�Love and Literacy 3

• Writing Thinking and the Brain: How Neuroscience Can Improve Writing Instruction
• Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa
• Jovi R.S. Nazareno
• Christopher Rappleye

ThinkWrite: Background

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The Conversation

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The Writing Group

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The Reflection

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The Lightbulb

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The Continuing Conversation

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The Research and Design

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The New Understanding…

“E.L. Doctorow has been quoted as saying,

• “Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.”
• From Amy Sackville, 2021” What If Procrastination Is an Essential Part of Our Writing Process?”

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Sackville, A. (2021, June 23). What if procrastination is an essential part of our writing process? Literary Hub. https://lithub.com/what-if-procrastination-is-an-essential-part-of-our-writing-process/

WRITING

PREWRITING

WRITING

REVISION

THINKING

PREWRITING:

UNDERSTAND

KNOW THINGS

MIND WANDER

REFLECT

MAP & CONNECT

WRITING:

OUTLINE

PLAN

RESEARCH

DRAFT

REVISION:

PEER EXCHANGE

FEEDBACK &

FEEDFORWARD

EDIT

REVISE

PROOFREAD

COMPLETE &

COMMENCE

THINKING

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UNDERSTAND

KNOW THINGS

MIND WANDER

REFLECT

MAP & CONNECT

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OUTLINE

PLAN

RESEARCH

DRAFT

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PEER EXCHANGE

FEEDBACK &

FEEDFORWARD

EDIT

REVISE

PROOFREAD

COMPLETE &

COMMENCE

Perspective: Understanding learning at the confluence of Mind, Brain and Education Science

• MBE Science
• Mind (Cognitive Psychology)
• Brain (Neuroscience)
• Educational Research

COGNITIVE SCIENCES

NEUROSCIENCE

EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH

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THE BRAIN in Reflection(s)

Reflection on “Difficult Goals” vs Reflection on “Easy Goals” (Packer and Cunningham 2014)

Holons of Writing

• A whole that is also a part
• Systems thinking
• What is useful boundary or holon depends upon context

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Why “Holons?”

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Encourages us to “zoom in” and “zoom out” and see the student and the writing as part of larger wholes and gives us more options in diagnosis and cure

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Different people need different things at different times…

Example #1

Example #2

Example #3

Source: Gabriel Espinosa for Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa. All rights reserved.

“ThinkWrite”

• Non-Linear, though that is optional
• Pre-K to 16 and beyond
• Multimodal activity options
• Use what works
• Use in your own writing to get comfortable

Other tools online….including…

• …400 Activities to engage the 15 thinking stages https://www.thinkwriteactivities.com/
• Product, Process, Product, Potential Rubric
• Relationships and Transitions Chart
• Teacher Checklist to Support Student Toggling
• Asking Questions to Prompt Toggling
• Literature Review

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“ThinkWrite”�“Writing to think; thinking to write”

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• Reflect: What difference, if any, it would make to consider writing as thinking made visible, and that we must teach it accordingly.��How does it build on existing knowledge (“know things”) and existing needs to think of the writing teacher as a thinking coach?��What new approaches or knowledge might it ask of us right now?

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“A change in purpose changes a system profoundly, even if every element and interconnection remains the same.”���-Donella H. Meadows, Thinking in Systems�

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Two Approaches

Human Motivation (and Classroom Culture)

• ABC:
• Autonomy
• Belonging
• Competency

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• Niemiec, C. P., & Ryan, R. M. (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. Theory and Research in Education, 7(2), 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878509104318

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Human Motivation (and Classroom Culture)

• ABC:
• Autonomy
• Belonging
• Competency

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• Niemiec, C. P., & Ryan, R. M. (2009). Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. Theory and Research in Education, 7(2), 133–144. https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878509104318
• What role do grades on a Final Product play? OR grading and feedback within this context?
• Within the writing classroom culture, what encourages a sense of belonging?
• Where do our students develop their sense of competency as writers?

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If you could design a program to "make all students writers"--what would that mean for you? 

• Choose One Activity from Page 4 and respond to the prompt above…

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Plasticity

“What is the brain architecture you are trying to build? ”

• “Experience builds brain architecture.”
• Harvard Center for the Developing Child

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What is Neuroplasticity? Applies to all learning, “positive” or “negative”

• Physical substrate of all learning: physical changes in the brain due to experience
• Daily…
• If you are not coaching it, you are allowing it….
• FIRST: The neuron… some basic structures
• SECOND: types of responses
• Neurogenesis (?)
• Increase in dendrites in response to learning stressors (experience)
• Myelination (oligodendrocytes)
• Diet (omega 3 fatty acids)
• Changes in synaptic receptors
• Long Term Potentiation: Wire together fire together
• Synaptic Pruning

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Why Prune?

Cognitive and Perceptual Differences…

• Differences between Expert’s brain and Novice Learner’s Brain (not just “knowing more facts”)
• Observation: Students have trouble with lesson transfer
• Structural or functional organization vs surface detail and similarity
• “Knowing Things” is not just catalog of facts but schemata and organizational retrieval strategies are automatized (can be hard for experts to teach for this reason)
• Chess players…
• Teach habits of mind: “deep analogy” ? But…

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Neuroplasticity and GenAI

• Implications for AI use
• Research and common sense: Shift in cognitive load
• NOTE: Difference between how expert uses vs novice
• Thinking requires energy and effort
• THAT is what stimulates desired brain growth
• Whose brain is working hardest in the classroom?
• Brains prefer low-energy states…
• Lean into the struggle mentality
• aMCC: Touroutoglou et al, 2021: “The Tenacious Brain: How the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Contributes to Achieving Goals”
• When a parent says: “But AI is out there they need to learn how to use it...”

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GenAI and Interventions: some questions

• Am I using this to make up for a deficit in thinking skills with this student?
• Am I using this as part of a structured scaffolding to build these thinking skills?
• Am I using this because the instructional focus must be elsewhere right now, but this task requires this (e.g. summarizing research)?
• How can I use AI to appropriately INCREASE cognitive load for a thinking stage?
• General strategy: Student does it first; have AI try; have student reflect on differences and similarities and then strategize improvement (feedback?): compete. (“John Henry”)
• How can I be sure the “taste” for lower cognitive load after this use of AI will not increase resistance to doing the mental work later?
• Does student “caring” about the skill matter? How does culture shape that?
• How to counter Social Pressure?

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Neuroplasticity: How many times: How many reps how many sets? Rest? Considerations

• Basketball example: Round the world
• Study of Physical Task Learning and Study on Cognitive task
• 🡪Practice rate of 70-85% success for “simple physical tasks” (Al-Fawakhiri, Kayani, & McDougle, 2023) and “simple (binary) info” (Wilson, Shenhav, Straccia, & Cohen, 2019)
• Habit formation (automaticity)
• Popular: “30 days… a hundred days?”
• Research on habits: highly variable
• For Habit (Executive Function cueing): Use the Environment to reduce resistance
• How do we habituate our writers and thinkers through intentional instructional design?
• How many times does a writing assignment show achievement and then
• ….rest, no reinforcement, they finally did it
• E.g. Revision of a Thesis Statement…
• Note “PLAY” in the ThinkWrite model: increasing frequency of thinking stages rehearsal

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Study Strategies: Washington University

Karpicke, Jeffrey D., Butler, Andrew C. and Roediger III, Henry L.(2009)'Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own?',Memory,17:4,471 — 479

Obvious from experience and yet

• “One reaction we have encountered when we present our research on the testing effect goes something like this: ‘‘This is completely obvious. Of course testing enhances learning. We already knew this. None of this is new or surprising.’’ Perhaps the testing effect is obvious to some instructors—but is it obvious to students? If so we would expect students to report that they frequently practise recall while studying. But our basic laboratory research has consistently shown that students lack metacognitive awareness of the testing effect. In fact students sometimes predict that repeated reading will produce better long term retention than repeated testing (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006b)”
• Karpicke, Jeffrey D., Butler, Andrew C. and Roediger III, Henry L.(2009)'Metacognitive strategies in student learning: Do students practise retrieval when they study on their own?',Memory,17:4,471 — 479

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Repetition: drilling and emotion

• Drill it?
• What are you drilling?
• E.g. Grammar error finding
• Often highly contextualized
• Identifying on structured worksheet vs “live” vs on one’s own writing (Proofreading)
• PLAY!
• EMOTION
• Repetition
• Focus of the joy
• Competition? “Points” vs Mastery and application
• “Look at this sentence I wrote!”

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What builds brains? Culture..

• Culture as a cloud of signifiers (actions, language, tone, music, visuals, rituals) that through neuroplasticity “become” the self
• What do we do repeatedly? How frequently?
• How do we talk about it?
• What is the focus of attention in our feedback?
• How do we do this thing (writing)?
• To what do we assign value and how do we do so?
• What do students assign value to and how do they do so?
• How does that shape process (and shape what we do repeatedly)?
• “Where is the emotion in the writing classroom?”
• What are students thinking in the meantime?
• What would our students tell us: Is writing a residue of thought or …..?

“WRITING IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF THINKING”

• Number of Neural Networks involved
• Writing AS thinking: Mutually reinforcing via Neuroplasticity

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Executive Functions

• No Shared Universal Model of EF
• “The directive capacities of the mind that tell the rest of the brain what to do, get it started, decide when to quit, how to modulate, estimate time… etc.”
• Often identified with “Frontal Lobes” but not limited to Frontal Lobes
• Can be compromised by other stressful factors (e.g. new genre) and times of increased demands have an effect on them (e.g. 9^th grade)
• Can be enhanced by relationship, coaching, culture, metacognitive cues…

Executive Functions and Executive Capacities

Kaufman, 2010

But…don’t mistake Executive Function difficulties with lack of knowledge or training

Cognitive Load (vs “cognitive offloading”)

• The mental energy that a task demands
• Has a physical substrate: running out of fuel
• Necessary for learning (neuroplastic response) to take place
• Can be strategically lessened
• “Toggling” : shifting—purposefully—to new thinking stage
• Beware though of brain’s preference for lower energy level
• E.g. “the Creative Cliff” illusion
• Coaching and metacognitive awareness
• When toggling: most neural networks take time to “ramp up”

Toggling: Reducing cognitive load

• “It takes energy to think, which is known as “cognitive load” (Vergara et al., 2019). Cognitive load is measured by tracking blood flow to different areas of the brain. Your brain is the most energy-hungry organ in the body, consuming around 20% of the entire body’s resources, despite only being around 2% of its total weight. Efficiency means the brain seeks to conserve energy and reduce cognitive load, which it can do in different ways (Phan & Ngu, 2021). We posit that one way to be efficient is to avoid staying in any one stage of thinking for too long...by toggling”

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Phan, H. P., & Ngu, B. H. (2021). Perceived ‘optimal efficiency’: theorization and conceptualization for development and implementation. Heliyon, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2021.e06042; Vergara, R. C., Jaramillo-Riveri, S., Luarte, A., Moënne-Loccoz, C., Fuentes, R., Couve, A., & Maldonado, P. E. (2019). The energy homeostasis principle: neuronal energy regulation drives local network dynamics generating behavior. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 49. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2019.00049

Choose One to respond to…

• What do you understand? What do you not yet understand? What questions do you need answered?
• How does this connect to what you already know? What might be distinct or different about this approach?
• What crazy but potentially useful or brilliant idea has occurred to you while I droned on?
• I’ve thrown a lot of concepts and vocabulary out there: how do they connect for you? What are gaps in the map for you? How would you rearrange the material to communicate it to someone else?

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Pre-Writing

Understanding ensures that writers build off prior knowledge to construct the foundations for future learning. It is a thinking stage that tries to habituate conscious orientation on the task at hand.

Activities: Understand

By knowing things, writers make space for what they don’t yet know, which is the path to insight. Activities in this thinking stage seek to connect prior knowledge to the task at hand.

Activities: Know Things

Where do your best ideas come from?

• Where are you and what are you doing when you have an insight? Solve a problem…in those “ah ha!” moments?
• Creativity, self expression, originality….
• “Ah Ha!” : Role of discovery in memory
• So …
• 47% of time
• Also associated with Negative Rumination: Killingsworth MA, Gilbert DT. A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science. 2010 Nov 12;330(6006):932. doi: 10.1126/science.1192439. PMID: 21071660.

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By doing Mind Wandering activities, writers take advantage of the brain’s ability to freely connect ideas, leading to more creative insight.

THE BRAIN

MINDWANDERING without self-awareness vs Mind Wandering with self- awareness (Christoff et al 2009)

Activities: Mind Wander

Tale of Two Minds…(feedback?)

Role of Modeling….

• Role of Worked Models: student vs professional
• And model writers more generally…culturally representative
• But also: Importance of seeing and hearing teachers engage with writing processes
• Who informed you as a writer?
• Voicing emotions and metacognitive reflection in the process
• How to transition from one thinking stage to the next…
• Where would you go from here?

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Reflect activities help writers make more strategic decisions about how to execute the task and become more metacognitively aware. Reflect activities can help connect the task at hand to a writer’s (developing) sense of purpose and meaning and touches on motivation circuits and enhances executive control.

Activities: Reflect

Mapping ideas helps the learner understand the relationships between ideas. Connecting ideas creates a logic that can be used to write the outline of written work. These tasks help working memory manage idea formation by externalizing the thoughts to relieve cognitive load on lower order task and shift to higher order thinking about relationships.

Activities: Map & Connect

“Working Memory”

• Many Memory Types or systems (Semantic, autobiographical, short term, long term, etc)
• Working memory is the “working desktop” of information I need to complete a task (e.g. order of operations…)
• Very Limited (a chokepoint for educational performance)
• 3-7 “chunks”
• Can be further limited by stress overload (shrinking the desktop)
• Most Working Memory “interventions” are strategic and structural
• E.g. Mnemonic devices: a “chunk” can be rather large (but encoding and decoding takes practice)
• Self-Regulation

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Working around Working Memory…

Assessing Thinking

An inquiry

What we know….

• Writing IS thinking and yet traditional assessment is directed at the written product
• When assessed as a “PRODUCT” alone or primarily, we reinforce the student’s understanding that PRODUCT matters.
• Traditionally Teachers are comfortable both from their own experience as student writers and through training and practice with evaluating the written product
• “Now more than Ever” in the age of AI, the written Product as a representation of student thinking is “called into question”
• Writing involves the recruitment and coordination (and consequently engenders the maintenance and development) of 15 distinct neural networks
• These networks have value not only within the production of written products but in the well-being—our sense of autonomy, belonging and competency—and beyond personal creativity alone have an impact on our ability to functional effectively within social and democratic systems
• If we value student thinking and if traditional writing teaching and assessment have reinforced for teachers and students alike that the written product is “what matters,” we may be actively undermining individual and social development as well as the functioning of democratic systems.

Writing is the Highest form of Thinking

• Not the residue of thinking
• When we write and engage the underlying neural networks, HOW CAN WE
• highlight and make visible the traditionally “invisible” stages of thinking involved to betters emphasize and develop these essential systems, becoming thinking and writing coaches?
• How can we grow our capacity to evaluate the previously “invisible thinking” involved in writing and develop greater student ownership and valuing of their own thinking product, progress, process, and potential?

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Deliberate foregrounding.

• Product Process Progress and Potential Rubric
• Accounting for learning Over time
• Coaching tool to recognize student strengths and development
• May be used alone or in conjunction with existing rubrics (176)
• Portfolios?
• Tracking?
• Focus?
• Student Identify?

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Product and Process

• Product (Most Current Rubrics)
• Progress?
• Requires tracking thinking over time
• All Thinking Stages or holons or focus by year? By student?
• Needs check points over time….
• Use in conjunction with Spider Rubric (175)

Spider Rubric: student self reflection

• Feedback tool: use with conferences or use
• Student provides evidence
• Check development over time: are they responding to feedback?
• In conjunction with PPPP rubric (Specifically PROGRESS and PROCESS (and presumably progress ON process.)

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General suggestion on Feedback

• Link Feedback to Thinking Stages (suggesting Toggling)
• E.g. “ You are using a hook with an unresearched quote from online resources and ignoring the lessons from class: how can you use what you know from class to better frame the introduction or intellectual horizon of your thesis?” or “What Know Things activities could you use here?”
• Use Teaching Checklist 7.1 to guide feedback and suggest activities?

7.1 If you notice…..

The Problem(s) for us today …

• Doing the familiar or wanting to continue the familiar in the face of significant change in technologies
• E.g. Want to “AI-proof” assignments vs Coaching thinking and Writing
• ISSUE: Discomfort evaluating and giving feedback the unfamiliar or less “familiar” thinking stages
• How can we feel more confident that what we are coaching is the students’ “authentic” thinking, or that we are aware of capable of being aware of what it represents

Note What thinking Stages are NOT accounted for in our present writing rubric?

Some Potentially Problematic Thinking Stages

• Mind wander
• Plan
• Reflection
• Map and Connect
• Feedback and Feedforward

Mind wander

• Deliberate Mind Wandering vs Unintentional rumination
• How can I evaluate this?
• Culture of previous classrooms
• Comfort of students (habits of capturing)
• Purpose: valuing of individual autonomous intelligence and connectivity, associative thinking skills, insight, voice and creative insight

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Guilford’s criteria for creative cognition may be one route suggesting 4 dimensions of possible feedback/rubric

Guilford originally used to evaluative Divergent thinking (AUT)

• Fluency: how much generated? How many solutions or connections
• Flexibility (cf cognitive flexibility): How many different or diverse domains are evoked, divergent solutions or connections
• Is like/differentiated from How many other characters? Is like/differentiated from how many other books? Is like/diverges from not just books but life, history, other classes and concepts
• Novel responses to prompt
• Originality: How common / how cliché? (cf Willingham on Expert vs Novice thinkers, however) –may be “novel’ to the inexperienced thinker/reader
• Elaboration: how detailed is the elaboration or development of the ideas?

The aim of evaluation and feedback in this Stage is to

• Encourage moving beyond the “creative cliff”
• (First idea best idea, pause in ideation means I’m finished)
• Dictated/Limited by “flow” rewards vs results
• When more novel solutions come later in the process
• Encourage student experience of autonomous discovery
• Reward recall of concepts, texts from LTM (specific circuits or recall need rehearsal; also rehearses memory circuits and associative thinking, empathetic engagement networks)
• “Reward” elaboration, (useful?) originality, flexibility, fluency
• Teacher feedback may be needed on sorting out what is useful, how it might be used? Covered in rubric? Add to it?

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Diverse Existing and overlapping Reflection Criteria/Rubrics

• Steven Jones (2015): Ranking Practitioner (on clarity, relevance, analysis, interconnections, self-criticism): what stage/identity? “Unacceptable, novice, aware, reflective”
• Oregon State University: self-awareness, critical thinking analysis of perspectives; depth of reflection; synthesis and integration (how will insights shape future action);
• DePaul: Hatton and Smith (1995): Descriptive, descriptive reflection, dialogic reflection (I wonder…), critical reflection (context and alternatives, reflective skepticism); and Ash and Clayton (2004) connection, accuracy, clarity, relevance, depth (complexity) breadth (meaningful consideration of alternatives), logic, significance
• Johns Hopkins: (Novice, apprentice, proficient, distinguished); levels of reflection (descriptive, empathetic, analytic; metacognitive); criteria: see Jones

Or use structure of Meaning Making as source of Criteria

• Description/Sense memory
• Details (of process of product)
• Identification of normative and pivotal moves or moments
• Role of autonomy or role of others’ input or influence
• Emotion linked to the above (if asked about?)
• Inference
• Empathy (cognitive/perspective-taking or emotional)
• Creating or identifying
• Patterns (repetition or divergence)
• Concepts and Schema (drawing on long term memory)
• Analogy and Abstraction
• Linking to developing or developed orientation
• Metacognitive connection, awareness, analysis, evaluation
• Purpose and Meaning: linking to goals, specific, developing sense of purpose and meaning (pattern and abstraction)
• The Big Story I am part of
• Public or Social or Personal development trajectory

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Map and Connect… how to evaluate?

• How is Mind Map/Wandering different from Map and Connect?
• Similar sense of discovery and associative intelligence
• and yet…M & C involves
• Deliberate thinking, eliciting long term memory (Knowing Things (previous learning)
• Aiming at multiple “tiers” and levels of connection
• Diverges from Outlining in that not concerned with linearity of organization so much as semantic nesting and connection

Map and Connect

• Tiers
• E.g. plot level details (or quoted evidence) vs critical concepts or schema vs connections to other texts vs connections to life; identifying and labeling patterns
• Level of detail in each tier or entry; granularity
• Similarities and differences (meaningful similarities in differences and meaningful differences in the midst of similarities)
• Context: does it account for the context of details?
• Speculation: does it suggest/ inquire about ways forward; if so, then…?
• Evidence of revision? Can we see the generation and thinking processes (iterative process?)

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Is this/ would this be useful to follow through on?

• For the above
• Knowing Things
• For Understanding
• Outlining
• Feedback and Feedforward

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Issues in summary….

• How to isolate from AI short circuiting the thinking and stimulation
• How to use AI in the process?
• Portfolio
• When to value handwriting vs computer/word processing
• Need to account for orthographic challenges/diagnostic fine motor control issues for some
• How to keep feedback specific and useful for students yet manageable for teachers
• Feasibility of limiting writing process steps to class: technology?
• Feasibility/desirability of writing portfolios
• Spider Rubric
• PPPP Rubric
• 7.1 and 7.2

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“4E model of Cognition”

• Embodied: Thinking takes place in a physical human body, and that embodiment enables and shapes cognition, including the role of emotions in thinking.
• Embedded: Thinking is embedded in a context, a specific life moment and history and cultural milieu, and that enables and shapes cognition.
• Extended: Thinking is extended, using tools that reach out into the world and people around us, which enables and shapes cognition.
• Enactive: Thinking interacts with the surrounding environment, enables and shapes that environment and the environment in turn enables and shapes cognition.

ThinkWrite

• How does writing involve embodied cognition? What difference does that make to educational practices and norms?
• How does writing involve culturally and biographically embedded cognition? What difference does that make to educational practices and norms?
• How do writing practices and tools reach out into the world and people around us? How does that change thinking? What difference does that make to educational practices and norms?
• How does writing practice interact and impact the surrounding environment? What difference does that make to educational practices and norms?

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Writing

If you have a good outline, the paper writes itself. A good outline ensures all the important parts of a paper are included in the right places. Outlining involves thinking about hierarchies of information and relationships (transitions). Outlines also require cognitive empathy and perspective taking

Activities: Outline

OUTLINE: Worked Models would help part 2…

• Thesis statements🡪 linking general to Abstract, bigger picture
• Important skill
• Hierarchies and relationships
• Relationship and Transition chart
• Templates
• Graphic Organizers
• Programs to move from mind map or concept map to outline
• Reverse Engineer outlines from model essays
• Teacher use AI to reverse engineer outlines?
• Templates and how to leave them behind….

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A good plan ensures the achievement of proposed goals. Planning involves metacognitive awareness of what must be done, what one is skilled at and/ or needs help with, how to get that help, how to accomplish the task, and estimating and tracking time increments.

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Activities: Plan

Role for AI in Planning

• These are the steps…
• These are the days …
• Map it out and remind me? Executive Functions Support…

Activities: Plan

Good research ensures your writing is original, based on facts and builds on our existing knowledge rather than repeating it. Research involves evaluating sources, understanding sources and schemata unique to domains, search strategies and tracking of findings, and subordinating ideas, as well as habits of mind to counter confirmation bias.

Activities: Research

As the first public viewing of your thinking, drafting helps visualize ideas into words, making your internal mental process available to coaching and feedback. A lot of toggling goes on WITHIN the drafting process.

Activities: Draft

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Revision

Good peer exchange gives you the opportunity to improve writing by hearing how others perceive it and enhances intellectual humility as the writer learns from others in age-appropriate language. This involves emotional intelligence and developing domain specific knowledge as well as rhetorical knowledge. This also requires cognitive empathy and perspective taking.

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Activities: Peer Exchange

Use AI for Peer Review or editing?

• Developing thinking skills and neural pathways in the editor or reviewer.
• Developing emotional intelligence of the reviewer
• Consider metacognitive possibilities for reviewer
• So, as an adjunct?
• Consider the order

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People who are open to learning from their mistakes through feedback learn faster. This involves emotional intelligence, metacognition and critical thinking skills about how to integrate feedback to feedforward. Giving feedback requires perspective taking as well as knowledge of the task goals.

Activities: Feedforward

To edit well is to perfect the formatting, visual structure, and presentation of your written work. This involved metacognitive awareness, emotional and cognitive distancing, and critical thinking as well as confidence.

Activities: Edit

Revision is the opportunity “see again” and make any final changes for improvement. This involves critical thinking and cognitive flexibility, the ability to “step outside” of the work to evaluate and consider alternative strategies.

Activities: Revise

Proofreading crystallizes your written presentation as clearly as your thinking. This requires training specific attention skills for sustained periods.

Activities: Proofread

Successfully completing a project gives a sense of closure and permits the commencement of new off-shoot projects and horizons and allows you to consider what you learned that might apply in the future. Celebrating thinking creates a culture of ownership, emotional connection to thinking and writing and expectation of an audience.

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Activities: Complete & Commence

Culture that engages emotions

• “Grade”
• Audience
• Repurposing information
• How often is the writing task “a terminal point” and exit ticket for a discrete unit, which is then segmented and cut off from next learning campaign?
• Encourages habits of transfer of skills and learning
• “Real” and authentic writing
• Opportunities for celebration of writing and thinking?
• “Intellectual Property”

• https://www.thinkwritembe.com/
• https://www.thinkwriteactivities.com/
• crappleye@micds.org
• christopherdr@gmail.com
• https://www.tcpress.com/products/writing-thinking-and-the-brain_9780807786345

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Literature Review

Online Resources

LESSON 1. TO WRITE WELL, THE INVISIBLE THINKING BEHIND GOOD WRITING NEEDS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

• While the writing process has come to be the conventional approach to writing, most writing instruction and feedback has lagged behind, reflecting a focus on the written product (Maxine Hairston “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing”1982)
• Today most feedback and rubrics continue to focus on the written product rather than the thinking process
• Most rubrics related to thinking are separate from writing (Joseph et al., 2020).
• Students’ products continue to be valued more than their processes (thinking) or their progress as individuals.
• How does that impact how students view their work?

LESSON 2. TO WRITE WELL, WE NEED TO ATTEND TO THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF WRITING

• Writing is a social activity (Boscolo & Gelati, 2019; Graham & Harris, 2019; Ives et al., 2022; Williams, 2022) and must be learned within the context and culture of the learner for it to be authentic (Bruyère & Pendergrass, 2020; He, 2020; Winstead & Alterio, 2021).
• Writing is often treated as an individual skill, however, people are deeply influenced by each other as they think through expectations, read and interpret each other’s ideas and feelings, and learn from each other’s perspectives (e.g., Hsin & Snow, 2017; Seih et al, 2011).
• Students often write for an audience of one.
• How does this shape student ideas about their work?

LESSON 3. TO WRITE WELL, PEOPLE SHOULD WRITE IN MULTIPLE GENRES

• All genres of writing stimulate distinct forms of thinking but not all genres are celebrated in school (see Haim & Ravid, 2022).
• Students can often be good at one kind of writing, but not so good at others. When the genre they are not so good at is the one that is graded, they label themselves “poor” writers and their motivation to grow as a writer is stunted (Torres et al., 2020).
• There is no “hierarchy” of writing genres, although formal writing is prized over the informal, and schools often prize evidence from standardized tests over imagination (Willson & Falcon, 2018).
• This helps build a writer’s sense of the world’s complexity and internalize the possibilities of what it means to be a writer in different contexts.
• Representative works from multiple cultural backgrounds can help bridge the perceived gap between school and the marginalized.
• Writing in a different genre can be a way to find one’s true voice and that in turn can be a driver to further mastery (Xu, 2023).
• How does what we ask student to read and what we ask students to write shape what they think of their work and sense of identity as writers?

LESSON 4. TO WRITE WELL, PEOPLE NEED TO READ BROADLY

• Wide and extensive reading acquaints the brain with perspectives and others’ internal thinking processes that are otherwise inaccessible (Eekhof, et al., 2021; Firman et al., 2022).
• Reading widely is an opportunity to build a writer’s schema of different genres (Driscoll et al., 2020; Tardy et al., 2020).
• When reading is done in a broad range of genres, the brain is exposed to syntactical norms and possibilities in a range that far exceeds that which it gets from direct grammatical instruction (Barnes et al., 2021; Freeman et al., 2016).
• Additionally, and paradoxically, we find our voice through the voices of others.

TRANSFER LESSON 5. TO WRITE WELL, PEOPLE NEED TIME: ALL TEACHERS SHOULD BE WRITING TEACHERS

• Benjamin Bloom identified time as the main problem with student achievement
• Over 90% of the kids in any given classroom would be able to master the content of whatever was taught, if the students had enough time to do so. (Bloom 1968).
• Effective writing instruction depends on time (NCOW, 2003).
• Quality writing instruction cannot occur if sufficient time is not available. All teachers need to assume the role of writing teachers and make space for writing activities in class (Russell, 2020; Wolpert-Gawron, 2014);
• It should be considered a modality woven into all subjects (Bell-Nolan, 2015).
• Graham (2019) noted that teachers around the world reported spending far less than the recommended one-hour per day on writing skills, mostly because not all teachers feel this is in their purview

Some Questions

• LESSON 1. TO WRITE WELL, THE INVISIBLE THINKING BEHIND GOOD WRITING NEEDS ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:
• How can we value and best coach the thinking that goes into writing?
• Do our feedback and grading systems favor process or product?
• What neural networks are we building with our feedback and grading systems?
• LESSON 2. TO WRITE WELL, WE NEED TO ATTEND TO THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF WRITING:
• How do we acknowledge cultures and build a distinctive writing culture?
• How do we build relationships through writing, and develop the perspective taking necessary for good writing and thinking?
• LESSON 3. TO WRITE WELL, PEOPLE SHOULD WRITE IN MULTIPLE GENRES:
• How can we best allow for students to find their voices and identities as writers?
• LESSON 4. TO WRITE WELL, PEOPLE NEED TO READ BROADLY:
• How does our reading curriculum relate to our writing curriculum?
• LESSON 5. TO WRITE WELL, PEOPLE NEED TIME:
• How can we make more time for writing?

Complete and Commence

3-2-1 Reflection:

1. Three things you didn’t know before the class began.
2. Two things you would like to continue to research as your curiosity has been piqued.
3. One thing you will consider changing in your personal or professional life.

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Images and ThinkWrite baubbles available @ RedBubble: Gabriel Espinosa

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