In November of 2022, ChatGPT was released and reached over 1 million users in just 5 days. Educators began to express concern that students would ask generative AI tools to write essays for them. It is 2025 and trepidation about this technology remains. As a classroom educator, I loved to engage my elementary aged students in writing. And as an adult, I thoroughly enjoy blogging and writing poetry. This being said, I realize that the last blogpost I published was in November of 2022. Might this be a coincidence, or is there something more significant about the fact that these dates overlap?
To answer this question I consider the purpose of writing itself. Often, educators focus on the writing product a student has produced, whether that be a research paper, narrative essay, or summary of learning. In blogging, one purpose I have is to communicate ideas that support other educators. When we focus on end results as such, it may be tempting to ask a generative AI platform to complete the writing for us. However, as AI has come to the forefront of conversations over the past couple of years, I had lost sight of another benefit of writing. The beauty of writing is in the process itself. The act of writing, when seen as a creative and cognitive experience, is unable to be replicated by AI.
As an elementary teacher, I was taught that students first learn to read and then they read to learn. Why do we learn to write? Writing enables us to communicate ideas and crystallize our thinking for others. But an oft neglected reality is that we can also write to learn. When I take a few minutes to write a blogpost, my mind is active. I have the opportunity to analyze ideas, engage in metacognition, and challenge myself to abstract experience and thought into written language. Writing is as much a benefit to the writer as it is to the reader. What does this look like in the classroom? How can we teach students the value of the writing process?
Quick-Writes: It can feel intimidating for students to share thoughts aloud to a classroom full of peers. It can be helpful to provide an opportunity for individual processing time via writing. Provide students a thought provoking question or ask them to consider a phenomena (intriguing gif, perplexing image, excerpt from an article). Then, ask students to write their thoughts silently and independently. When faced with the common comment, “I don’t know what to write,” say, “Write what you heard” or “Write what you see”. To lower students’ affective filter, assure them that this process is not meant as a writing test nor will the finished product be judged. Rather, teach students that quick-writing is a process to support information processing.
Timed Writing: As a teacher, the students in my classroom wrote a minimum of 15 minutes straight each day. This was the case for kindergarten all the way through to sixth grade. The prompt for young students was often an image itself (perhaps from a read aloud story, or in reference to a concept we were learning in another content area). “Write about this picture,” was the extent of my explanation. For older students, the prompt was creative and linked to content from our classroom. For example, when studying natural disasters in science and ancient Egypt in history, a prompt might be “Create a character set in ancient Egypt and imagine they are facing a natural disaster.” The writing was not meant for a second draft, it was not meant to be peer reviewed, rather, it was an opportunity to practice writing itself. The cognitive act of putting thoughts into written language was presented as valuable in and of itself. The guideline was that students were not allowed to say “I’m done”. The idea was to continue writing for the entire 15 minutes. “Writers write,” I would say. “And we are writers.”
Consistent writing in the classroom is more important than ever before in an age of AI. Just as calculators did not replace the need for students to engage in problem solving in mathematics, generative AI does not erase the benefits of crafting language to communicate ideas.