Not Your Granny’s Grammar: Bringing Joy Back to Writing and Grammar | Patty McGee

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Writing is one of the most cognitively demanding tasks that we ask our students to do.
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Pair that with grammar instruction that hasn't changed much since your grandparents were in the classroom, and you get a recipe for avoidance.
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Today we're exploring engaging approaches to grammar and writing instruction that remove the shame and stigma often attached to the grammar police mindset and instead bring joy, clarity, and confidence back.
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Welcome to the brighter side of education, research, innovation, and resources.
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I'm your host, Dr.
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Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education.
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In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it.
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What are the variables?
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And how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes?
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For decades, research has shown that isolated grammar instruction in the form of worksheets, memorization, and correcting errors out of context does not improve student writing.
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Students may perform well on grammar exercises, but those skills rarely transfer into authentic writing.
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Organizations like the Writing Revolution have emphasized this for years.
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Their approach centers on explicit instruction in sentence structure, embedded directly into content learning, not as a separate grammar program.
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The book, The Writing Revolution, written by Judith Hotchman and Natalie Wexler, expanded these principles into a structured framework that helps teachers apply these strategies across grade levels.
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And that's exactly what our guest Patty McGee helps teachers achieve.
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As an educator and literacy consultant, Patty's work focuses on simplifying and energizing writing and grammar instruction.
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Her books, feedback that moves writers forward, and writers workshop made simple offer practical, research-aligned ways to strengthen student writing without overwhelming them.
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Her newest book, Not Your Granny's Grammar, reimagines grammar as something powerful, joyful, and fully connected to writing, building student confidence through small, meaningful shifts.
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Patty, welcome to the brighter side of education.
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Thank you for having me.
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So, how did you start to get into grammar instruction and to reimagine how it can be designed?
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Well, this is a decades-long creation of when I was a first-year, second-year teacher, and I was doing a lot to grow my literacy block and my instruction in the literacy block and opportunities for students.
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And I was starting to see growth from my perspective, both in my instruction and in students.
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And then when we got to the obligatory grammar instruction, it was just a black hole within my literacy block.
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It just sucked all the life and interest and engagement out of both me and the students.
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And I was like, there has to be a better way.
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And it's 31 years later, and I finally have like something where I feel really confident that it's cohesive and simple, and that the engagement that I've seen with students with this approach has been really quite remarkable.
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Your book, Not Your Granny's Grammar, I absolutely love the title.
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You have an outline that helps teachers move beyond just drills and memorization towards a more meaningful grammar study approach.
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And I truly appreciate that because I taught the younger ones in definitely drills and memorization, which is never applicable in reality when they go to transfer that knowledge.
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So, what should teachers keep from traditional grammar instruction and what should they let go of?
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And what kind of new additions make grammar instruction more relevant and effective today?
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So, number one, I we want to have as educators a mindset shift.
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In the days of Granny's grammar, there were experiences like identification, memorization, filling out worksheets, and then there was immediate expectation of perfect usage.
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And when it wasn't perfectly used, there was no time to learn, like there is in many other areas of that we can be learning in.
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It was corrected.
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Everything was corrected.
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And that type of approach to grammar instruction, that like fill out a worksheet, immediate expectation, and then correcting it just isn't how most people learn.
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So many did.
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I mean, there was there are a fraction of teachers who feel really strong in terms of their grammar know-how.
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But I have found in my experiences and some informal research that I've been doing that the majority of teachers do not feel comfortable with grammar and therefore makes it very hard to teach.
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And so if we shift our mindset to we don't have to know everything about grammar, and that students having multiple entry points to learning grammar and practicing and playing with grammar, that through that over time, multiple entry points, we see that kind of growth happening.
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If we think of the like a painter's paintbrush, that is similar to what grammar is for a writer.
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And when you think about it, that painter really never stops experimenting and learning about different brush sizes and strokes and different ways of creating on the page.
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Same goes for grammar.
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It's not something that we're going to learn perfectly forever unless perhaps we're a copywriter and we have a set of rules that we're following from a certain organization.
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But really, grammar is style.
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Grammar is making meaning on the page.
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And we use grammar differently depending on our audience, depending on what we're writing.
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And so those are some big shifts in thinking, but also shifts in experience for students.
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That is very helpful.
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So what I did was I started to think what is missing from grammar instruction that other learning experiences include.
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Oftentimes I think about what am I doing to learn something, but not in school?
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Like what are the natural things that I do as a learner?
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One of the things I love to do is refinish furniture with chalk paint and waxes.
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And I started by just getting curious about these paints and these waxes and then reaching out to experts that have stores that teach this, or I would look at videos, I would look for feedback, like I did this little bit, what do you think?
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And then I would experiment a lot before I actually put paint to furniture.
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And I often would pause and reflect like, how did that work?
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What is it that I still want to learn?
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What is it that I know for sure?
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And yes, I memorize, I memorize different combinations of colors and ways of applying the waxes and all of that, but it's only one part of my learning process.
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So another shift for us as educators is thinking about how many entry points are we giving into grammatical concepts for students to grow that grammar know-how.
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And so one of those entry points is the 10-minute mini lesson, mighty.
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So simple, clear, and powerful.
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Those really give us a nice little entry point.
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You're coming in, you're coming out, you're making it fun.
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How can teachers use a short 10-minute grammar study routine to make grammar instruction both manageable and meaningful?
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Well, first of all, we want this to happen in tiny snippets across time.
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So we call our approach grammar study because the same way I study these paints and waxes, I want the same entry points for students.
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And so we can have 10 minutes three to five times a week over, say, six weeks with a few related concepts.
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I recommend starting this approach, and it doesn't have to start at the beginning of the year, it can start whenever we choose, but we start with sentences, simple, compound, and complex sentences and compare them, learn how to build them, learn how to combine and expand.
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And through different experiences, one of them is the explicit mini lesson where I'll teach you how to and say turning two simple sentences into a compound sentence.
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But before that, kids are already getting curious.
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I give them, I identify.
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Here are simple sentences, here are compound sentences.
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What do you see are the same and different about them?
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I just did this yesterday in a classroom and I heard lots of different things, lots of theories, and what is the same, what's different.
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And some of them were spot on, some of them were gesturing toward it, some of them were way off, but that doesn't matter because that wasn't a mastery moment.
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That was piquing our curiosity, just the same way that many science teachers begin a unit with phenomena.
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So we look, we get curious, and then we're ready for that explicit teaching of okay, here's what makes a simple sentence.
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And you need two of them to make a compound sentence.
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And I'm going to show you how.
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After that, we have time to play.
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And this might be my favorite part of this approach.
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It's not games where there's a winner or loser, it's grammar manipulatives, like the same concept we use in math.
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But this time we're using it in with grammar instruction where kids in partnerships play with certain concepts.
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The one that I taught with yesterday, I call Presto Chango.
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And that's where we started with simple sentences.
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And I gave students the fanboys or the coordinating conjunctions and a comma.
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And they had these sentence strips and they made multiple compound sentences using those manipulatives.
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So they weren't jumping right into their writing.
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There was that scaffold there for them.
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Yeah, I used to love doing centers with grammar.
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They've really gotten wonderful in the self-correcting puzzle pieces.
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There's a lot of ways to get kids excited about playing with it.
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So the things that you're doing, I just am so excited about because I just love to see joy and grammar.
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For instance, an article on Taylor Swift.
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I love this article.
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Okay.
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And you were talking about her lyrics, a Swifty, or what did you call it?
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A Faye of Tay or something.
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I think I had a bunch of different nicknames.
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Yeah.
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So you were talking about lyrics and how they can help students think more deeply about characters and author's intent and even their own writing.
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So, how can teachers use song lyrics like Taylor Swift's to help students analyze language and strengthen their understanding of grammar and craft?
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I really believe that one of the things that helps us learn grammar well is comparison.
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Taking song lyrics is like looking at poetry and thinking about the author's intent and their use of different types of elaboration, you know, the whole bucket of figurative language and how that can be pulled into our writing more conventionally and how they kind of complement each other.
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But I also like to take poems and add to them to see if we can turn the lyrics into full sentences that make sense and still have the integrity of the song.
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So it's a little brain teaser, but students do it together.
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What they come up with is entirely different from each other, but really fun.
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Many teachers have students who avoid writing or they shut down completely.
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And so, what advice do you have for re-engaging struggling or dormant writings as you refer to them and help them rebuild their confidence, especially when grammar feels overwhelming?
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Yes.
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Well, first following the grammar study approach, the last part of grammar study is co-creating reference tools that when we're writing, we can refer back to.
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So let's say we have simple, compound, and complex sentences.
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We have the six weeks and we've been following along with those different entry points that I described, including reflection, because that helps us know what uh students are kind of clinging to, that they're understanding, and also what's still a little bit confusing or what they wonder about, which are my favorites.
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And then we get to the point where we know enough.
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We're not going to know it all, but we know enough that we can co-create a tool.
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Maybe it's how to build those sentences or when to use them.
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The one I have in my book is a combination of both.
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And we use that to practice on writing that we've already written.
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Ideally, students would have some written from any subject area.
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And that little scaffold or stepping stone helps kids revise their writing intentionally, but it's also not the same pressure as starting from scratch.
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And so it helps with that application and it feels a little less daunting, a little less vulnerable.
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Can you give an example of that just to help me grasp it?
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Yeah.
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Yes.
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So a fourth grade classroom that was piloting this approach created a tool that said, okay, here's what a compound sentence looks like.
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Here are the times we might use a compound sentence, and here's how you can construct them.
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And then students went back into their writers' notebooks and just found an entry that they had in there, and they used their tool and their writing.
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And some kids even put like a line down the center.
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This is what it said, this is what it says now, or like had a page spread in their notebook, where the entry was, and then how this entry's been revised using the considering compound sentences.
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Nice.
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So now do they come up with what tools they feel that they need, or is there some guidance in that?
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Yeah, there's definitely guidance.
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It's something co-created through a process sometimes called shared writing and sometimes called co-authoring.
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And I like co-authoring.
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It takes a couple of days to finalize the tool, and we can always revise it as the year goes on.
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But having something that we've all had a hand in and knowing it well and not just being handed to them like an editing checklist or something like that, not to say those aren't good.
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It's just to say it may not remind kids how to use what we've learned.
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And so through the co-creation process as a class, in little snippets of time, then they have something that they can look to if it's up or pull out if it's nearby.
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And so that can really help with the grammar and writers who feel that very, very real sense of vulnerability that everyone who writes feels.
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Everybody feels something.
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Yes.
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So, how can those methods be used in different content areas where grammar isn't the main focus of instruction?
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Yeah, so very easily we can share these tools that have been co-created with other content areas.
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And I recommend to content area teachers not to worry about everything grammar, but to focus on one thing that's important to the content.
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And so let's say it's scientific writing and we want to make sure that complex sentences are used sparingly and compound sentences are used a little bit more often.
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And then simple sentences are often the ones that we might find are the most useful.
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And of course, as kids grow, they know and start to learn about different ways of using simple sentences that have length to them that are not compound or complex sentences, but can be chock full of information.
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As a content area teacher, if I have this tool and I want to make sure that students are focusing on sentence construction for meaning, I can focus on one little part and put that in my expectations.
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That's a really good idea.
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Do you see AI concerns with how kids are looking at grammar?
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Are you thinking about that?
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Yes, there's been a lot of ways.
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And at this current moment, AI does not capture our voices.
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No, at least 100%.
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You know, they try to sound like us, but really we're the deciders on what this grammar usage should look like because we have the audience in mind better than anything digital can.
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And so knowing grammar well, we can become critiques of something that is created using AI.
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We can do a side-by-side comparison, we can draft something, give it to AI to look at, look at their suggestions, compare them to what we have.
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And if we like them, we might take them and revise.
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And if I don't, I don't.
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Yeah.
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And so it's just a quicker way for me to get feedback than asking a human.
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Well, and I think also as adults, we don't necessarily have someone that's uh giving us feedback, uh, you know, or that we can bounce ideas off of.
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So for listeners who want to know more about grammar study and your work, where can they find your resources and your book, not your granny's grammar?
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Well, a first stop would be my website, which is patty with a why,micgee.org.
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I always specify the why because there's Patty McGee with an I, who was a very famous skateboarder.
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Yes.
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So I thought it was me at first.
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I wish I had that kind of balance.
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Yeah, no.
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So it's Patty with a why.
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And then there's a place to order the books on my books page.
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Okay.
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And if you use the code SAVE20, it'll go save 20% off and give you free shipping.
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And it's also on Amazon and Barnes and Obles.
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Wonderful.
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Wonderful.
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Well, thank you so much for bringing such joy to grammar and writing instruction.
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Thank you for having me.
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If you enjoyed this episode, share with a colleague who deserves a little more joy and less grammar policing moments in their day.
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If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at Lisa at dr lisaarhassler.com or visit my website at www.drlisaarhassler.com and send me a message.
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