in your sixth grade ELA class but in the fifth grade coming into you, and seventh grade and eighth grade and so on. It eliminates confusion that might arise from using different terms for similar concepts in reading and writing. So it was very helpful, actually, when Jessica and I both use these terms with our students. So Jessica used them with her fifth graders, I used them with my seventh and eighth graders. We had a little bit of a hiccup with the sixth grade situation, but that's fine. But Jessica taught them the basics in fifth grade of really kind of starting to understand these terms and what they meant and how they can use them interchangeably and how it applies to basically everything that we're doing all of the time in reading and writing.
Speaker 1:And what I love about these two is it's not just applicable to reading and writing. As a business owner. Now I think about it from a business owner's perspective like there is nothing more valuable than what we're going to talk about, because it's applicable in so many different instances. I look at a variety of different jobs that people have, from consulting and working in healthcare and insurance and all of these concepts, these four words. They are everywhere. They might not necessarily be explicitly stated, but they are certainly implicitly implied, right? So a common language one creates consistency. That way, when they get to seventh and eighth grade or eighth grade and they've been doing it for the last couple of years and using these words you can just take it to the next level, right? And that's what happened when I taught with Jessica, when she was across the hall. When my students got to me in seventh and eighth grade that had had her in fifth grade, they were just like light years beyond everybody else.
Speaker 1:A common language also enhances critical thinking and it improves our students' communication skills. So what's cool is that students are going to start connecting what they are writing about to what they are reading. They have a framework to follow that makes both talking about what they read and write about what they read that much easier for them, right. So it's so much easier for them to just pick up and be like oh yeah, blah, blah, blah. And a common language also allows students to express their thoughts more clearly and coherently, because they can articulate their ideas in a very logical sequence, and this is going to make sense to you when I share what these four words are. This makes their writing more persuasive. It makes their writing more understandable and a common language I love this facilitates more productive discussions in class, because students can now engage in meaningful debates using these four terms that we're going to cover and they can use them to critique and build on each other's ideas.
Speaker 1:So I want you to imagine, like a class discussion, when an admin happens to pop in and they just catch your students naturally engaging in high level academic discussion. That is super impressive to see, but that only happens when we're using these four. Well, okay, I don't want to say that that's an exclusive. Whatever the word I'm looking for, it's an absolute, not an absolute. And it is very, very much more likely to happen when you are using these four words as foundational practices in your classroom. And the last thing that I love about these four words and a common language really is what it is at the end of the day, when they have this between reading and writing. This gives your students confidence to participate actively in class. So, whether or not that's raising their hand and answering a question, whether or not that's small group activities, whether or not that's a Socratic seminar or whole group discussion or whatever it might be, students are so much more equipped to tackle assignments and engage in discussions, because it's just happening all the time and it's something that they see in reading and writing.
Speaker 1:And if all of this can happen when four words are used consistently and I'm talking in every single class period and you're going to think I'm crazy, but that it is a hundred percent possible then why wouldn't every teacher want to be doing this? And that's exactly why we felt we needed to record this podcast episode. So what are these four words, how do we use them and how does it make this much of a difference? So I'll be curious to know if you've guessed this. So if you did guess this, as you're listening, send me a direct message on Instagram. I'd be so curious to know these four words that really changed the trajectory of the way that I taught and really everything that Jess and I do here at EB with our team are claim, premise, evidence and justification, and if you're not familiar with those terms, I'm going to define them for you. If you're an EB teacher, you should be familiar with these. If you are an EB teacher and you're not, this is all of the foundation of our EB writing program is built upon this. But what's interesting about this? As much as you might think that these are just writing focused words, they are not. If you go look at reading for literature standards, reading for informational text standards, students are supposed to be doing this with what they're reading about. So when we write about what we read about, we are inherently really covering all of those standards for reading for literature and reading for informational text.
Speaker 1:So a claim is a sentence or a statement that can be argued. Okay, so it's a sentence, something that you're writing, or a position that you're taking, something that can be argued. There's this side or that side or whatever. Then a premise is a reason to support your claim. So my claim might be that In-N-Out has the best burgers and my premise, my reason, would be their lettuce is incredibly fresh and crunchy, or they source their lettuce from organic, local farms, or whatever it is right. Well then, evidence is a fact or a quote from a text that supports your premise and your claim. So if we're going with my In-N-Out thing, I might find an article that was published about how fresh the lettuce is from the in and out sources and how it's better for you and has all these antioxidants. I have no idea I'm making this up but you get what I'm saying. Then justification this is where it gets good and this is where it gets juicy, and this is where students really start to improve their argumentative skills, their positions that they're taking, whether or not their evidence is good, etc. So justification is students analysis or explanation that shows why the evidence that they chose supports the premise and the claim. So here's what's great about justification and why I love these four words so much.
Speaker 1:When I first taught high school English, I constantly was writing on my students papers. How does this answer the prompt? How does this answer the question? This whole entire essay literally does not address what I asked you. Right, all the time it was constant and that was a reflection of my, you know, I was learning how to teach. I was 22 years old, you know, um, doing the best that I could, as I'm sure we've all been there. But I just think about okay, well, I didn't equip them with the ability to understand that they needed to explain and analyze not only why their evidence supported their premise, but why it supported their claim. Right, because the claim answered the question. And if the claim isn't even answering the question, well, of course, then their whole essay is not answering the question right.
Speaker 1:And so that's where these four words are so important, that students understand if ever I'm taking a position in class, that's my claim. Well, I have to have a reason for that position. That's my premise, and I can't have a reason without evidence, and that's my quote from the text, and then pretty much have to provide this type of information for a boss, for a client, for a customer or whatever it might be. And so, like, this isn't just about writing about literature or informational text. This is about learning how to think critically and formulate a position and support that position with evidence, with sound evidence. And so I want you to think about what happens now if students are expected to not only know what these words are like, they just know them because they are used daily in class. They're going to apply them in class, and this can be as simple as you ask a question to the class, whatever it might be, and a student raises their hand and answers it and you say, okay, can you provide evidence for that position? And the student will have to go to the text and provide evidence for that position. Okay, that's great, they found evidence. All right, can you explain? Can you justify your reasoning? How does that support what you're saying?
Speaker 1:This is applicable in like everything that they're doing all the time in class, and this is something that you can come back to over and over and over again in a variety of instances. So it's not like students are constantly writing a multi-paragraph essay in class in order to hit these. It's not like students are always doing some sort of grand thing in class in order to address these four words. No, it's a part of everyday discussion. I just was constantly asking my students well, what's your position on that? What's your reason for that position? Can you find evidence to support that position? Okay, that's great. Well, can you explain it?
Speaker 1:And then we're having those discussions in Socratic seminars, small group discussions, silent debates, whatever it might be. It is happening all the time. So wherever there is a class discussion, students are not only sharing their opinions or their positions, but they're making claims about the text. They're supporting them with evidence and justification. And then what happens is other students start to build on those talking points and then they start to inherently provide alternative claims or different relevant evidence or a different justification, and then, all of a sudden, these conversations in your class are going so much further, beyond surface level discussions.
Speaker 1:Students are engaged in critical thinking and analysis and in fact, they start to get a little bit fired up, they start to get a little bit intense, because now they understand well, I'm not just arguing to just argue, right, and we're not arguing, we're having a discussion, but I can't just say something. I've got to provide evidence from the text or from wherever it is that we're discussing. But then what's cool? So if this is what's happening on a consistent basis in discussions, right, whether or not that's a silent debate, whether or not that's a Socratic seminar, whether or not that is a panel discussion, whether or not that's small groups answering questions that they're then going to present to the class, on whatever it might be, it's happening all the time.
Speaker 1:Well then, when students start writing their literary analysis essays follow consistent frameworks that follow the structure. So we teach in our EBW approach, right, where students are arguing claims, and then each paragraph contains a premise, evidence and justification, and then each paragraph contains a premise, evidence and justification. And so when they have that framework to follow, their writing is so focused, it makes sense. They're no longer left, you know, wondering like well, how do I even start my essay, or what am I even talking about, or how do I even answer this question? And we can go down a whole rabbit hole about writing good, essential questions that set your students up for success, that aren't convoluted, that actually make sense for them to answer.
Speaker 1:But I just want you to imagine how helpful it is for students to be seeing and applying these words every single day in class, not just when they're sitting down to do a writing piece once a semester right or once a quarter. That is not helpful for them. This makes the writing process so much less intimidating because it's just a part of what you guys do. It's just a part of your daily class structure, and so I would argue that by making the application of these four words of claim, premise, evidence and justification just non-negotiables in your classroom, you are automatically raising expectations for your students so that when state testing takes over, your students don't even flinch at finding relevant evidence, or they don't even bat an eye at writing a text dependent response. They just know how to do it. They've been doing it since day one of the school year and they are ready.
Speaker 1:And so these four words, if you are an EB teacher and you're part of our portal, you'll know that these are a part of so many of our everyday lessons and activities, built into our EB curriculum because it is so foundational to what we do. So if you are an EB teacher's ELA portal member, make sure that you are doing your best to utilize the content and the resources that are going to help reinforce this language on a consistent basis, and that's why it's so important, we believe, to find something that, across all disciplines within ELA vocabulary, reading, writing, grammar, etc. That we are using a common language for students so that we can set them up for success. All right, you guys, if you have any questions about this, definitely feel free to send us a message over on Instagram. Happy to discuss. I love talking about all of this, all of this stuff. This is like my favorite part of ELI, um, so hopefully you enjoyed some of these solo episodes this month and we will see you next week on the podcast. Have a good one. Yep, everybody.