Teachers who have been in the classroom for a number of years will agree upon a trend that has become somewhat prevalent – the vocabulary void. It’s not that students are reading less, it’s just that they typically are not reading “text rich” content that helps them to augment their vocabulary. Given this phenomenon, we need to bridge the chasm to help cultivate their academic voices. In this module, you’ll learn a number of tricks so that you can host your own word study academies in your class – everything from vocabulary journals to gamification strategies; voice lessons to teeter-totter balancing the academic (Tier II vocabulary) with the colloquial and vernacular.

What do you have in your teacher toolbox to ensure that every student has relative mastery of the basics such as grammar, punctuation and syntax – and then what about cultivating all that nuance “stuff” like voice, rhythm, and flow? In this module, we’ll tackle a ton of theory and technique to ensure that all of your students have a solid foundation upon which to approach all of their compositions, but we’ll also explore how to get the elusive “sophistication point” that is featured on most rubrics. While these lessons may sound pedantic and overly academic, we’ll look at several gamification methods – everything from incorporating children’s literature to boardgames. In essence, we will be building writers from the ground up so that they can continue to grow and flourish in all of their writing endeavors.

Getting students to sustain a clear line of reasoning is yeoman’s work. But as you’ll see in this module, when you equip your writers with an accessible and effective template, achieving the goal of cogency is actually pretty easy. We will explore how to teach inductive and deductive reasoning, but we will also take a deep dive into the templates of the declarative and inverted thesis, as well as the syllogistic method – the template we use for constructing the body paragraphs across the expository modes. Yet again, we will simplify our instruction and gamify it with children’s literature and a number of engaging exercises.

In this module, we will explore how to construct essays rooted in literary analysis with a special focus on poetry. I will “Bob Ross” my instruction and demonstrate how to pull the strings of my templates while highlighting a few classic and contemporary poems.

Different genre … same old templates. Even though we will switch our focus away from poetry and turn it toward novels and plays – nothing changes. We will yet again declare or invert the thesis. And we will tackle the body paragraphs syllogistically. In the module, I yet again will “Bob Ross” a number of exemplars and models to demystify the process.

Historically, rhetorical analysis has been principally housed in AP Language & Composition, but in recent years – educators have seen the need to equip students with this skill in their other classes as well. We will look at a wide array of texts and tackle how to construct rhetorical analysis essays from start to finish. In this module, we will also look at a discussion modality I invented known as Plato’s Play-Doh Discussion.

In addition to straightforward argumentative writing tasks, there is also a push is to give students more opportunities to try their hand at synthesis and research. The bulk of what I assign in my 101 & 105 courses is synthesis and research. It is true – our students, if they go to college, will unquestionably write a ton of these types of papers. In this module, we will unpack how to construct essays within this expository mode while yet again manipulating my templates.

Closing out literary analysis, we will explore a few short stories. This is the cool thing about my templates – new genre … bust out the same old templates. I’ll “Bob Ross” yet again how to invert the thesis and construct the body paragraphs syllogistically.

The bane of the ELA teacher’s existence is the sheer volume of grading we are tasked to do. But here’s the thing – there are far better ways than being a red-ink-hawk scrawling endless comments in the margins of student’s drafts. In this module, you will learn 25 alternative grading methods. Not only will you reclaim your evenings and weekends, but your students will grow and mature as writers simply by sharing the onus of responsibility. In the traditional grading paradigm, teachers do 99% of the work. This is primarily why it is an ineffective learning tool. These alternatives not only give your students more accountability, but they clearly delineate areas of strengths and weakness.