Some of your students are ready for the challenge of essays, while some are still struggling with sentences. Sound like a familiar situation? Take a listen to this episode, as Caitlin and Jessica show you how to support all your students, no matter where their writing skills currently lie.
If your goal is to get students writing clear, complete, well supported essays, you need a game plan that you can consistently follow, in order to close the writing gaps while propelling students forward. Caitlin and Jessica will share a quick, game-changing method to improve students’ essays: sentence stems for introducing evidence. It’s a small tweak that will yield big results.
In this episode, Caitlin and Jessica will show you how to use sentence stems to help your students introduce evidence, with an additional component for your higher-level writers. The bonus? Your students’ improved writing will mean you get to enjoy reading essays, plus spend less time grading them!
Tune in now to hear:
- [02:10] Does this scenario apply to you? Caitlin discusses the different types of student writing challenges that teachers face (simultaneously!)
- [03:40] Jessica poses some questions to ask yourself after you’ve faced a scenario like this
- [04:40] The importance of putting ego aside, so we can reflect on our methods to better serve our students
- [06:40] Jessica explains how not building a foundation for strong writing comes back to affect you as a teacher
- [8:00] What would life look like for you if you had a range of engaging, rigorous lessons to choose from? If you came to school every day excited to teach, knowing you were going to rock your lessons? If your students had some of the top writing scores in your district? Our EB teachers have shared so many of these success stories with us, and we’d love for you to join! Our doors open this summer for new members – join the waitlist now
- [10:00] Retrain your brain; how to convince yourself that you love teaching writing, until you do!
- [11:50] Use this idea (step #6 in the EB writing approach) as early as tomorrow to start seeing improvement in students’ writing! This method will help students to introduce evidence
- [15:40] Cailtin shares a list of sentence stems to help students introduce evidence in their essays
- [16:30] What can higher-level students do to improve their writing? Teach them to “set the scene” before introducing the evidence. Jessica explains with an example.
- [19:20] How methods like this one help students to become more confident in their writing
- [20:00] Put these sentence stems on your board, and make them a requirement! Watch how consistently requiring these stems (and “set the scene” statements for higher-level students) will instantly improve essays
Click here to watch on Youtube!
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