#381 – Writing to Learn

#381 — Writing to Learn

AVID Open Access
12 min

Transcript

Paul Beckermann 0:01 Welcome to Tech Talk for Teachers. I’m your host, Paul Beckerman.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 0:05 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit? Check it out.

Paul Beckermann 0:16 The topic of today’s episode is writing to learn. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrases learning to write and writing to learn. Learning to write is about developing skills that help writers generate ideas, organize, draft, edit, revise, and publish their original ideas in the form of written text. These are key life skills that benefit students far beyond the task of writing.

Writing to learn, on the other hand, is less about the technical skills of writing, and more about writing to strengthen the thinking process. It’s about using the act of writing to think deeply about a topic, process it mentally, and make sense of the information. Writing to learn shifts the focus from producing polished final products to using writing as a means of exploration, reflection, and critical thinking. Writing to learn activities often emphasize informal, low-stakes writing activities designed to deepen students’ understanding of concepts.

It’s about thinking through writing so students can process information, clarify their thoughts, and make connections between ideas, whether it’s right or wrong. Learning to write is often tasked to ELA teachers. However, writing to learn can, and I would argue should, happen in every classroom. In today’s episode, I’m going to share writing to learn strategies, as well as technology that you can integrate into the process.

So first, before I dig into specific strategies, let’s take a quick look at a few of the benefits to this approach. Number one, it enhances comprehension. Writing helps students synthesize and organize their thoughts, leading to better understanding and retention. Number two, it encourages critical thinking by engaging with content through writing, students evaluate, analyze, and question what they’re learning. Number three, provides time to think. When students write, to process their thinking, all students get an equal opportunity to express themselves, rather than only a few outgoing students getting an opportunity to share. All students get quiet time to think and write. And number four, it promotes active engagement instead of passively absorbing information. Students engage in the learning process by generating their own ideas and reflections through writing.

Next, let’s dig into some specific strategies that you can use in your classroom. To begin with, I’ll describe the approach without referencing specific technology that you can use. After I’ve shared the strategies, I’ll give you some ideas of tech tools and approaches you might incorporate into any of these strategies. I think you’ll find that most of the tech tools can be applied to more than one instructional approach.

Number one, quick writes give students one to five minutes to write everything they know about a topic or respond to a thought-provoking question that you provide. This can be a great way to have students activate prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson or even part of a lesson. It can also be used to summarize learning at the end.

Number two, learning journals and reflection logs encourage students to write daily or weekly reflections. These may feel similar to the quick writes, but they’re used on a regular cadence. They can work really well as a routine bell ringer activity to start a class period or an exit ticket style wrap up activity at the end. Often these journals will allow for metacognition or thinking about thinking. Students might reflect on what they’ve learned, struggles they faced, and questions they still have.

Number three, think pair share with writing. Many teachers use the think pair share strategy to have students first think to themselves about a thought-provoking question before sharing it with a partner, and then perhaps the full class. This version of the strategy asks students to write down their ideas as they think. Writing before speaking helps organize ideas and can provide added confidence for students to engage in the verbal discussion that will follow. It can set them up for greater success, and it also adds a level of tangible accountability to the thinking step of the process.

Number four, sentence stems and prompts. With this process, the teacher provides part of the sentence, the stem, and the students fill in the blanks with their own thoughts and ideas. It’s a great way to scaffold thinking for students, and it’s especially great for developing writers and students who need a little extra support processing their ideas into full sentences. Examples of prompts might include: “One thing I learned today is blank, because blank,” or “I used to think blank, but now I think blank.”. You can create stems that specifically align to your classroom, topic, and context.

Number five, annotation and notes in the margin. This process encourages interaction with texts by having students write questions, reactions, and summaries in the margins. You can guide these or teach students to watch for opportunities to process the text on their own. You might facilitate some type of structured processing activity that uses these notes later on as a follow up, once all students have finished reading and processing the text on their own.

Number six, exit tickets. This would be a structured writing activity at the end of a class period or lesson. It can be used to gauge student understanding, help students process their learning, and guide future instruction. For example, you might end the lesson by asking students to write a one-sentence summary, a lingering question, or a key takeaway.

And number seven, RAFT writing. RAFT stands for Role, Audience, Format, and Topic. This is great for expanding student thinking and perspective. It encourages creative thinking and real-world application. To use this strategy, you would assign students different perspectives from which to write, tagged to one or more of the four RAFT scaffolds. For instance, you could assign different roles. The role could be a scientist, a construction worker, or a politician. Portions of the class could be assigned to each of those roles. You could assign different audiences, maybe the general public, a coworker, or a U.S. Senate committee. You could offer different formats. Maybe students write as a blog post, a news article, a speech, or a simple conversation. And the topic can be varied. This might include the value of space exploration, construction of a new research facility, or maybe a newly proposed law or regulation.

Now, what about technology? Yes, you could certainly use any of these techniques by writing on paper or simply thinking about the answers. However, there are great opportunities to bring in tech tools which can enhance the process and help you keep ideas organized. Here are a few.

Number one, a Google or Word doc. If the writers are the only ones that need to see the documents being generated, a simple word processing document is perfect. There’s no need to overcomplicate it. These tools offer great features the ability to highlight and annotate text and also to add comments in the margin. Students can even insert images or links to outside resources if needed. If you decide you want students to turn this in, they’re easily shareable, and many learning management systems allow for streamlined uploads into the online assignment portals.

Number two, Padlet. If you’re looking for a tool where students can see and engage with each other’s ideas, collaborative tools Padlet are great. You can set up the canvas to be organized in a way that facilitates your writing prompts, perhaps in columns by topic, and each student can add ideas to the interactive workspace.

Number three, digital whiteboards. There are multiple digital whiteboard workspaces available. Canva has a good one. FigJam is another. These collaborative spaces can offer a less structured space for students to add ideas, which can include text, drawings, images, links, and other resources. Sometimes seeing other students’ ideas on this canvas may trigger a new, original idea, much what would happen during collaborative brainstorming.

Number four, blog or a website. You could have students create an online presence, a blog or a website, and then keep using that on an ongoing basis. These don’t need to be shared with the world, but they could be if that meets your needs and your school’s permission structure allows for it. Otherwise, they can usually be published or shared with a closed audience, a classroom or just the teacher. Blogger, Google Sites, Weebly, and Wix are good options to explore. For younger students, Seesaw offers a classroom blog option that you can keep very private. Again, check with your local guidelines before sharing beyond your classroom.

Number five, polling software. If your goal is to collect student thoughts, to gather input about what to plan next, you might want to consider polling software Socrative. You’d need to make sure to select an input option that allows students to write out their responses rather than simply checking a number on a survey or poll. With these tools, student responses come to you.

Number six, AI chatbots. Tools School AI and Magic School allow you to create custom AI chatbots for students to engage with. By crafting custom chatbot experiences aligned to your classroom learning targets, students not only get to write about their learning, but they can also receive feedback and engage in personalized dialogue about what they’ve written. This engagement can take writing to the next level.

And number seven, AI feedback. AI is good at writing and processing written ideas. Therefore, you could use it to review and respond to writing at the student level. Students could paste their writing into a chatbot and ask follow-up questions What did I miss, or what are the strengths of my argument. As a teacher, you could paste in a class of student responses and ask a chatbot to aggregate them and point out trends and common themes. This could save you a lot of time and make student writing more actionable.

These lists of strategies and tools just scratch the surface of what’s available. I encourage you to leverage your own imagination and tech tool knowledge to devise in-class writing experiences that work for you and your students, and I do encourage you to have students write to learn. It can be a powerful way to process and cement learning.

To learn more about today’s topic and explore other free resources, visit AVID Open Access.org. Specifically, I encourage you to check out the article collection, “Power Up and Enhance the Writing Process with Technology.”.

And of course, be sure to join Rena, Winston, and me every Wednesday for our full-length podcast, Unpacking Education, where we’re joined by exceptional guests and explore education topics that are important to you. Thanks for listening. Take care and thanks for all you do. You make a difference.