Strengthening Students' Writing Skills While Significantly Decreasing Grading Time (Grades 6-12)

Presented by Joel Clements
National Presenter, Author andAcclaimed English/Language Arts Teacher

Specifically Designed for Educators Serving Grades 6-12: English/Language Arts Teachers, Classroom Teachers, Content Area Teachers, Literacy Coaches, Special Education Staff and Administrators

New and innovative strategies to dramatically reduce time spent grading while giving meaningful, specific feedback
Practical, ready-to-use methods and techniques for assigning and evaluating student writing that maximize student involvement and autonomy
Dynamic, powerful strategies to engage 21st-Century students and make writing more meaningful
Effective, hands-on tools for the age of AI and making the ethical use of AI meaningful for us and our students

Practical Ideas and Strategies

As technology and learning continue to change faster and faster, it gets more difficult to make writing meaningful for our students, and to combat apathy and disengagement. Amidst to it all, we often find ourselves – buried once again in stacks of papers – feeling like we are spending more time on our students' work than they are. In this seminar, you'll learn numerous practical ways to turn that around! You will discover practical ways to drastically reduce your grading time while making your feedback more strategically effective. Paired with this, you will learn new and innovative methods for taking your students' writing to the next level with daily, easy-to-use instructional techniques that will work in your classroom. Joel Clements, acclaimed national writing expert and experienced secondary level ELA teacher, will demonstrate dozens of ways to strengthen the writing skills of all students in Grades 6-12. You will learn how to more effectively implement peer feedback, discussion techniques and student conferences in your class time that will give your students the immediate feedback they need to revise and improve their writing on the spot.

Joel will share dozens of new and innovative ways to reduce your paper grading load while increasing your students' writing skills. From your struggling students to your more advanced writers, these tools work! Join Joel for a day filled with dozens of practical and doable strategies to strengthen your writing instruction and see powerful results!

Ten Key Benefits of Attending

Strengthen Your Students' Writing Skills
Proven approaches for strengthening your students' writing … Practical strategies to get powerful results while creating a productive learning environment
Differentiate Your Writing Instruction
Learn ways to create a cycle of student ownership and proficiency-based writing to better meet the diverse levels of students' writing skills
Reduce the Time You Spend Grading Student Writing
Learn proven strategies to significantly reduce the time you spend grading while increasing all of your students' writing skills
Learn Creative Approaches to Improve Student Engagement and Success With Writing
Move "outside the box" to re-engage students with multimodal writing, and to find exhilarating and challenging ways to improve their writing
Provide More Effective Feedback to Improve Students' Writing
Move beyond that time-consuming essay grading with minimal learning-curve … Techniques for giving more meaningful, more practical feedback
Utilize Generative AI as a Powerful Tool
Explore multiple strategies for guiding students through the ethical use of AI, as well as for utilizing it as a resource to augment and accelerate our lesson design and feedback
Utilize Timesaving Ways to Assess all Genres of Writing
Discover new, more time-efficient ways to teach students how to produce and critique narrative, persuasive, informative/explanatory, and creative writing
Explore Strategies to Make Writing Relevant and Meaningful to 21st-Century Learners
Develop lessons for students to practice traditional writing skills in dynamic, relevant platforms
Organize Your Writing Lessons to Increase Student Success
Develop strategies for flexible prepping and planning to help your students become more confident and competent writers
Substantially Increase the Time You Spend Actually Teaching Writing
Receive extensive ideas that will allow you to immediately spend less time grading and more time in creative instruction and conferencing … Yes, less time grading and more time focusing on innovative ways to engage students in much higher levels of writing proficiency

Outstanding Strategies You Can Use Immediately

Here's what you'll learn:

Innovative ways to help your students increase the quality of their writing and enable you to fit in all the ELA standards you are required to teach
How to stop taking piles of papers home to grade and start using strategic feedback that your students really learn from
Practical, proven strategies to implement writing assessments in multiple writing genres
Outstanding, ready-to-use ideas for integrating multimodal writing assignments with your current writing program
How to get students more deeply engaged in the process of writing, leading to stronger finished products
How to give targeted feedback that reduces grading time and increases student progress
Proven tips for making AI an asset to the classroom, so you can spend more time collaborating and creating, and less time trying to catch AI-generated work
How to increase students' confidence in writing and focus less on grades and more on achieving substantive personal goals
How to get students serious about peer feedback
Proven ways to teach students to read and revise their writing using interactive rubrics that are much more than checklists
Model lesson plans you can use or adapt to successfully integrate all the writing skills students need

A Message From Your Seminar Leader

Dear Colleague:

Teaching writing is really hard.
I know. That's not a bold statement or a dazzling catchy opener to draw you in. As a hook? Not so great. But that's what it comes down to, isn't it? It can be frustrating, exciting, overwhelming, profound. In fact, if one thinks about it too much, on a logical level? Teaching someone else to write well is, well, impossible. And yet we do it. Every day.

And the blessing/curse of it is that it's also deeply important. Writing is communication and critical thinking. It's the cornerstone of education and the bedrock of a functioning society. Nothing less.

And because it is so big, and because we are asked to do so much, we can get locked into patterns of teaching that overwhelm us – and they start to hurt us and hurt our students. So much of what we do as teachers puts unnecessary strain on us and our students. And so, we must revisit them. We can find ways to refine our practice and spark new life into it. To create kinetic, creative lessons; to give meaningful feedback; to create critical thinkers; to develop students with critical agency.

And to do it without burying ourselves in work at home.

In this seminar, that's what we're here to do. To ask those challenging questions and look at strategies and resources to revitalize and enhance what we already do. Because teaching writing is fun. And challenging. And profound.

My goal is that you will return to your classroom with a wealth of practical strategies and tools for assigning and assessing writing to significantly improve your students' writing and greatly reduce the time you spend grading papers.

I look forward to meeting you at the seminar. The day will be packed with exciting new practices, strategies and perspectives that will enable you to teach and assess writing in creative new ways.

Sincerely,
Joel Clements

P.S. You will also receive an extensive digital resource handbook filled with practical, proven strategies, outstanding resources and time-saving digital tools you can use immediately.

Who Should Attend

Educators Serving Grades 6-12: English/Language Arts Teachers, Classroom Teachers, Content Area Teachers, Literacy Coaches, Special Education Staff and Administrators

Special Benefits of Attending

Extensive Digital Resource Handbook
Each participant will receive an extensive digital resource handbook giving you access to countless strategies. The handbook includes:

Practical, ready-to-use strategies and techniques to strengthen student writing and significantly reduce your take-home papers to grade
Motivational engagement strategies that can be used to focus your class at the beginning of periods or as entire lessons
Effective, accessible resources for helping your students meet your state's standards for writing
Powerful strategies using a variety of multimodal tools to increase your students' motivation, involvement and success as writers in an age of constantly evolving technology
Proven activities that generate active participation in writing and editing, promote higher-level critical thinking and motivate students to grow as writers
Sample lesson plans that will help you "fit it all in"

For in-person seminars, registrants will also receive a printed copy of the resource handbook as long as their registration is received in the BER office at least 15 calendar days before the event.

Share Ideas
This seminar provides a wonderful opportunity for participants to share ideas with other educators interested in enhancing the writing skills of their students.

Consultation Available
Joel Clements will be available for consultation regarding your questions and the unique needs of your own program.

On-Site Training Guarantee

BER is not a booking agency that just finds a presenter who presents on the topic you requested. Rather, we only recommend highly experienced BER presenters who have consistently received outstanding evaluations from educators attending their trainings.

Consequently, we provide a strong program guarantee.

We guarantee you'll be fully satisfied or you'll owe us nothing after your on-site training event.