Thinking Through Writing: Helping Students to Extend their Understanding

Andrew Atherton

It is easy to think that writing is the terminal point of thinking. It is what happens after thinking: a way to record what has already been thought. But this would be wrong.

Many thinkers over many years have recognised that so often writing is the thinking. Joan Didion, for instance, once conceded that ‘I don’t know what I think until I write it down’. Likewise, Lev Vygotsky commented that ‘thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them’. WH Auden, too, understood that ‘words will tell you things you never thought or felt before’.

Recognising that writing can so often help to generate ideas rather than simply record them has profound implications for teachers. It helps us to reframe how we think about and use writing in the classroom whilst providing opportunity to enrich, develop and generate new student knowledge.

In this article, I’ll share three practical strategies I use in my own teaching, all geared towards helping students to think in and through writing.

Write, Share, Write

Start by asking students to respond in writing to whatever content is being covered. In my own subject of English, this might be a new poem, a character or scene in a novel, or the writer’s argument in a piece of non-fiction. It might help to offer students a specific prompt such as a question or word to respond to, but this isn’t necessarily essential.

Explain that they don’t need to write in any specific form or style. They may use paragraphs, they might not. They may ‘analyse’ or ‘evaluate’, they may not. Remember: the intention is to use the writing to generate and develop new thinking, not to assess the writing itself.

You might frame it like this: students should write as the voice in their head sounds. As an idea or thought pops into their head, they write it down. It is conversational in style and tone. Give students a specified amount of time to do this — maybe anywhere between 3 to 10 minutes — and get them started.

Once finished, now ask them to share what they’ve written. This could be word for word or just a couple of chosen sentences. It could even be just an idea or thought. You might do this by sampling the class (‘Jose, could you share something you’ve written?’) or even by arranging students into small groups. In these groups of three to four, they move student to student, sharing what they’ve written.

Once the sharing has finished, ask students to now go back to their paper and complete another burst of writing. This time they’re writing in response to something they’ve heard from someone else. It could be a way to develop and extend an idea they’ve just encountered, to challenge it, or simply to comment on how it has changed their initial response.

Moving through cycles of Write, Share, Write in this way is an incredibly effective but logistically easy way to help deepen and develop student thinking.

Write, Summarise, Write

Students begin this task in exactly the same as Write, Share, Write: a short burst of conversational, ‘in the head’ writing.

However, once done, instead of sharing students now re-read what they’ve just written. They’re looking for an idea, phrase or thought that they consider to be especially revealing or important. They’re looking for something that they can probe further. Once found, students should underline or highlight this.

Now, underneath their original burst of writing, students briefly summarise the idea they underlined. This might just be a few words or a single sentence, meaning their page looks like this: a burst of writing, with something in it underlined, and underneath this a few lines of summary.

Students begin a new burst of writing, but this time in response to whatever they’ve just summarised. The summary in effect becomes the new prompt. This process can then continue for several more cycles: a short burst of writing in response to an original prompt, a summary of an interesting idea within this, and a further burst of writing in response to that summary. And so on.

Each new cycle helps to really push student thinking in new and interesting directions. The format ensures that each new burst is extending an idea students have already identified as interesting or significant. By the end, and several cycles deep, students will have a far more robust sense of whatever is being discussed. At this point, you could segue into sharing some of these ideas with the wider class.

Freewriting

Freewriting describes a very particular kind of writing exercise that, unlike the above two examples, includes one caveat: students must not stop writing for the duration of the exercise. Once their pen hits the paper, they just keep going

Advocates of this approach, such as Peter Elbow, argue that it is an incredibly liberating experience for students. The reason for this, so he argues, is that ‘normal’ writing tends to insist upon editing, which creates an often unhelpful gap between thinking and writing. Freewriting  collapses this gap, and in doing so gives students the space to write whatever pops into their head. A lot of it may not be very good, so Elbow points out, but amongst all of this there’ll be genuine nuggets of real insight.

Freewriting is very easy to set up in a classroom. Use either of the strategies above, or any other writing activity, and add the single disclaimer: once you start, don’t stop. If students become stuck they can simply write ‘I’m stuck’ until a new idea strikes.

In my own classroom, I use freewriting relatively sparingly, preferring the first two strategies. However, what it offers, which they don’t in quite the same way, is a particular energy or frisson. The constraint to keep going forces students into a kind of pleasing and stimulating frenzy of writing, which, in my experience, can produce some simply stunning responses. Be wary, though, of this technique causing added pressure rather than, as intended, a release of pressure: some students simply find it too intense, in which case, it’s best to avoid and opt for Write, Share, Write or Write, Summarise, Write.