Strengthening Students' Writing Skills While Significantly Decreasing Grading Time (Grades 6-12) Presented by Joel Clements National Presenter, Author and Acclaimed 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 strategies and techniques for assigning and evaluating student writing that maximize student involvement
• Specific, step-by-step methods to ensure a greater amount of quality writing in multiple genres while decreasing your assessment time
• Fitting it all in … How to teach your numerous ELA requirements, achieve high-quality writing results from all your students and reduce your take-home paper load

Practical Ideas and Strategies

Do you sometimes feel that you are spending more time reading and grading your students’ writing than they did before they turned it in? Do you often spend countless hours planning to find creative ways to fit in all the skills that are now required, only to spend even more hours reading papers that are missing critical elements? If so, 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 which 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

1. Strengthen Your Students’ Writing Skills
   Proven approaches for strengthening your students’ writing … Practical strategies to get powerful results while creating a productive learning environment
   
2. 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
   
3. 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
   
4. Learn Creative Approaches to Improve Student Engagement and Success With Writing
   Move “outside the box” to re-engage students with writing, and to find exhilarating and challenging ways to improve their writing
   
5. 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
   
6. Utilize Powerful Online Resources to Strengthen Lessons, Collaboration And Assessments
   Explore online assessment resources for student learning and develop valuable strategies for using videos, images and other online environments to enhance lesson delivery, assessments and student success
   
7. 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
   
8. The Keys to Practically and Successfully Teach Complete Distance Learning Lessons
   Develop standards-based grading and flexible assessments to clarify learning and simplify your planning
   
9. 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
   
10. 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

• 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 working more efficiently and effectively spending more time collaborating and creating, and less time grading papers
• 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:

It’s Monday morning. You gave up most of your Sunday to grade essays. Again. You handed them back five minutes ago, and they’ve looked at the score and moved on. We’ve all been there. Teaching writing effectively may be the single most difficult challenge we, as teachers, face. In my work with teachers, I hear over and over, “We’re asked to do the impossible.” I have come to believe that – in my experience, that of my colleagues, and of teachers I meet all over the country – we are often trained in methods of teaching and assessing writing that are time-consuming and usually counter-productive.

As an ELA teacher at the secondary level I have faced these same frustrations many times. Over the last 10 years, I have developed numerous methods that have made my teaching more effective, given me my weekends back and made my teaching more enjoyable and rewarding. My grading is now faster and easier, and I have discovered my assignments and feedback have become far more substantive and have greater impact. Consequently, I have developed this new seminar to share proven ways you can organize your instruction to fit more into class time, reduce your paper load and most importantly, significantly improve student writing.

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 timesaving 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 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 with Other Educators
This seminar provides a wonderful opportunity for participants to share ideas with other educators interested in increasing the behavior and learning of their students.

Semester Credit Option
Up to four graduate level professional development credits are available with an additional fee and completion of follow-up practicum activities. Details for direct enrollment with University of Massachusetts Global, a nonprofit affiliate, will be available at this program.

Meet Inservice Requirements
Participants of both the Live Online Seminar and those completing the Recorded Version online can receive a certificate of participation that may be used to verify five continuing education hours. State CEUs are available for both versions of the course. For specific details, visit www.ber.org/ceus.

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