Teaching Writing as Thinking: A Tale of Two Cities

To be fair to advocates of the Science of Reading, a caucus of reading researchers who have turned to evidence from neuroscientists to bolster the phonics first argument, even first grade reading classrooms organized around scripted phonics lessons aspire to teach learners to think—phonologically if not semantically. Moreover, learning to think phonologically in the context of an alphabetic orthographic English geography becomes increasingly more important for surviving, if not always thriving, in today’s world. So the intent, if not the substance, of the SoR movement is laudable.

To be fair to advocates of the Common Core, a caucus of political standard setters who operate in the shadows with no obvious regulatory or custodial oversight, writing standards that graduate from writing about my opinion of my favorite book in kindergarten to writing about a piece of complex text wherein I make claims, provide textual evidence, analyze, and repeat the cycle are indeed designed to teach learners to think—logically in syllogisms, rationally, hierarchically like chatGPT, generating claims and over claims and super claims all riding on evidence stored in files on the Internet.

To be fair to learners, who have no caucus in these matters yet whose private epistemologies are under construction contingent not only on opportunities to learn, but opportunities to think, one wonders about the long term outcomes of over a decade of early onset, repetitive cognitive subordination. To begin reading, learners are required to wall off their interests, their questions, their feelings about reading; to shut down consideration of pictures, of meaning, of language, when comprehending. To postpone books in favor of sounds until a learner can read nonsense words automatically is to habituate the deletion of automatic efforts to comprehend—the effort most highly valued in the real real world.

To graduate from high school, learners must resist personal associations and feelings, exploration of dead ends, sharpening their personal tastes, changing their minds, welcoming confusion as a door to clarity, when analyzing texts as resources for evidence useful in making an argument. Writing prompts and cognitive protocols linked to Core standards by way of formative and summative assessments have decimated any hint of teaching learners how to use writing as not just a mode of thinking, but of learning.

Is this fair? Probably overstated, probably in need of nuance, but… In the space of a few short years California State standards for writing in high school have devolved from teaching writing as a mode of thinking and learning to instruction in writing as a set of mnemonics governing the writing process for making and defending an argument. If this Core view represents American society’s strongest vision for teaching writing in public school, the SoR approach in first grade represents its weakest. At least SoR and Core are parallel in impact, if coherence is a virtue.