The Road to Improving Student Writing

In the last blog post, Writing Strategies Series #2, I shared an in-depth look at teaching your middle school ELA students how to analyze strong, medium, and weak writing samples to strengthen their abilities to identify the characteristics of writing and become better at self-assessing their writing compositions.

In today’s blog post, I am going to focus on my favorite pre-writing tool, the PEEL Writing Strategy. Getting your students to organize their writing into a well-written and easy-to-understand composition can be challenging. I can’t even begin to name all of the other writing strategies and organizers I tried before finding PEEL. Trust me, it was A LOT, but I could never find one that fully helped my students.

Testing Out the Better Answers Strategy

In my third year of teaching, my middle school became a TAP school. Schoolwide student strategies are a big part of the TAP program. Our master teachers came to the Elective team and asked us to field test a new writing strategy, the Better Answer Writing Strategy. Better Answers, more commonly known as the hamburger method, proved to be an awesome starting point for helping our middle school students create better-organized paragraphs.

Although our students improved their topic sentence (top bun) and conclusion sentence (bottom bun), the downside to Better Answers was that the middle of the paragraph was just as messy as your favorite fast food burger in the majority of our students’ paragraphs. We needed something else to help students include relevant text evidence and fully explain the text evidence in their writing responses.

Searching for a New Solution

Once I identified the problem, I decided to start looking for a new way to help our students improve their entire writing compositions. I spent a lot of time searching on Pinterest and Google before I came across the PEEL Writing Strategy. It seemed like the perfect fit that would complement the work we had already done with the Better Answers Writing Strategy. PEEL followed a similar format, but it clearly defined the middle part of the paragraph response- the evidence and explanation.

I began to field test PEEL with just my Literacy Enrichment students to see how it would impact their writing before we rolled it out to all of the students at our school. It wasn’t an overnight fix, but even from that first writing assignment, I could see the positive impact that it was having on my students. The messiness of the middle of the paragraph was getting cleaner and looked more like the hamburgers you see in the commercials instead of what you actually get at the local fast food places. It was like something just clicked for the majority of them and PEEL was the missing piece that they needed to help them write well-organized responses.

Finding the PERFECT Solution!

After a few weeks of use in just my classroom, we rolled out PEEL to all of the Elective team members’ classrooms. The success that I was seeing with my students became the norm for the majority of my Elective team. Each week in our cluster meetings, we would focus on the group of students that each teacher had selected and compare their weekly writing responses to their previous ones from the weeks before. We saw growth and improvement across the board, regardless of the student’s abilities and levels.

PEEL officially became our school-wide writing strategy during the second half of that school year. I worked alongside our master teachers to lead professional development sessions with all our teachers to show them the success that our team had with field-testing PEEL. I also taught them how to successfully implement the PEEL Writing Strategy in their ELA, Math, Science, and Social Studies classrooms.

You may be asking yourself what exactly is PEEL and how can you use it with your students. I’m going to share all of that with you now. Plus you’ll want to stick around until the end of this blog post to grab your FREE PEEL Writing Strategy Guide.

What is the PEEL Writing Strategy?

One Paragraph Response:

P(oint/Purpose/Position): The main point, purpose, or position of your composition
E(vidence): 2-3 pieces of text evidence to support the point, purpose, or position
E(xplanation): Sentences that explain how your evidence (text evidence, examples, data, etc.) support/connect to the point, purpose, or position
L(ink Back to the Questions): Summarize your response and link back to your point, purpose, or position

Body Paragraphs in a Multi-Composition Response/Essay:

P(oint): The main point of your body paragraph
E(vidence): 2-3 pieces of text evidence that supports the point of your body paragraph
E(xplanation): Sentences that explain how your evidence (2-3 pieces of text evidence, examples, data, etc.) support /connect to the point of your body paragraph
L(ink to the next paragraph): The last sentence should link the point of this body paragraph to your next body paragraph or conclusion

The Benefits of Using PEEL in the ELA Classroom

The PEEL Writing Strategy is a great tool for you to use in your ELA classroom. Think of PEEL as a roadmap for your students. It provides them with a clear structure to follow for their writing responses. This not only boosts their organization skills but also makes their ideas shine. In addition, PEEL encourages students to think critically – they’re not just throwing words on paper; they’re crafting solid points, backing them up with evidence, and explaining why it all matters.

Plus, it’s not a one-size-fits-all deal – whether they’re working on essays, responses, or creative pieces, PEEL is flexible and ready to roll. Students end up with not just better writing skills, but a toolkit for expressing themselves confidently in any writing scenario.

Another bonus to using PEEL is that it is a simple strategy for students to learn and master. With enough practice using PEEL, students will begin to automatically include the elements of the strategy each time they write. This will help them on benchmark exams, state testing, and other writing opportunities where they will not have access to a strategy organizer and anchor chart.

Ways to Use the PEEL Writing Strategy in the ELA Classroom

The PEEL Writing Strategy is very useful for different types of writing in the ELA classroom. You can use PEEL to help your middle school students with various writing tasks, ensuring clarity, organization, and impactful expression in their compositions.

My favorite thing about PEEL is that the format of the strategy is so simple that students can easily use it for any writing assignment or text-dependent question.

Here are just a few ways that you can incorporate PEEL into your ELA classroom:

Literary Analysis Responses
Character Analysis
Constructed Responses
Argumentative Writing
Debates
Reading Comprehension Questions
Responses to Text (Fiction and Nonfiction)

Ready to Dive In? I’ve Got You Covered!

Whether you’re a seasoned ELA teacher or just starting your journey, implementing the PEEL Writing Strategy is a breeze. I’ve created a PEEL Writing Strategy Guide that includes anchor charts, teacher models, student writing samples, and blank organizer templates.

I’ll guide you through PEEL with step-by-step instructions and provide practical tips to help you begin your journey and easily implement this writing strategy in your classroom.

Let’s embark on this writing adventure together – with PEEL, success is just a paragraph away!

Click here to grab your FREE PEEL Writing Strategy Guide

P.S.- Stay tuned for the next blog post in this Writing Strategies Series where I will show you how to combine the PEEL Writing Strategy and the Four Square Organizer to help middle school students create multi-paragraph compositions.