Beyond the Paragraph: Teaching Writing in Middle School with Structure
If you're tired of guessing how to teach writing in middle school, you're in the right place. Robin Mellom is a veteran ELA teacher and published author of over ten children’s books with Disney, HarperCollins, and Houghton Mifflin. She brings the clarity and structure you've been craving without the gimmicks.
Hosted by Robin Mellom, author, middle school teacher, and creator of the Structured Writer’s Workshop™, each episode delivers practical, classroom-tested strategies that work in grades 4–8.
Learn how to implement evidence-based writing routines, like CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning), build lasting writing habits, and engage students in meaningful work that actually sticks.
Best of all, they will learn how to write like the pros!
Beyond the Paragraph: Teaching Writing in Middle School with Structure
Revolutionizing Student Writing: Beyond the 4x4 Classroom
The writing crisis in American classrooms isn't due to lack of teacher effort, it's our instructional model. When the Nation's Report Card reveals only 27% of eighth graders scoring proficient in writing, we need to examine what's really happening in our classrooms.
After spending nearly a decade away from teaching to become a professional writer, I returned to education as a "fish out of water," shocked by both how writing instruction had changed and how my professional writing experience contradicted classroom practices. While publishers expected complete manuscript rewrites in weeks or even days, schools were still dedicating entire quarters to single essays. This disconnect revealed a crucial truth: volume matters enormously in developing writing proficiency.
Kelly Gallagher's critique of the "4x4 classroom" (four big books, four big essays annually) resonates deeply with what professional writers like RL Stine know instinctively—writing improves through consistent practice, not occasional massive projects. Stine, who produced Goosebumps books monthly, found that "writing fast forced him to stay in the flow, avoid overthinking, and treat perfectionism like the monster it is."
My structured writing method transforms reluctant writers through daily sentence combining exercises, perspective-based quick writes using engaging images, and explicit weekly workshop skills. When essay time arrives, we tackle it in focused 10-day blocks with clear checkpoints rather than dragging the process across an entire quarter. Students set line-length goals, building the confidence to overcome writing inertia while developing authentic voice.
The results speak volumes! Students who once feared writing now request additional workshop time. Even implementing these strategies mid-year yields remarkable growth. Start tomorrow by replacing traditional warm-ups with sentence combining and perspective-based quick writes, and watch as your students discover that writing can actually be enjoyable.
Visit structuredwritingteacher.com to learn more about implementing these volume-based strategies in your classroom.
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In the most recent nation's report card. It gives you data on our students across the country and it says that 27% of eighth graders scored proficient in writing, which, let's repeat, that only 27% of eighth graders score proficient in writing. The strange thing is that in my experience when I taught several years in eighth grade and 27% when they came in it's almost even higher than some of the experiences that I've had they're coming into middle school with very low writing skills and it's really not because the teachers just aren't trying hard enough. It's really the model that we've been using. It's the four big books, four big essays, and I'm going to tell you how you can flip this around. We're going to talk about Kelly Gallagher, we're going to talk about RL Stine and I'm going to tell you my fish out of water story and how this all relates. So we're going to talk about the system and we're going to talk about how to change it. So we're going to talk about the system and we're going to talk about how to change it.
Speaker 1:I became aware of Kelly Gallagher's work a while ago when I came across the article of the week, which kind of became like a thing for a while there. Right, it still is, and it should be. What I loved about it was that I could teach my students how to read through an article kind of short it was usually like one page on a worksheet is what I ended up doing and I could teach them how to annotate it and put there's a column on the side for them to put notes. And they became so used to this that I actually just assigned it for homework, because my school said we'd had to sign a little bit of homework and I made article of the week, the one that they did, and they could do it, and by Friday we would all kind of get together and see what their reactions were and talk about the article, because everybody, hopefully, had done all the work and all the thinking beforehand. But then I came across a, an article that Kelly Gallagher wrote. It's a well, it's a blog post and it's actually from 2015 and it's called moving beyond the 4x4 classroom, and I want to I'll just kind of read a couple of quotes in here. But he says that when I first started teaching, I ran a a four by four classroom. My students read four big books a year, one per quarter and they wrote four big papers a year, one per quarter, or big books or big papers, a four by four classroom. So he tried this for a while but then noticed that they weren't actually progressing. And here it says years later, I have come to understand the severe limitations of the 4x4 approach.
Speaker 1:The central reason why 4x4 doesn't work can be summed up in one word volume. Summed up in one word volume. Volume matters a great deal and simply put students stuck in a four by four paradigm do not read and write enough over the course of the year to significantly improve. So I love this because it really falls into place. Exactly what I do with my, my writing program, the writer's workshop, that I do. But let me skip to the fish out of water, how this connects, if you've ever heard that phrase, fish out of water meaning, you know, like a movie where the main character is sort of plopped into the setting and they've never been there and never seen it and they're reacting to normal things and their reaction is kind of funny. So, like the movie elf, he was in the north pole all of his life and then he comes to new york city and so his reaction to new york is just priceless. So I mean, I wasn't stuck in the north pole.
Speaker 1:But thing was is that I left teaching for a while. So I wanted to be a writer and I got my books published and so I took off like I was gone for seven, eight years. I mean, it could have been, it could have been almost a decade, because I did some social work in there and I stayed home with my son and all this stuff. So in that time I was so focused and immersed in the world of writing and learning from my editor at Disney and how to do all the parts of writing that I really kind of didn't know. I was able to write my story well enough that I could get a book deal, but then he was able to write my story well enough that I could get a book deal. But then he was able to lead me to the next level in a way that I just wasn't prepared for, and so I didn't even think about the world of teaching. I was only immersed in how to write and how to do it professionally, how to do it quickly, efficiently and with style and all of that.
Speaker 1:But then I went. I started doing some tours, so I went around the country and I would go talk to classrooms and sometimes they would have me come and I even stayed for a little bit longer and I met with the teachers and I met with their students and did some writing with them. And when I met with the teachers, I was at a lunch one day and was asking them you know, what are your, what are your barriers, what, how's it going? And that day I had done that voice writing activity with them, the like interactive, really cool voice activity that gets them going at the beginning of the year. And one of the teachers said I have never seen my student write so much ever. And they were saying that getting going was a problem. Of course revising was a problem, because they really didn't have much to revise. They just weren't writing very much. They were doing the bare minimum and they could not figure out how to pull them over into that next level. So I wasn't quite sure like what their writing program looked like.
Speaker 1:But when I went back to the classroom it was as if I came in as a total new stranger to the whole teaching world. Everything had changed. So when I had first started teaching in the early 90s, we didn't have Common Core standards. We had like a list of things to do and my writing program back then was just less do creative writing because I want to, and let's do a state report, because in history we should do that, and that was it. That was all the writing that we did, and so fast forward to all the common core standards that they're doing. And now there's such a push for evidence-based writing and in some way absolutely they need to do that, but it's possible Kind of went off the deep end here. We tend to do that we swing our pendulum really far Sometimes. The problem is that we swing that pendulum back too much and too fast, much and too fast.
Speaker 1:And I found that when I redid my program. I basically took the great parts about workshop, but I structured it. I added in there what was missing, because that really explicit instruction on how to write, and not just how to write an informative essay, but how to write. They really, really needed the basic skills that would then apply to whatever else they were being asked to do. So I also realized from my experience when I was gone out of the classroom that writing a lot really is what helped me become a better writer.
Speaker 1:You start to, you know, gauge what your reader likes what they don't like. I had a critique group and we had a set meeting every two weeks and I took my writing over to. It was a table of like eight of us A lot of them were former teachers and I read my writing and they would critique it and we would have like hours long meetings about you know what's working, what's not working, and so that's how you start to learn is by writing, writing, writing and then having a reader and getting their feedback. What worked for you. So volume is important and in my program I make sure that the volume is as high as possible without overloading them, but I do.
Speaker 1:You know, every day they're doing sentence combining so that they kind of get used to just really writing a perfect sentence one sentence, that's it. And then they also do a quick write every day which is a short response to like an image, and the reason why I do that is because it starts to take away the fear of writing. So much of our problems are just kids who have in their mind that writing is too hard, I can't do it. They don't see a way in to what your expectations are, and this is their way in, because our kids are natural at voice and that's what that first voice activity really taps into. And then they use that when they're doing their quick write every day. So now they're doing voice every single day. They're picking a perspective, maybe, you know, a lot of times it's an object, maybe it's a cat, he's really grumpy and they're giving it a voice and they're writing dialogue or they're writing it like they're a reporter or they're writing it like it's a diary entry. So every day they're doing that.
Speaker 1:And weekly they are getting these workshop skills that are taught to them explicitly. And sometimes the lessons for that go outside of the workshop because you really need to go deep and like, let's say, sentence complexity, you're going to want to spend more time with that. And on workshop days I always like to try and keep the lessons, you know, like seven minutes somewhere around there, because they just love to get into the writing. And on that weekly workshop they are writing volumes because they're already used to writing a quick rate. Every day that fear starts to go away. They've learned now that they could write with voice, so I could just pick a perspective and I could do it like this or this or this. They start to learn how they could write a hook automatically and then make their sentences start to look and sound proper and that starts to build momentum. So that's when you can then move into Okay, now let's talk about how we could make all your writing even better, even more visual. And then you hop into figurative language and vivid imagery and showing and not telling.
Speaker 1:I always say don't start with those. They might be kind of easy, because it's sort of easy to kind of write a simile sometimes. But I wouldn't do that. I would just go heavy on voice and hooks and sentence complexity until you really have them pulled in and you're starting to see some progress and now you can start layering, layering in all of these like magical elements to make their writing sparkle.
Speaker 1:And then the question becomes but what about essays? How are we going to do that? Basically, I stop everything and we do essays in a 10-day block and each day is broken down into exactly what they need to accomplish and they're sort of small chunks and I always do like a hands-on activity at the beginning called deconstruct an essay. So instead of me standing up there and saying here, the beginning called deconstruct an essay, so instead of me standing up there and saying here are all the parts of an essay. Take notes. I instead give them file folders in groups and they have an essay or two, depending on what grade they are. They can handle a couple at a time and the essays are cut up into strips and as a group they have to go through and match up the parts of the essay with the headers on there, the hook and the thesis and all that. So they are reading it and trying to come like figuring out what is a thesis, and it has a little definition on there. So they're just they're doing the thinking first and then they want to see if they can match it up correctly.
Speaker 1:Not all of them will get it correct. With the ones you do, it's like super cool and then you can do it again the next day before you start the next lesson. So they're doing all their research and I give them approval. After they've given, you know they've done the research and they pop in their links that they're going to use. They have to get a digital checkmark from me in order to move on to the next phase. So sometimes eventually, like a lot of them are all in different spots, but that's why I use ClassKick so I can visually see where everyone is at. After that then they're going to write their hit introduction, which is their hook, introduce topic and their thesis. And when they've written that correctly, they have to again and they'll get a digital check mark. But if they have set that up correctly, the rest of it is going to start to flow.
Speaker 1:So I don't let them move on to the next part. They have to have their introduction done correctly and done well. Then they can start into their body paragraphs, which are just CER paragraphs, which I talked about in a previous podcast. I go back to that one about writing across the curriculum. They're all just little CER paragraphs which they've done, done, done. They've done all this and so they'll have examples up on the wall and they can kind of get going at their own pace after that. So we're doing the whole thing in 10 days. We're not doing a quarter. We're not spending nine weeks on writing one essay.
Speaker 1:The reason why I set it up this way is number one. I've noticed from them and for myself, if you're working on an essay and you go to day 10, if you go to day 11, that following week they are spent. They are like, oh, and I am too. Honestly, I'm like I'm kind of done with this. That's like a natural reaction that we have, and I also realized that you as a writer, all those years when I was away from the classroom, the expectation on how much you write and how quickly it's turned in was mind blowing. So my first book that I got published with Disney, I wrote that for years like a couple of years it took me to write that book and then I turned it in and it it got, it was purchased, right.
Speaker 1:And then they give you a revision letter and what I didn't realize was that revision to them often means complete rewrite, like almost totally redo the whole thing, because they'll. I got like a 10 page letter on all the things that are working and all the things that need to be fixed and it was like big stuff, character stuff, it was this. You know, the responses weren't quite making sense. This doesn't quite line up All the you know what's the theme? Where are we going with all this? It was this long letter and I essentially was like, okay, I'm going to have to kind of start from scratch here again, and they gave me a very tight window. It was like we need to see the revision and I think it was like five weeks. I was like you're joking, right, like that. I just spent two years writing this and now I'm going to rewrite it in five weeks. And they were like no, you're fine, go for it. And I was so stressed out because I couldn't even imagine doing that in such a short amount of time. But the truth, I turned it in earlier than that and then you go through the next round. Now we're going to go through and start doing all these line edits. This time you only have a week. A week that's not possible. Well, it was possible and sometimes they'd have a turnaround of like we need this by Friday or we need you to go through this and could you get it? You know, it was like the timeline got smaller and smaller and smaller as we went along, smaller as we went along.
Speaker 1:And then, if you notice, like authors who have a series, the next book usually comes out the next year. So it's like one a year will come out in that series, because once the author is done, then it's into the hands of all these other people and that takes months for them to do all the covers and all the final blah, blah, blah. But your main work as the author is done up front with that big rewrite in a very short amount of time. And so I realized like I have got to learn how to write quickly and not freak out and have to be like I have to stay up all night. And I did.
Speaker 1:And Disney bought my next series. It was a middle grade series and I knew up front I had given them the idea it was called the classroom and I sold that on an idea over lunch. It was so, it was crazy, it was so like cliche, la, like, over lunch I sold it to the editor and on my idea, basically we wanted to do like the office, the show, except set in the classroom. So we wanted to do like a mockumentary in class. And Then my agent was there and she said how many books would you like to have in the series? And literally she was like let's do four and could you get the first draft done by? It was like I don't know two months, three months, and I was like mm-hmm. And then I went home and freaked out and then, sure enough, I did. I got the first draft in and what editors are experiencing is that they, they have all this experience and they can see that people can write much quicker than we ever imagined those of us who've gone into it on our and we have to learn that. And so if that fear of volume, if our kids can get over the fear of volume when they're younger, the better off they'll be when things happen in the future and they have projects they need to do and there's a quick turnaround it happens all the time, right? Any any business you're in, you'll often have something you have to do quickly and so giving them that confidence that okay, I can pivot, I can do this. I've done this before.
Speaker 1:And then a little serendipity struck and while I was planning out what I wanted to say in this podcast, I came across this article popped up and it was about RL Stine. And RL Stine wrote you know, all the Goosebumps books, and there are probably 17 million of them. I don't know the exact number, but that might be it. And I'm going to read you a couple paragraphs from this article, and this is sort of his advice to young writers At his peak, rl Stine was cranking out a Goosebumps book every month.
Speaker 1:That's not an exaggeration. In two weeks I can write a Goosebumps book. It's like factory work, he said in a BuzzFeed interview. But don't mistake speed for sloppiness. Writing fast forced him to stay in the flow, avoid overthinking and treat perfectionism like the monster it is. Fast drafting also keeps the momentum alive, especially important when you're writing stories meant to grip young readers with short attention spans.
Speaker 1:So Stein recommends setting a daily word count. Mm-hmm sound familiar. For him it's 2,000 words a day, for you maybe it's 500. The point is to build rhythm and complete the task, because you can't revise a blank page but you can polish a messy one. So daily word counts that's the other part with my workshop. That we do is that the kids set their own goals and they do a line length goal.
Speaker 1:I don't. I mean you could do word count but you'd have to teach them how to highlight it and get it and go into Google docs and do that. Blah, blah, blah. I don't. I mean you could do word count but you'd have to teach them how to highlight it and get it and go into Google Docs and do that. Blah, blah, blah. I don't do that. I do a line length.
Speaker 1:So they start that. They just make a goal for that day. They draw a line how far they think they could get to and then see if they can get past that line. And if they did, then they get their little whatever star or something on their chart that they're charting all this so they can see am I writing a little bit more each time? If not no big deal, you know, some days we're off, that's okay. But they start to realize that volume is also important. And I know that can feel weird for us as teachers because we're like but I only want quality. But you cannot get to quality until we clear out the pipes and we get out the junk and we get to the point where we can decide OK, what's working, what's not working, because we don't know what's working if there's nothing on the page. What's working if there's nothing on the page? Now you might be thinking are the students really going to buy into all of this if I'm making them write this much? And maybe not 100% of them, but in my experience, yes, absolutely the majority of them are now going to flip into engaged writers. It's kind of a bold statement, but that is exactly what's happened and that's what so many teachers have been telling me.
Speaker 1:And I got a letter from a homeschool parent. I have a lot of homeschool parents doing this now. So if you're doing it as a homeschool parent and we haven't talked, email me. I'd love to hear your experience. And one mom wrote and just said I just wanted to tell you that my son does not like writing, he hates it. I started your program and we just started with the quick writes, so those warmups that we do, and now he's just he loves it and now writing is his favorite thing to do every day. And now he's been asking for a workshop session every day and the younger sibling, who's in second grade, got jealous and said I want to do it too. And so now she's somehow running the program for a second grader and a sixth grader all at the same time. So that volume, when it's combined with you know some thoughtfulness about how you engage them.
Speaker 1:I do find that just every day here's a, here's a prompt, it doesn't quite land as well there. There does need to be some structure and some routine to it, and I discovered that the images when there's different perspectives obvious in there, like you could be. It could be a picture of um, a head of broccoli who's in the kitchen making soup, making soup, and I have one of a big fish who goes to lunch and someone serves him sushi and he's crying. So what's, what point of view are you going to use there? Are you going to be the waitress? Are you going to be the fish Are you going to? You could be the sushi, you could be the chopsticks, like.
Speaker 1:It teaches them to think outside of the box of who is telling this story. And the person who's telling the story is the one who dictates the voice. The voice typically isn't just your own style of writing. It is. If you are writing a text or you're writing a diary entry about yourself, then it's your voice. But the cool thing about voice is trying to show them that you can get into the mind of someone or something different and figure out how would they say this, and they just absolutely love that.
Speaker 1:And if you're just parachuting in and you've just kind of discovered my program and what I'm doing, what can you do right away? Because some people feel like they need to start this whole thing at the beginning of the year. I will say I've had a lot of teachers who started it after winter break. They did the halfway mark. I had one at spring break. She even finished it the last year and she saw huge growth just in that last quarter. It was crazy. So you could do it at any time of the year, but if you want something for tomorrow, I would change up how you do your warm-ups.
Speaker 1:I would suggest starting with creating a compound or a complex sentence or a compound complex, with creating a compound or a complex sentence or a compound complex and getting that perfect and then offering them a really cool image that they can start, you know, dabbling with with voice from different perspectives, so that they have fun with it and they start to want to share their writing. That's the natural thing is that those quick writes are like, oh, I want to share their writing. That's the natural thing is that those quick writes are like, oh, oh, I want to share mine. And sometimes they can. You can just have them turn in their trio and set a timer and say I'm going to give you 90 seconds for you all to share a line or a paragraph from what you just wrote, and they could do it that way. Or I've done it where I've just pulled numbers.
Speaker 1:Pull, do those. You know the sticks, the equity sticks, this. Pop those popsicle sticks in a jar and you pull someone's name and two people could share out to the whole class. They've also sometimes, when they get to workshop that week, they have loved one of the quick writes so much that they wanted to take that one and expand it and keep going with it, which is amazing because that's a natural situation where they're starting to learn how to revise and add and elaborate on something they've already done and that they already love. And so they're super motivated and they get that muscle memory of like how to revise and not be scared of it. And it's also really cool when you have a kid say, I want to revise one of my, then consider you know, before I teach essays, maybe I need to teach really strong writing skills so that you're not spending that time, those 10 days during essay time, teaching them you know, here's how you're going to write a hook. We've done it over and over on the way up. And so they get so excited because they've already practiced hook writing and it's so cool when you see their writing change by doing the hook exercises.
Speaker 1:And then the thesis is actually a compound sentence and I say have you all written a compound sentence? Mm-hmm, every day. So that's all it is and here are the rules. You're going to just say something, should something, because blank, blank, blank. Oh, it just makes it so much easier.
Speaker 1:If you are practicing the skills nonstop on the way up to it, you keep your essays to a short amount of time, because that's what real authors do, even if you're not becoming a fiction author. If you're writing for a newspaper or writing for anything my husband's a photojournalist deadlines are a real thing and sometimes the deadlines are so short for writing an article. We need this article by this afternoon. They have to learn how to get over inertia. They need to keep going and have momentum. Now, if you're stuck in a 4x4 classroom some of you might be at school districts where this is mandated like this there are ways to stick with what it is that they are requiring.
Speaker 1:As far as the reading goes, I have a certain way that I have students respond to literature, but that's a different one. But the writing itself you can take control and really figure out. If you have nine weeks to work with before they're going to turn in that essay, you're not spending nine weeks writing an essay. You're spending those weeks getting confidence. You're spending those weeks learning the writing skills. Practice, practice, practice. And then boom, we're going to write an essay, we're going to write it quickly, efficiently, and it's going to be amazing. And then they're done, and then they share it out and they start to realize like writing and then reading it to an audience is actually enjoyable, and that's what's going to change your writing program. I hope you enjoyed this one and I will see you in the next episode. Be sure to follow Beyond the Paragraph. Wherever you get your podcasts 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 structuredwritingteachercom.