How to Teach Writing and Maintain Teacher Life Balance

We’ve become a meme: a picture of a teacher bringing all their grading home in a pick up truck or carrying a stack of papers taller than the teacher is… Well, I’m out: I refuse to normalize sacrificing my time outside the classroom for grading. 

Now, I’ll be honest. I did not transition to this line of thinking easily and it seemed impossible with nearly 200 students (both high school and college students) that I had taught to write detailed elaboration and analysis and, to my extended grading dismay, were following through with flying colors. Yay! They were writing and doing well; but my weekends and evenings were taken over by grading all of these essays and giving extensive feedback (that realistically only a quarter of them used or looked through). Sound familiar?

Something had to change, so I started my favorite hobby: research! I found lots of different techniques and tried each one out to see what worked and what needed adjusting or tossed out. Now, I can share those things with you, so that your students can still write and get feedback, but you get to keep your weekends. 

In this article, we will discuss one of the possible techniques of teaching writing. Learn not only how to teach writing skills, but more importantly, how to create systems that will allow you to have a better teacher work life balance. 

Techniques of Teaching Writing

There are a variety of different techniques you can use to teach writing. Below are some of the ones that I found most effective at not just helping students with their writing skills, but also with my own teacher work/life balance. 

1. Grading Using Rubrics: 
• One of the biggest caveats to teaching ELA is that we have tons of essays to grade and they all need feedback in order to help students. Use grading rubrics to both give written feedback and save you time. See my rubric here. 
2. Stations
• Use stations to increase student engagement. They are versatile, i.e. can be used in a variety of different ways, and can allow students to pinpoint exactly where they need to focus in their writing. 
3. Mini Lessons: 
• Incorporate mini lessons into station time or even use them right after bellwork to review concepts you know students need a little more help with (or to bring everyone up to speed). When using mini lessons in conjunction with stations, you also get more 1:1 time with students.
• Try out this mini lesson on thesis writing to help your students with their thesis creation. 
4. Conferences: 
• 1:1 conferences or even group conferences can be so helpful for improving students’ writing and their confidence about their own skills. Having templates to help you get through these conferences, also helps you give efficient feedback to each student. My conference templates, that I use in my classroom, can be found here.

Today, we will be focusing on Grading Rubrics, though you can see the whole series by signing up for our newsletter here.

Essay Grading Rubrics

Grading Rubrics can save so much time and energy when it comes to essays. We all know that they help us align to standards and show students where they are with reaching the objectives or outcomes of the course. But, did you know that they can also help you give more extensive feedback for students as well?

I have used a variety of rubrics in my time teaching high school. Each one is really great for each individual purpose. I have one for showing standard growth (especially for items that may not be graded or we are just starting a new standard), one for a specific essay skill that we have been practicing, 4 for the different parts of group project grades, and commentary rubrics.

Commentary rubrics can be digital on a LMS platform such as Canvas where you import the rubric and you can either click from the boxes or you can choose to add your own commentary. A little known fact is that you can also save comments that you make most often (or are things you are focusing your feedback on) to the drop down menu for each criteria and use them again and again.  This is honestly my favorite feature in Canvas.

I also made a printable version of this to use within grading conferences and writing conferences with students. See my printable version here.

See more about using rubrics to grade with students in my Conferences article here. 

Goal: Keeping Grading at School

You can use rubrics digitally, in grading, or as a writing process check-in. I love how they are able to be used in so many different ways AND make my grading feedback a little easier/faster. 

If you are looking for even more ways to easily incorporate writing instruction, you can look into the Writing Concisely Course I have available in the Life Skills Academy. The course includes a full ebook, activities for each strategy, and a video for each lesson in the course. Plus, you get the Google Slide Deck, so you can teach these strategies using ready-made curriculum with or without the videos depending on how best your students learn. 

Only want the ebook of notes and resources? Head over to my Teachers Pay Teachers Store to get the ebook today!  Only you know what will help your students best, I am just here to give you ready-made resources that can lessen your prep time.  

Let me know in the comments below what you feel you need more help with when teaching writing to high school students and I will be sure to see what I can do to support you.