267: How Inquiry-Based Freewriting Can Deepen Student Writing

This is Jennifer Gonzalez, welcoming you to episode 267 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we'll be talking about how free writing can dramatically improve your students' academic writing. Teaching students to write well has always been pretty challenging. Writing requires a synthesis of so many skills that teaching it has never been a simple straightforward process. Over the last few decades, newer developments have made that process even more difficult. The internet offers unlimited text for students to plagiarize. Standardized testing has pushed us to teach more bland, formulaic writing. And now, of course, AI is a constant presence, tempting so many of us to let it do the writing for us. Many of us teachers and students alike are becoming less confident, less fluent, less agile as writers. My guest today was struggling with these issues for years, until she realized a classic writing technique could turn things around. Nashwa Elkashari has been teaching English language arts at the middle and secondary levels for 10 years, both in person and virtually. And through most of those years, she was frustrated with the quality of her students' writing. She found it to be kind of robotic, lacking in any real voice. Then, she started having them do regular free writes, where they just let their thoughts spill onto the page without stopping to polish plan or correct, with only a word count as their end goal. And things began to change for the better. She has developed a systematic way of applying free writing to more structured writing assignments, and she's gotten fantastic results from her students, both in the quality of their writing and in their confidence as writers. This process worked so well that she made it the focus of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Central Arkansas. By the way, she wanted me to give a quick shout out to her professors there. Their encouragement really helped her come into her own as an educator. She's written a detailed guest post on Cult of Pedagogy explaining the process of how she uses free writing. And in this episode, we'll talk through it step by step. Before I play the interview, I'd like to thank Renaissance for sponsoring this episode. With decades of learning data and close collaboration with educators, Renaissance advances AI responsibly to deliver tools you can trust and results you can see. Renaissance's 40-year commitment to accelerate learning for all students drives this ongoing investment in the best use of AI throughout its solutions, which includes star assessments, nearpod, freckle, accelerated reader, and more. By connecting real-time assessment data to personalized instruction and engaging practice, Renaissance's use of AI empowers educators to make informed decisions that meet each student's unique needs while helping administrators answer essential questions throughout the year. As technology continues to advance, Renaissance is committed to the best use of AI to amplify teachers' impact and support leaders with actionable insights to make timely decisions and celebrate student success. If you're looking for trustworthy and innovative AI tools for your school or district, Renaissance can help. To learn more, visit Renaissance.com/AI. Support also comes from school AI. Teaching 27 students means 27 different starting points and 27 different needs. School AI helps you meet every single one. With school AI, every student gets their own AI tutor that adapts to exactly where they are. Writing an essay, one student gets help organizing their first paragraph while another gets feedback on strengthening their thesis statement. Same assignment, personalized support. And while your students are getting what they need, you're getting real-time insights into who needs you most right now. Plus, school AI streamlines your administrative work, parent emails, translations, lesson prep, so you spend less time on tasks and more time with students. It's all student safe and designed to give you more time for what matters most, connecting with your students. School AI makes school awesome, one student story at a time. Learn more at schoolai.com. Now, here's my conversation with Nashwa Elkashari about inquiry-based free writing. Hey, Nashwa. Hey, Jim. It's great to see you. You too. You too. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. We are going to be talking about free writing today and how it made a really big change in how you teach writing, but before we do, just for my audience, tell us a little bit about what you do in education. So it kind of starts way back. I started homeschooling my own kids. I spent 10 years before I really dove into my career, kind of figuring education out on my own and experimenting on my own kids. That makes sense. I've really adopted more of a constructive as they need to create their own learning. They need to have a strong part in the learning process. Then once they went back to school, I spent 10 years between brick and mortar and virtual settings, teaching English language arts at the middle and secondary levels. I also have my masters in English, and I just finished my PhD in change leadership with a focus on digital teaching and learning. That's where I'm coming from. What we're going to be talking about today is what was the focus of your dissertation, correct? Exactly. That's great. Let's sort of take it back to. You and I have a very similar background academically in terms of like I was a middle school English language arts teacher also. And so when you sort of approached us with this topic, and I was reading about this problem that you were having, I was thinking, yes, I had this same problem. And I taught pre-AI. So tell us, let's set the stage a little bit and talk about the frustrations you were having as a writing teacher. And you were having these in a virtual setting, but this is a technique that is going to work for anybody that teaches writing to anybody. So it's not limited to virtual. Absolutely. Okay. Yeah, so I in this in school, a lot of teachers focused on the TDAs and the TDWs trying to make sure that they're focused. So giving a lot of formulaic templates, giving students a recipe and really strict restraints on what they can write and how to write. And student writing was like robotic. It was formulaic. You couldn't hear their voices. It almost sounded like AI, even before AI was it, you know, was so commonplace now. And I just tried so many different ways, like I tried choice boards to try to get their voices come out. And I tried to pull in different articles, and I tried so many different strategies, but nothing seemed to stick. Like it still sounded robotic. They couldn't express themselves. And when I figured out it was the constraints, because everything was so tight based on a rubric or certain criteria students never got the chance to really express themselves and to pull themselves into their writing. And it was something that they had never done before, according to a lot of my students. Yeah, for sure. Before we move on, explain, tell me what is TDA and TWA for anybody listening. It doesn't know because I don't know those acronyms. Oh, yeah, sure. So text-dependent analysis or text-dependent writing. So a lot of state tests will focus on that. So they own a lot of teachers will just focus on that one type of writing. Again, using acronyms like races, like race day, answer site, explain. And so again, the writing is just very canned. Yes. And it's really not represent those genres are not representative of any kind of real writing outside of school settings. Exactly. Okay, so you and you tried to give them choice boards and that really gave you limited success. So what did you end up landing on that really broke things open for you? Yeah, and I wish I could remember what prompted me to start. But I use an essential question for my unit. So every unit is based off an essential question. So I'm like, what if I try to get their thoughts about that essential question before we start and then go through all the motions, all the, you know, reading all the different types of text and then get their perspective after. And what if I can make it so they have very limited constraints and they can just write with who they are, pulling in their lived experiences, pulling in their backgrounds, their cultures, their religion, just things that matter to them. And it was really powerful to see the change. So what you used is what we know of in the ELA world as free writing. So explain, let's define free writing from people that have never heard of it before. All right. Yeah. There's a lot of different ways you can go about free writing. There's just an absolutely, like, just right. But with middle school students, like that's just, They just can't figure out, like they don't know where to start. So I call it more of structured for your writing because I give them a question. So for example, one of our, the question that we're doing right now is how can we maintain our human intelligence in a world of artificial intelligence? Okay. So they started writing all about what they know, what they think. If you get these really strong opinions that come out, so it's not structured. I give them the question. I offer prompts, but they are totally welcome to use them or not use them. I ask them to stay within the topic and then I give them a word count. That's it. I don't create on grammar, structure, organization, just letting them express themselves and think on paper. Okay. And yeah, the free writing that I was familiar with was even looser than that, which is just, you're going to write for the next 10 minutes and you're not going to stop. And when you first introduced that to students, when it was first introduced to me, there's frustration and pushback of just like, I can't just keep writing. Can I just write nonsense? Yeah, you kind of can. And it is a learning curve for people to get used to it. And so with yours, it was a little bit of a modification in that there was a prompt. But so two questions. You said you gave them a word count. Does that mean that they were doing it on devices so that they could see a word count? Or was it more just like exactly? Okay. So being virtual, they would usually submit it in a Google Docker. They have the text box within our LMS. Okay. So they would have that word count. And then the word count progressed because I want there to be more thought generation. So every unit increases by 50. So our goals to end with a 500 word free write by the end of the year, just to get them to generate thought and to be able to express themselves, because they're usually never given that opportunity to build them up to it. Okay. So you did this in a virtual setting. Did you do it when it was a live class meeting where everybody was on screen? You had them do the free write then and there was a homework assignment. It just depends on what day it falls. We teach live Monday through Thursday. So if it happened to fall on a Friday, they were on their own, but they had the sheet. But if it does happen in class, I will go during a class time, I'll go over it. And I will give them that writing time in class, so that way they can ask questions. Sometimes they'll be like, I'm stuck. And then in the chat, other students might give them some ideas. But for the most part, it's pretty independent. Okay, because I'm thinking if this would be my thought as a teacher, especially in 2026 now would be if I gave it his homework, how do I know that they wrote it? How do I know that they didn't just pull it from chat GPT or something like that? That's always, even pre-AI, my solution to any kind of plagiarism or not doing your own writing was always sit in front of me and write. And then I can see that you're doing it. And so yeah, that's been a huge, huge frustration. But I think I finally overcome it by making them submit a link through Google Doc so that I can go back and trace using Brisk or another tool so that I can actually inspect their writing. And it shows me their thought process as it goes, which is awesome. Because you can see them erase and type, and it's been a really powerful tool for me to make sure that the writing is authentic. Because with free rights, especially when it's supposed to be lived experiences and feelings and thoughts and emotions, when it's AI, it's very clear. Yes. But students, I can't prove it. If I don't confront, I might be wrong, but this doesn't quite sound like you. Please let me know. If I'm right, please re-submit it in your own words. So it did happen very frequently. But I think letting them know that I can access your version history. And we just need to be transparent, right? So I can give authentic feedback by through the comments. And then that way, you can also show that this is your work and be transparent. Right, right. You-- so I don't want to pull on this thread for too long, but I'm trying to think like a listener right now. So with Google Docs, you would be able to just look at the version history to see the process of building over time. With the version history, I still haven't figured out how that quite works, but it's through brisk, as long as it shared with my email address, and I'm an editor, I can access that version history. And then brisk can inspect that writing and show me how it unfolds. Interesting. The types, like the hesitations, it's an amazing tool. OK, OK, and this is brisk teaching. I'm familiar with that, but I didn't know it did that. So I want to-- they're getting a free advertisement right now. The podcast, so you're welcome, brisk teaching. OK, so we've established what free writing is. And I can also see how, especially now, by the way, listeners, Nashwa has also written a post that details exactly how this whole thing works out. And so I'm going to be referencing pieces of that post, too. Before we get into what this actually looks like in a unit, because when you first presented it to me, I was just thinking, I don't understand how this works. Can you map out where the free writing happens in the unit? So we're going to do that in a second. But you also talk about how this regular exercise of free writing is coming at such an important time in our technological history in terms of AI, not in terms of not using AI to cheat, but you talked about it in terms of their confidence as writers. So talk a little bit about that, about why this technique is so important. Yeah, absolutely. So oftentimes students, they get labeled as bad writers, right? Because they've got an assignment back with negative feedback or just a blank rear breaker, just no feedback at a bad grade. So students get, they label themselves as, I'm not a good writer. So to overcome that, I only give positive feedback on the free rights, just positive feedback. My goal is to not only get them to generate thought into process their ideas, but to also gain that confidence. So by highlighting what they're doing well, they gain that confidence and we're like, hey, well, Dr. Ethings, I'm a good writer. Look, she put all these great comments here. And students are not used to that. Like parents and students are like, the feedback is amazing because I feel like I can grow. I can see what I'm doing well and I can continue to do that. And I try to target my feedback based on what we're working on. So if we're working on a certain literary strategy or informational strategy or a writing type, we kind of just shift my feedback a little bit to focus on those. To pull in standards a little bit, but it's not tied to standards even though it does come out. It comes out through that investigation and through the explanatory writing with this AI one, it totally shifted to persuasive writing because everyone had very strong opinions about AI. So you can see all those persuasive techniques coming out naturally before I had even taught it. So it was really cool to see. OK, do you also find, because when I was hearing about this, I was thinking that I think a lot of us who are starting to depend more on AI even to sort of generate initial thoughts. Because I'm using it a lot as a thought partner to just get some ideas going and then I'll write. But I think that's probably putting a, it's reducing my ability to generate original thoughts on my own initially. So I would think that this practice of just putting your thoughts down on paper. It builds more writing fluency, right? Yeah, absolutely. And even students will admit it. I had one student just write a free write. And it was like, as I was writing this free write, I realized. And that just gave me chills because that's exactly what writing is supposed to do. It's thinking. And students slowly start to see that. And they're able to wrestle with ideas that they've never been asked if they weren't challenged with this question. They would never take the time to investigate it and think about their beliefs about it. And instead of passively looking at what's going on in the world, they start actively looking at different perspectives in the world around them. Yeah. Part of also what you, your theory that turned out to be true was that if they have more practice writing about more accessible topics, things that are sort of in their own personal background or whatever, that could then translate to better, more formal academic writing. Yes, absolutely. And I can see that writing grows. And even in my dissertation, I could see that a lot of students started out at a surface level. So I had a rubric that was developed by another educational board. And it showed like surface level thinking in different progressions of reflective writing. So at the beginning, most students were at the surface level. By the end, every student had hit transformational by the end of the year. So transformational means their writing actually showed that their thoughts, behaviors, or actions changed because of their thinking through the free, right? And we were able to apply it. So it was a really powerful finding. OK, and this was all of the students showed this? So I only had a subset of 13. But anecdotally, I would say that my entire class grew with writing. And I also did it for my SLO. So it did show growth for all students with that 500 mark, all the students grew from, you know, just very summative and just descriptive to like really diving deep into the topics, sharing their personal experiences, how they change their thinking, and how they might change their behaviors in the future. Okay. Hey there, this is Jen interrupting for just a second to ask you a question. How often do your students make errors in spelling, mechanics, or usage, even though they've been taught the rules for years? When teachers see these mistakes come up in student work, many are tempted to get back to basics and teach everyone the concepts again, but that's not a good use of your time, and it forces too many students to sit through instruction they simply don't need. What's more effective is to teach these conventions in the context of meaningful writing. Giving each student the exact instruction they need, but that kind of precise differentiation takes a lot of time. I've created a collection of products that I think provide a great solution to this problem. I call them grammar gap fillers. A grammar gap filler is a small, powerful package of materials that teach a single spelling, grammar, or usage rule. Gap fillers are designed to let students review just the skills they need on their own and then get back to writing. When you notice a student making a particular error, simply assign that student the right gap filler and you're done. Each gap filler includes a short video that reviews a single concept in clear simple language, offering mnemonic devices so students can remember the rule later, plus four review questions at the end of the video. A 10 question self-check that allows students to quiz themselves on the concept they just learned, then check their answers independently. This is available as a printable or as a Google form. And a one-page cheat sheet, giving a quick overview of the concept with students can keep in their notebooks for future reference. There are 24 gap fillers covering everything from the difference between your and your subject verb agreement, run-ons and comma splices and possessive versus plural nouns. To explore all the grammar gap fillers, head over to cultipetagogy.com/grammer. Let's take a look. There's a little bit of a culturally responsive piece to this, but I have a feeling it listeners want to actually see what this looks like in a unit. So let's do that first and then let's circle back to the culturally responsive because you really lay the groundwork for how that's an important piece of making this actually work, that without that, it may not quite work. But I think I like to see what it actually looks like in a lesson because that was the piece I had the most trouble wrapping my brain around. And now I get it, but it took me a while. Yeah, it's definitely different. Yeah, so you, you, I'm going to actually give it a try since I have seen it to give you a very like encapsulated description. And then we will, we can break it down. So you tell me if my summary is correct. Love it. You have, this is, we're looking at this right now just in a language arts class. Later on, we'll talk about how it could work in other subject areas. But if you're doing say like an informational writing and reading unit, which anybody that teaches ELA would be like, okay, yeah, that's something we do a lot, rather than just starting with a, what I would have done would have been like a rubric saying, this is the assignment that you're going to do an informational writing assignment. Here's, here's the requirements. And then we will start like working on our ideas. You start the unit first with an essential question that they just free right on. Then work into the academic stuff. The readings contribute to that essential question. And the students are sort of reading and responding around that. They do the, the writing assignment kind of like what I was talking about that might actually have like a rubric to it. Okay, exactly. So the only other pieces I always pull in for the most part, I pull in literary and informational. So that they can get it from different perspectives. Okay. So we'll spend about a week on informational, about a week on literary. And then we'll spend a week on writing so that they can develop it. And the writing project is pretty authentic. So for the AI one that we're in right now, students have different options. But one of the options is to write their own AI policy for our class. And they have to convince us why we should adapt it. So I'm hitting on the, on the informational skills that they were working on because they have to show their perspective. They have to clearly show their purpose, right? They want to persuade us. And then pull in those argumentative. So I try to tie into the writing all of the, at least either the literary or the informational standards. And then pull in the writing standards. Okay. And then you finish every unit with a final free right. So every unit is sandwiched between an opening free right and a closing free right basically to sort of have them think about how their thinking has evolved and to continue getting that writing practice. Yeah. Exactly. So a lot of times they will go back to the readings on their own. I give it as a prompt like how could you respond to this? You could go back to the readings. You could do this. You could try this. But most of them do incorporate the discussions, the readings into their, I call them exit free, right? And they just show how their thinking has grown. And oftentimes we'll start off with, yeah, my thinking has totally changed. We did a unit about kindness. And one student was like, I didn't realize how mean I was being to my little brother. And how that must make him feel. And I realized now that I really need to make an intentional effort to spend more time with him. And that'll be so mean and to get off my device and play with him. And like I literally started tearing because, you know, that's the kind of teacher I want to be. I want to elicit things that hit them holistically as human beings, not just academically. Yes. Absolutely. And you know, a lot of times when I talk to sort of English teachers or whatever, and we talk about like, why are we reading stories in the first place? You know, it's to it's to live a richer life and to see ourselves and to learn and grow. And it's not just about, you know, analyzing author's purpose and character development. You actually stories serve a bigger purpose than that. So yeah. And it creates a cohesive structure so that everything fits together and has meaning behind it. And I think students really get on board because they see up a bigger purpose than just a grade. Yeah. Yeah. So what you've done in this article is sort of walked us through a sample unit. So let's just let people like follow us on that unit. You've got well, I'll I'll let you go ahead. This is a this is a the top biggest friendship of this. Okay. Right. We're talking about right. Okay. So how does the how does what is week one? What happens there? Okay. So week one we focus on the question, why does friendship matter? So the first day is always the entry free right students are given the prompt sheet and they do that. And then after that, we'll start off with two or three informational articles that they'll read. This is where I tie in the standards. So as we're reading, we're looking for the meaning, but we're also tying in the standard. Well, why does purpose and perspective matter to that meaning? How do I know that I can trust this author, especially with the informational text? Or do I agree with this message? So tying in those standards with the essential question. And then throughout the unit, we're reading and analyzing, we're discussing the text together, sharing our thoughts and ideas. So discussion is a really big part. As we go through these texts together. So that first week, we start with the informational texts. Then we move into the literary portion, which I tried to tie similar standards together. So if we did perspective and purpose in informational, I try to hit perspective and POV in literary. So tying those standards together. So the second week, we read Charles, kind of the example of how not to be a good friend. And then the treasure of lemon brown to show how friendships can come out of lots of different situations with anybody. So they annotate those. I did use signposts, post and beer signposts, which just highlights different. So they're looking for maybe a tough question a character asked or a flashback and how that helps this story. And it also ties into this standard as well. So again, we're going through, they're doing, they're having discussions. I use Padlet a lot. They post their reactions. They reply to each other. So it's really student centered with them going back and forth in discussion and tying all of these pieces together. And you'll often find them like referring back to an informational piece. Be like, oh, this is like, you know, what we read in that article. So they start making those connections and start synthesizing the ideas, which is exactly what we want as ELA teachers. We don't want it to be isolated. So they have this, this repertoire of knowledge from these informational and literary texts. And that's where week three comes in. That's where we pull it into a writing project. And I try to make make them as authentic as possible. possible to make it real world. I never just give a five paragraph essay or a TDW or TDAs. It's got to be authenticated. So for this one, they could choose different options, but one of them was to write a scene of a story. And they needed to make sure that they pulled in a perspective that highlighted friendship, that their purpose was to entertain because they were using a narrative, and that they could use the information they got from the informational text to shape their writing. Not necessarily citing it, but using that as background knowledge for their narratives. Interesting. And then the last day is always the fix it right. The exit right. So I want to stick for a minute on the week three on that narrative writing piece, because a lot of people, I think, are thinking, what about grading? How are things graded? How do you grade these? So throughout the unit, how does grading look? Well, why don't we start with the narrative piece? Because that sort of feels like the biggest, maybe point value or whatever in terms of weight of a grade that seems like the thing that would get a big summative kind of a grade. Absolutely. So I pulled in those criteria. And I tried rubrics, but with my students, rubrics didn't really sink in. So I make more of an outline, and I put the point values. I'm like, you need to make sure that you have this point value x, y. You need to make sure-- so I give them the criteria they need to include, but it's pretty flexible. So like, you need to show me that you have a clear perspective. You need to show me that you can pull in-- you can use a consistent point of view. You need to pull in-- so pulling in all the pieces of this standard into the writing, but in a way that still gives them flexibility to write in a way that's authentic to them, if that makes sense. Yeah, actually, it does sound like a rubric to me. It sounds like-- I mean, I have a thing called the single point rubric that I've been using forever and ever, and I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's just a list of-- it's not all of it anyway. But the other criteria, yeah, right, right. It's just distracting for them. And I usually will assign a point value to those things. So anyway, so they do have an idea of how they're going to be evaluated and what they're sort of shooting for in this, what types of things need to be included in it. OK. Yeah, absolutely. And throughout the unit, there's formative assessments that are very low weight up to check for those skills to make sure that they're progressing. So I can adjust my instruction or see where I need to go back or I need to move forward. So there's definitely scaffolded formative assessments throughout. And then the writing, I use that as my major grade, the performance assessment. OK. And then they get this exit free right. And the purpose of the exit free right-- and from what you've told me, the essential question, the prompt, is the same for the entry free right and the exit free right, yes? Right. So same question, the prompts might change a little bit. But again, the prompts are there just as a scaffold. Because some students will see the question and they'll draw blank. So I very clearly say, you can choose to use these prompts or you can take it in any direction you choose. But these are just here to help you if you get stuff. So the essential question in this example is, why does friendship matter? So that you're saying is not actually the prompt. You have other prompts that would go along with that? No, it is the same prompt, but I'll give them different point, like starting points, these ways that they could approach it. OK. Can you give me some examples? So for why does friendship matter? Think about the stories and the articles. Did that help change our thinking about friendship? Did you think change from your entry free right to your exit free right? So just things like that, just questions to prompt them to think. Got it. But that major question, that's what they're addressing. Right. And if they want to go away from those prompts, they totally can. This is not a worksheet that they're just completing answering questions. Those are just some things to just spur their thinking. Exactly. And I have some students who use them, some students who completely go off on their own direction. And as long as they stay within the topic, they get credit. OK. And the grade is basically word count and stay on topic. And that's it. You're not taking anything off for spelling or anything like that. And what have you noticed about the difference between those entry and exit free rights? There's a lot of growth. And the crazy thing is, is I see that the free rights end up turning out better than the actual graded writing project, which is, I think, because they don't have the stress of the grade, and they feel comfortable and safe. And I think that safety is huge. They want to feel safe writing. They don't want to have to sit there in second guests themselves and think that all this has to be perfect. So oftentimes, I find the thinking and the writing to be better in the free rights than the actual writing project. It's so interesting. Have any of your students ever pointed that out too? Have they ever noticed that? I don't think so. No. No. And that's the real point. It's like, we can have our structured assignments, and that's great. But our goal really is to help them become better writers. And if the free rights helping them do that, then yeah. Absolutely. And within those free rights, they're evaluating, they're judging, they're synthesizing, they're analyzing. They have no idea what they're doing. So that's my effort in the free writing in their feedback is to really highlight, wow, you synthesized all these different sources. You pulled them all together and came up with the conclusions of, I'm kind of like scaffolding them through to show them what they're doing also, but they can replicate it. Not just like, oh, this is great synthesis, but explaining what that is, how they did it. Right. So over the course of a school year or a semester, you see even bigger growth. Yes, you had written about this too. Talk about that. Yeah, so again, going back to the results, there was from the results, you can always see a big jump from the entry free right to the exit free right. So there was definitely growth between the two. But then from the beginning of first semester to the end of second semester, there was huge growth from the way you could feel that they just felt more comfortable writing. And even I had a student focus group, and they said that it was really awkward at first. They didn't feel comfortable writing, because nobody had ever asked them to write like that. So when they were like, it was really hard to pull myself into the writing and talk about me and write about my feelings. But now I feel so much more comfortable writing. And I feel like I can just be myself. And writing was really hard, but now it comes so much easier. So it really helps give them that confidence, that writing, fluency. And it just brings joy back to writing. They said that the number one thing that they loved out of everything in my class is the free rights, which at the beginning, they complained about a lot, right. But at the end, everyone was like, yeah, the free-- they were like, can you assign us some over the summer? Oh my gosh. So they really got into it, because it was something they never got to do. And they loved pulling in, their activities, their interests, their sports, their religion, their values, their morals. They never been able to do that. Right. OK, two more things on my mental to-do list that I want to lay. So let's swing back now to the laying of the groundwork, which you've kind of talked about a little bit, because you talk about keeping all of your feedback positive. But when you set out to do this, you recognize that kind of climate-wise in your classroom, culturally within your students, you needed to set the tone, basically, to make something like free writing work. And I want to make sure that we hit on this, because if people are hearing this and just thinking, oh, I'll just tell my students to free write, and that's going to make a huge difference. There's a little more to the delivery, I guess, of it. So talk about how you figure that out and why you think that was important. So for students to feel safe, they have to be able to feel comfortable in their learning environment, so making sure that those expectations, those core values are reiterated daily, making sure that they know that this is a safe space to be, because even in their writing, if they don't feel comfortable with their classmates, if they don't feel comfortable with their teachers, it's going to affect their performance in class. Yes. When we build that community in those relationships with our students, through setting those expectations, predictable routines, they know what's coming. So I think because they got into that structure of free writing, they felt comfortable, they knew the routine, and that also helped build their confidence and make them feel safe to participate. I would also share stories of vulnerability. So I'll tell them about different things going on in my life, or if I'm not feeling well, I'm very transparent and open with my students. So in turn, I hope that they feel comfortable with me as well. And then just in the feedback, sometimes I look at-- I'm an instructional coach as well, and sometimes I look at teacher's feedback, and I want to bang my head into the law. I'm like, these are people. Really have to make sure that that feedback is personal. I always include the student's name, and it's always like a letter, like a personal letter to this student, validating their points, and really just lifting them up and encouraging them. So all of these pieces come together, and just having that presence with students, I know I didn't really mention that in here, but presence I feel is like really important too, to make sure that students realize that you love your students, you love being there with them, you're invested in their future and their success. It really sets that culturally responsive leadership is more for admin, but I took it in my dissertation more as a long as a teacher leader, because sometimes our systems are broken. And we can't depend on our leadership. So sometimes we have to take that leadership role, go against the grain, and make sure that we are introducing those culturally relevant pieces to our teaching. - Excellent. The other thing I wanted us to get to before we leave is we've only been talking about this in the context of English language arts, but you also put together a list of essential questions for how this could work in other subject areas. So why don't we just kind of like run through those really quickly so that people who teach other subject areas can kind of envision possibilities? - Yeah, absolutely. These can definitely be tweaked. I am ELA through and through, but you can kind of get the idea of what I mean and tweak it in a way that works best for you. So for math, maybe something like how do we decide when a risk is worth taking, when you're starting a statistics unit? How do we notice patterns in our lives that can go with so many different units? - Yeah. - For science, how do living things depend on each other? And looking at that from different perspectives. And again, not the expert in these other subject areas, so you can take them in whichever way, but kind of finding a real world essential question that can tie the learning together and give it meaning behind, besides you just got to learn this because you're gonna be assessed on it at the end of this. - Yes, yes. - For social studies, maybe how do people learn to live together? Or how do our experiences shape what we believe that can highlight so many different historical time frames for STEM or career? What do we do with an idea? Or how does creativity come into our everyday lives? And even art and PE, how do people express who they are? How does creativity help us share what we feel? So just kind of finding those overarching questions that can tie our units together in a meaningful way. - I think for any teacher of any subject to the way to arrive at some of these is to just think about why do we learn these things? Why do people need to learn and how do we apply it? And that can kind of, and I think a lot of subject areas are pretty good at the essential question. It's just that we never really have our students right about those things. We just maybe put it on a, this is our unit and we don't really like ever think and talk about those things. So some of that work is probably already done for them in their textbooks and that could, but we just don't really do much with them. So yeah, okay, anything else you want us to know about this whole idea of free writing before we wrap up? - I think we pretty much covered everything. It just really transformed my classroom. It was, I only started it last year. I needed, I kept trying to figure out ideas for my dissertation and I was like, you know what, let me see what this free writing actually does for these students. It was just an experiment. So I'm like, perfect. But yeah, it definitely showed that it is definitely a worthwhile practice, especially today when students just don't have a way to express themselves. - Yeah, yeah, or even at the time and space to do, no, you're absolutely right. And this is one of my favorite things to do is just, you know, have teachers share something that worked and this requires no technology, no special apps, no anything, I mean paper and pencils honestly or door they can do it on devices, but yeah, this doesn't require buying a new program or anything. - Exactly, exactly, really easy. - No resources needed, so. - Thank you so much for sharing this. Nashville, this was great. - Thanks so much for having me, Jen. I had a blast. - To read Dr. Akashari's article about this process, visit cultipetagogy.com, click podcast, and choose episode 267. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses, products, and speaking services, sign up for my mailing list at cultipetagogy.com/subscribe. - Thanks so much for listening and have a great day. (upbeat music)