Structured Writing: A Better Way to Teach Writing Ep 1

In this first episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on why traditional writing instruction isn’t working and what you can do instead. I’ll walk you through the simple shift I made that completely transformed my classroom (and made teaching writing way more fun for everyone involved).

I’m sharing:

• Why most students sound like robots when they write (and how to fix it)
  
  
• What “structured writing” really means
  
  
• What to expect from this podcast and how it can support you all year long
  
  

If you want to dive into the 10-video FULL training on The Structured Writer’s Workshop, go HERE.

Whether you teach in a classroom or homeschool around the kitchen table, I hope this episode gives you a sigh of relief and a spark of inspiration.

Let’s rethink how we teach writing. I’ll show you how.

~Robin

➡️ Learn more about the FULL Structured Writing training PD

📆 Grab my yearlong writing planner for free (it includes my eBook!)

🎥 Watch the teaching strategies in action on YouTube

📝 Read the latest blog posts for writing tips & ideas

HAVE A QUESTION? Email me at robin@structuredwritingteacher.com

Transcript

Ep. 1 Structured Writing: A Better Way to Teach Writing Beyond the Paragraph Podcast 
Transcript:
(00:08) Hi everyone thanks for joining me i'm Robin Mellom this is the first episode of Beyond the Paragraph podcast i'm a teacher and a children's book author with Disney Harper Collins and Houghton Mifflin basically I rebuilt how I teach writing and I used the strategies that I learned that authors rely on to write efficiently and confidently and when I came back to the classroom and I revamped my program so that it matched what was happening in the real world it just changed everything my students just
(00:48) really flourished and I just want to get all this information out to you all of what I did and why I did this so I'm going to share with you what I learned from my editors my professional editors and it was kind of mind-blowing there were things that they taught me that I had never been taught and I know you have never been taught cuz it's it's not part of our traditional you know training that we've had as teachers no one has done this and I'm like why are we not making the connection between writing in the real world and what we're
(01:23) teaching in the classrooms it kind of never made sense to me so in this first episode I'm going to pull back the curtain on why our traditional writing instruction just hasn't been working and what you could do instead and I'm going to walk you through all the shifts that I've made and how I transformed my classroom and the cool thing is that doing it this way it made it fun like writing is now my students favorite thing to do writer's workshop is at the top of their list at the end of the year when we do our reflections and I've been
(01:58) hearing that from teacher after teacher they're like "Whoa they're putting writer's workshop as the thing that they love the most." Mhm i love it so I'm going to talk in this episode about why students writing might sound kind of robotic and what we could do to fix it i want to talk about structured writing and what that really means like how do we do a workshop that's structured and then we'll go over what to expect from this podcast and how it can support you as an ELA teacher or as a parent so if you're in the classroom
(02:34) or maybe you're a homeschool parent hopefully each one of these episodes is going to give you some relief and maybe a spark of inspiration so let's start here i want you to imagine that you're sitting at a table it might be your teacher desk or maybe it's your kitchen counter wherever there's a stack of papers in front of you and it's your students writing and you start reading through it and you're hoping that oh I'm going to find this spark from them i'm going to find something that makes me so excited that
(03:07) all of this teaching that I just did was totally worth it however you start going through it and the sentences feel kind of stiff and the ideas are shallow and basic and then every paragraph starts to sound like it comes from a template and maybe you gave them a template and it kind of sounds like it so but then you're saying to yourself okay I did everything in the curriculum that it said to do i gave them a graphic organizer i modeled in front of them how to write an essay we went through it step by step but why didn't it click
(03:47) what's missing i want you to be thinking about that as we go through this podcast why is it that a graphic organizer and modeling it in front of them might not be the answer so when you're feeling this way when you see this whole stack of essays you start to kind of question like why does teaching writing feel so hard and it breaks my heart sometimes as an instructional coach to come up on teachers who are like I I get sick to my stomach right before we start an essay because I don't like teaching it anymore and the teachers are
(04:24) going into it with dread because it just there's something about it that's like it's not going to click i'm doing all the things and it's not working oh makes me sad but the truth is is that it's not your fault it's not that teacher's fault it's not the students fault either it's the problem in the way that we were taught how to teach writing or that we weren't taught how to teach writing which is which is in my case i mean I started teaching in 1992 um outside Atlanta and I I don't you know at University of Georgia I don't
(05:06) remember ever having any classes in my teacher training that taught me how to teach writing like it I don't even remember talking about it it was very much reading oriented degree that I got and so then when I got to my first job they just said you know we had to do like one state report or something but they also said you could do creative writing kids like that like that's as much as the writing program was back then and so I just did really goofy stuff we did sort of like art project writing where they would make things
(05:40) that looked really cute with their writing and then we could put it on the wall so it would look good for conferences but that's not really a writing program right like that's that is just um kind of wasting time in a way we were just having fun so we have a system where where it's teaching writing to kids now like we've just given them a set of directions for assembling furniture so let's do a little sidebar here with IKEA if you have any IKEA furniture and don't get offended when I say all of this because I've I've done all of this so you get an
(06:17) IKEA thing you see it in the catalog and then oh my gosh it looks so good and you it comes into your house at this box and you start to put it together and you're trying to follow the directions but it feels like it's in a different language because it's in a different language and then you're you're like "What does this say what is that i don't know just try something and so then you put this thing together and you're like I this does not feel very sturdy if there's any wind that comes by this thing's going down
(06:49) and then someone else comes over to your house right and they walk in and instead of looking at that piece of furniture and saying "Wow that's a gorgeous piece of furniture." They say "Oh yeah we have that one too." So IKEA furniture again don't get offended but it's kind of generic it's something that like often we all have a piece of IKEA furniture at the beginning of our lives for sure especially when we're starting out it's priced really nice so it's the same thing with writing curriculum where what we're telling them
(07:24) is the same from teacher to teacher and year over year and then the output feels cliche it's overdone it's totally uninspired and they're like following these numbered steps they're using the exact words we give them for the sentence starters and then we've never really moved the needle and they hate it they dread it you dread it and then we're wondering why our students aren't engaged in class and why are these essays so flat no one wants to revise that's where we're going to talk about all of this in this podcast let's talk about the five
(08:01) paragraph essay we're just going to go there right off the bat because we've all done it and you've given them the topic and maybe you've given them some choice in in what their topic can be and you think that would be super engaging for them turns out just just that alone is not going to be the thing that fixes everything and then you have a graphic organizer it looks amazing you hand that out and then you have oh if you get stuck here are your sentence starters and then you have a checklist for them make sure you're
(08:37) including this and this and this you're gonna model for them in front of them like here's how to write the watch me as I do this as they kind of sit there doing something I'm not sure and then what you get in return is five paragraphs if you get five paragraphs really and those five paragraphs don't tell you much and there's no voice in there and I let me just stop for one second here this not having voice was was the key this is what got me published this is what changed my writing once I finally understood i went
(09:15) to so many conferences i attended so many meetings and critique groups and voice is the number one thing that editors are looking for and nobody's teaching this i I can't find it anywhere so the first lesson that I teach every year is voice and we come back to it over and over again the cool thing is that these students can pick up on this skill so quickly they're really really good at it adults are not we have too many habits that we have in place and trying to find our voice when we're older is harder so get them when they're
(09:51) young teach them how to write with voice that's all part of my program if if I'm going all through this and you're like "What what what is this program?" Just look in the notes and I do have like a full training if you're ready to dive into it so here you get your five paragraphs right there's no voice it's not a super clear idea it's feeling really robotic and it's surface level but technically it checks the boxes of that rubric that you gave it's not really saying much of anything and then what do we do we give them an A i mean
(10:26) it's it's an issue so I've been hearing the same thing from homeschool parents too and and those who are trying to follow like a writing workbook from cover to cover the problem can be that they just jump right in with grammar drills or it jumps straight into an essay and there's such a heavy leaning on templates and fill-in-the-blank activities that the students become passive they're not making decisions in their writing life they're just waiting they're sitting there arms folded saying "Well just tell me what to write and I'll do it i just
(11:02) want my grade and move on." But it doesn't have to be like that so I want to just make sure and I stress this you don't become a better writer by completing a worksheet you will get better at writing by writing and I know that sounds like yeah blah blah blah but by having a daily writing habit you experiment you fail you rewrite and that builds your confidence along the way because you set up a program where you want them to try new things that is what I look for when I give we'll go through the whole thing but when I give digital
(11:40) stickers and everything like someone who did something new and blew my mind so it's a problem like if you're playing basketball I'll leave my IKEA metaphor and we'll go into basketball and as you get to know me if this is the first time you've hung out with me you'll know that I talk about basketball quite a lot and if you were going to teach someone how to play basketball but you only just pulled out a book that had some diagrams in it and some arrows and here you go here they go there and now you can play basketball right and that
(12:12) doesn't work it doesn't stick they have to grab that basketball and start playing around with it and make mistakes and miss a bunch of shots until they finally finally learn how to do it so you have to give them those opportunities where they aren't feeling the pressure of getting a grade so you got to build that into your daily curriculum so grammar does matter absolutely and structure as you'll hear does matter but all of that has to come after learning expression and expression meaning that voice so once they've
(12:50) learned how to get some words down and express in a way that only they could express it or that the character would express it you really can't move on from there so talking about structured writing but I don't mean rigid I mean strategic so it's about building like this repeatable consistent but flexible system that gives students both freedom and focus so like they know exactly what happens in workshop they know what's going to come next and they all know what the skills are that we're learning there's no there's no surprises in my writing
(13:28) program but they love structure they love routine even eighth graders do and times when I have to stop the workshop because we have this or that we have an assembly or whatever they're like "What?" They're so sad that we don't have workshop i so want that experience for you you will it'll just oh my gosh fill your teacher heart so much so in that structure here are four things that I think you should do so you want to take notes you need to have a daily sentence combining exercise so that you have fluency in sentence writing perfection
(14:08) perfection and I have these ELA 3 a day warm-ups that I do with them and so they always combine sentences and then the next task they do like a little test prep uh question multiple choice so that they're practicing all those little you know those little language standards that we can't seem to ever fit in that's where I put them and then we do those that same skill all week so that they have a whole week of working on it so that they can you know master it by Friday and then it also includes a quick write this they love they love it so
(14:41) much and this is where they start to build up that ability to have expression and then they can pivot at any point they can learn all these different ways to write and their confidence just it just soarses and next we have weekly writing workshops and they focus on one skill at a time so the teacher always gives a mini lesson and you'll see if you take the training you'll see that I do it with a certain time segments and it's all very specific like the amount of time they have to write and you have 7 minutes to give your lesson because
(15:18) there's um science behind that about the amount of time that we can handle new information like that so they're they know there these six skills are on a wheel and they know which one's next and then we can kind of move the arrow and tell them we're going to work on this some more next week and so on and then next we work on CER paragraphs which is claims evidence reasoning like all the time whenever we're not doing anything it's we just do CER for everything so that they have the ability to do an evidence-based
(15:53) paragraph quickly and confidently because we've done it a gazillion times and then they learned that CER paragraphs are actually the body paragraphs when you're doing your your essay so we also do essays but we do not do the essays in the workshop it's a totally different system and I'll save that for another um podcast episode so they know what they're working on and they know the routine and they start to feel proud of their progress and they're going to start to care about what they're saying and not just how they're saying
(16:29) it now I teach this through a progression meaning I there's four phases we go through we're going from confidence to ownership to mastery to transfer confidence you have to start at the beginning of the year with building their confidence and you can do that through this voice activity that I do with them where they're basically writing they're doing a diary entry for a very obscure object and I walk them through the process of determining like what obscure object they're going to use and it kind of explains to them why
(17:02) brainstorming is so important and um and then we move on to ownership which is having leadership in the workshop so my kids they have jobs they are captains or co- captains um one of them does all the timers one of them does all the tech they're doing the digital spinners and pulling up the dares like I it's more like I'm a coach on the side while they're sort of getting all the players on the field and doing warm-ups and getting ready for the workshop they love this part of it and then we move to mastery once we're getting those skills
(17:39) practiced weekly we can then transfer them into the mastery part which is your essay and then we transfer that to other curriculum so now we can write this way in science or history and again we always start with voice and no other curriculum seems to be teaching this but if you can find it please tell me cuz I want to see if there are other ways to teach you that I have not thought about now as you can kind of tell the heart of the program that I've created is the workshop itself this is where all the magic happens my
(18:12) student leaders run it and they they kick off every time with a warm-up they warm up the the class i don't for workshop day they introduce a skill that we're going to focus on and they introduce the teacher when it's time for that power lesson and the kids time the teacher they spin the spinner choose the dare and then and then all these leadership roles rotate through the year so just about everybody who wants a turn um in front of the group can get it but then those students who want you know who'd rather be in a smaller setting
(18:41) there are leadership opportunities within their trio group and then that's when they mine for diamonds and so now if you're wondering like what do you mean by power lesson and writing dares and spinners and trios and diamond mining so don't worry I'm going to break all of this down for you in future episodes so I want you to hold on to your hat maybe your flare pen cuz we're just getting started so in this podcast some weeks I'm going to dive into like a single teaching move like just the sentence combining or how to focus on
(19:12) that studentled part of the workshop and then other times I'll share stories from my own classroom or spotlight strategies or pull out zoom out and tackle bigger stuff and how to integrate all your writing into other subject areas and by the way if you're ready to just go even deeper with all of this I do have a 10 video training that walks you through every single step of a structured writing workshop it'll help you launch it all the way through to your final celebration on that last day okay and there's a link in the description
(19:45) below and you don't have to piece this together all on your own it's it's all laid out there for you so don't worry just listen and relax as you listen to the podcast my goal is to help you look forward to writing instruction and writing can be something that is your most favorite thing to do because it's going to in the end become your students most favorite thing to do i can almost promise you this this whole thing has been a magical transformation not just for me but for so many other teachers who are doing this they are
(20:20) seeing like remarkable results so if you are craving that shift in your own classroom or in your home school then welcome to Beyond the Paragraph you're in the right place there's so much more to come be sure to follow Beyond the Paragraph wherever you get your podcast and share this with a teacher bestie they will love you for it and so will I to go deeper and learn more about the structured writing method go to structuredwritingteer.com