How writing enhances thinking—and learning

“I love your newsletter. I read it devotedly.” —Vivian, reading teacher

Hi there, Bell Ringers. We are wrapping up summer school this week (happy graduation!). But even as you’re heading out of the pool and back to class, you can keep that summer feeling going: join the book club and start from the top with the book guide to Writing Fitness here.

• The science of learning news roundup starts back up next week after a summer hiatus. If you’ve got a tip for a story, a report coming out or an event you want to include, get in touch.

• The Bell Ringer LIVE Q&A with Writing Fitness authors David Didau and Rikki Cole is happening tomorrow. Join us for a fun and lively discussion of the book, cognitive science and what evidence-based practice looks like in classsrooms on Wednesday, July 22, at 1 pm Eastern. Get the Zoom link in this newsletter below the paywall!

I’ve spent the summer talking to researchers and educators about student writing. Many echo what associate principal Morgan Shoneberg told me:

“I think we believe that students kind of have this ability [to write] if they know how to read, if they have gone to school this far that they have those skills. So sometimes it feels—and even I feel it—really reductive and kind of juvenile to teach sentence structure in high school, but those skills need to be explicitly taught and sometimes re-taught, because we have to practice.”

After a summer reading, talking to educators, and researching evidence-based writing, I’ve boiled the knowledge down into four big ideas I think are worth talking about. Here they are:

Morgan Shoneberg, associate principal of Hoover High School in Des Moines, Iowa, was sitting and observing in the back of a history class of juniors and seniors last year, when the teacher walked over and handed her a recent student exit ticket. “This is the level of writing we are receiving,” in assignments, the teacher told her.

Shoneberg inspected the exit ticket. Then she inspected a whole stack of them. Student responses to the exit ticket question, supposed to be written in complete sentences, were not what she was expecting.

“It was, quite frankly, heartbreaking,” she said. “The syntax, the length—you could see what the purpose of that exit ticket was, and it just wasn’t being met.”