The Role of Writing in the Creating a Classroom Culture of Thinking

"Writing, that most lucid mode of thinking." -Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story

A thinking classroom is a writing classroom. Distributed cognition serves two purposes. The act of putting our thinking on paper--literal or digital--frees up cognitive space so that we can consider new ideas without danger of losing the old, and it is a visible record of our thinking--a record we can share with others and with our future selves. Writing is a powerful tool in helping students learn to manage and grow their own thinking.

Put to intentional use writing offers a multitude of other benefits that align with the goals of a thinking classroom. It has the potential to: increase sophistication and depth of thinking, help students think more precisely by carefully considering the grammar and craft of written language, and intentionally shape the narrative of students' lives.

Writing is Thinking on Paper

Somewhere along the way, more students than not pick up the harmful notion that by the time they have begun the physical act of composing, the thinking work is done, and now the task consists only of physically jotting down all of the ideas they've previously generated. This is not only mistaken thinking, but a tragic missed opportunity. 

Throughout the writing process, the brain continues to refine ideas, to search for more precise words, to create metaphors, etc.; writing is a recursive process. To benefit from this unique characteristic of writing, for writing to actually be "thinking on paper," students must learn to listen to their internal dialogue, remaining open-minded and flexible as they compose, or they risk leaving their best ideas untapped. E.M. Forster famously said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

This is most challenging for primary-aged children as their ability to get thinking on paper is limited by their physical development. They just can't write fast enough. This challenge is not limited to young children, however, and affects all of us to some degree. Who hasn't had the experience of having an idea escape because you couldn't get it on paper quickly enough? When thoughtfully and skillfully managed, providing opportunities for talk prior to putting ideas on paper can help to alleviate this challenge.

In a review of research on the subject, Clive Thompson, author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better found that fluency in keyboarding directly correlates with higher student scores on tasks of writing. Logic tells us, the faster you can type, the more ideas you can get down. Alternately, students who struggle with the physical act of writing--even in the upper grades--become discouraged and routinely simplify their ideas, word choice, and paragraph structure to make the physical task easier. It's not hard to imagine that a student struggling with and attending to letter formation doesn't have the excess cognitive capacity to consider sentence structure.

In addition, quickly getting ideas on paper allows students to maintain a "flow state," which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines as "a state of concentration or complete absorption with the activity at hand and the situation. It is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter." (1990)  While in flow state students are more likely to attend to ideas that surface only during the process of writing.

Written reflection on content area learning offers students the opportunity to organize new thinking. The process of writing about new learning takes an amorphous, sneaky creature, ties it down & closely examines it. In reading, math, science, social studies--the learner performs a thorough examination, describing, in writing, what s/he sees and/or currently understands. Slowing down those observations and thoughts enough to get them on paper makes them tangible, somehow, taking them out of the realm of impressions, and into the realm of concrete beings.

How Understanding the Grammar & Craft of Writing Aids Thinking

Noted neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks once said, "The act of writing is an integral part of my mental life; ideas emerge, are shaped, in the act of writing...a special indispensable form of talking to myself."  While composing, writers engage in nonstop self-talk, whether they can articulate it or not.  A writing teacher's goal is to increase the sophistication of that inner dialogue year after year, moving increasingly sophisticated skills from the instructional edge toward automaticity, thus freeing up mental energy for new skills. The kindergartner, who at the beginning of the year pauses to consider letter formation (Is "m" the letter with one hump or two?) is, by the end of the year confidently spelling "mom" without a thought. That frees up cognitive space to consider where end punctuation should go, considering if that is indeed the end of that particular thought, or if she might have something else to add before moving on to her next thought.

Similarly, crafting options surface over time. For our kindergartner, for example, capital letters, large and dark, mimic bold print. Pictures grow more detailed and more reflective of the accompanying words. A byline appears, as the writer lays claim to these ideas that are uniquely hers. All of these crafting choices are evidence of a mind at work, considering options for communicating more precisely.

By the late elementary years the grammar and craft options available to our student have grown exponentially, and more sophisticated tools lead to even more precise thinking. For example, the writer may weigh choosing a semicolon rather than a period, creating a compound sentence rather than two simple sentences. The semicolon communicates a closer relationship between the two sentences. The writer reflects, is that the message I want to send?

In another sentence, a writer might place the subordinate clause before the independent clause rather than after.  The writer considers, do I want to create a left-branching sentence, surprising the reader with momentarily unattached adjectives, before the reader learns what the subject is that the adjectives are describing? Maybe so, if I want to call particular attention to those adjectives. Or do I want to choose a right-branching sentence, in which my reader first forms a clear image of the subject and then modifies that image with the adjectives that follow? 

The need to be reflective during the process also manifests as writers structure their writing, ordering sentences/paragraphs into a logical progression of ideas. As they do, students have the opportunity to test the soundness of the evidence for their thesis, to look for holes in their arguments, to notice places where they may have made a leap in logic that doesn't stand up under closer examination. This realization can open up the opportunity to question: Do I really believe this?  If so, why do I believe it? Where could I turn for additional evidence to support my case?

When students fully engage in the ongoing process of writing, they repeatedly ask, "What am I trying to say here?  What's the best way to communicate that? What are my options?  Am I making myself clear?" It is in the struggle to hone the message, to clearly communicate with others, that writers home in on what it is--exactly--that they think and want to say. In making their message more concise for others, they also clarify for themselves. As S.I. Hayakawa said, "Learning to write is learning to think. You don't know anything clearly unless you can state it in writing." 

While communication remains consistent as the primary goal of writing, with more sophisticated grammar and craft tools, our student can create a more precise message. With more sophisticated tools, our student also has the means to craft more precise thinking.

           

Write Yourself into a New Space 

Ira Glass, creator of This American Life, tells stories for a living, so it's not surprising that he would claim, "Great stories happen to those who can tell them." But we all have narratives that we tell about our own lives. We tell these stories over and over until they wear deep grooves into our psyches. They are often the first stories we tell a new confidant; they may be the stories our family tells about us. And the tone of those stories, the way we tell them, the patterns they fall into, and the role we play in them is revelatory. Are we the victim or the hero? Scholar or class clown? Are our stories of defeat or triumph? Overcoming adversity or sticking it to the man? Are they riddled with conflict or about the abundant blessings in our lives? Have we collected anecdotes of the teachers who have treated us unfairly or of people who have gone out of their way to lend us a hand?

"The stories we tell literally make the world. If you want to change the world, you need to change your story. This truth applies both to individuals and institutions." -Michael Margolis

The students who have been the greatest heartbreak for me as a teacher were two who consistently saw the world through mud-colored glasses. Despite my best efforts and significant emotional energy, these students stayed wed to self-defeating narratives, which had become key to their identity. I would love to see how writing might be able to positively influence students who have developed entrenched negative mindsets, either about themselves in general, their identity as students, or about their relationships with others--including peers, teachers, and/or society as a whole.

It is conceivable that this final aspect of the role of writing in creating a classroom culture of thinking that I want to explore could be accomplished without actually putting pen to paper--or fingers to keyboard as the case may be. I wonder if an oral retelling would accomplish the same results?

Jordan Peterson teaches in the department of psychology at the University of Toronto, and his research on a similar question was recently detailed in the NPR story, "The Writing Assignment That Changes Lives." Dr. Peterson has been exploring how written reflection and goal-setting can change a negative academic trajectory for struggling students. What he has called "past authoring" & "future authoring" (or cumulatively "self-authoring") combines expressive writing with goal setting to identify key motivations and create plans for the future, including strategies to overcome obstacles. His research involves helping students create identities that align with their goals.

Making thinking visible through writing is one of the most important tools available to us when creating a classroom culture of thinking,

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row.