Natalie Wexler on How Writing Promotes Clear Thinking | Literacy and the Science of Learning

“Teaching students to write clearly was actually teaching them to think clearly.” 

In the Season 3 finale, host Natalie Wexler brings listeners inside Monroe City Schools, a high-poverty Louisiana district where educators have paired a content-rich curriculum with explicit writing instruction. This combination has not only helped students become fluent writers but also expanded their ability  to understand complex content and think analytically.

For writing instruction to work, the curriculum needs to dive deeply into specific topics. “It’s hard to build a complex paragraph and sentence structure around something that’s a relatively simple idea. You're able to use those higher-leverage strategies when the content gives you something to work with,” explains the district’s former chief academic officer, Serena White.

Monroe City Schools had been using the content-rich Louisiana Guidebooks curriculum for several years, and many students were able to understand lessons, read the texts, and participate in class discussions. But writing was a different story: “when it came down to actually composing and expository writing, they struggled greatly. . . Many times they just wouldn’t put anything,” White explains.

In 2017, she came across The Writing Revolution, a guide to an explicit method of writing instruction grounded in cognitive science. Wexler co-authored the book and is on the advisory board of the organization that provides training in the method. It has three crucial characteristics, Wexler explains.

First, writing activities are embedded in the content of the curriculum, across subject areas. Second, grammar and rules of syntax are taught in the context of students’ own writing. And third, the heavy cognitive load that writing imposes is lightened so that students can enjoy the potential cognitive benefits of writing, like retrieval practice and elaboration. 

After the district adopted the method, teachers began to see changes for all students, including those who struggled the most. Students were writing in complete sentences, outlining and drafting coherent essays, and tackling written responses on standardized tests with confidence, says teacher Tamla South. Teacher Justin Overacker adds:

“You’re helping students write with clarity and with purpose and confidence across disciplines. And let's be real: these are skills that are very essential for college and career and life.”

Like most educators, those in Monroe weren’t familiar with cognitive science. They just wanted to teach their kids how to write. Their experience shows that even if teachers haven’t learned about concepts like retrieval practice, they can provide their students with all the benefits of science-informed instruction—and equip them for success in school and beyond—by adopting an explicit, carefully sequenced method of writing instruction.

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign and StandardsWork. Follow the Knowledge Matters Campaign on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Search #knowledgematters to join the conversation.

Production by Tressa Versteeg. Original music and sound engineering by Aidan Shea.

Transcript

Natalie Wexler

Lots of educators would love to find a way to teach their students how to write. What if they found an approach to writing instruction that worked and also found, to their surprise, that it improved their students’ ability to think? In one school district, that’s what happened.

Justin Overacker 

So at the start, yeah, the focus was on writing instruction. But like, as we started something kind of unexpected to me, kind of amazing began to happen. Like we realized that teaching students to write clearly was actually teaching them to think clearly.

Natalie Wexler

This is Episode Six of the Knowledge Matters Podcast, Season 3: Literacy and the Science of Learning. I’m Natalie Wexler. You just heard from Justin Overacker, a high school English teacher in Monroe, Louisiana, who you’ll hear from later on in this episode. 

Throughout this season, I, along with my co-hosts—Dylan Wiliam and Doug Lemov—have explored the connections between literacy and the science of learning. You’ve heard about the importance of knowledge to reading comprehension—and learning in general. About cognitive load theory and why it’s so important to have information stored in long-term memory. About reading fluency, attention, and why we need to have students read whole books. And about how concepts from cognitive science apply to writing. 

Today, on our last episode, we are traveling to Monroe, Louisiana, to see what can happen when a school district combines a content-rich curriculum with an explicit approach to writing instruction. We’ll find out whether that combination can provide students with the benefits of instruction grounded in principles of cognitive science—even if teachers have never heard of those principles.

Monroe is in the northern part of the state. It has about 48,000 residents, and the school district has about 8,000 students. About 80 percent qualify as economically disadvantaged. And about the same percentage—although not necessarily the same students—are Black. 

Around a decade ago, the district began using an elementary literacy curriculum that was rich in content—one that had been created by the state. While the curriculum had writing prompts related to its content, it didn’t guide teachers to help students actually do the writing. Then, state tests started to put more of an emphasis on writing.

Here’s Serena White, who was then the district’s director of curriculum and instruction and later its chief academic officer.

Serena White 

So of course there was um heightened attention to the students' writing. And when we looked at it, we honestly saw students who—although they could participate in class, they could answer orally, they had read the text, could complete assignments—when it came down to actually composing and expository writing, they struggled greatly. They honestly, many times they just wouldn't put anything. They would simply either put their pencil down and skip it, or they closed their laptop. But they did very little. 

If they did attempt it, the organization was not there and nor was the communication from the student clear.

Natalie Wexler

Teachers were pretty much on their own in trying to figure out how to help students learn to write.

Serena White

There were different acronyms—RACE or SKIP, or you name it. There was a hodgepodge of different methods where teachers were really trying to give students tools to be able to complete this, but there was no consistency and there was no um research behind it. It was just—I mean, the teachers were honestly just trying their best to find a way to help the students be able to complete the writing assignment.

Natalie Wexler

In 2017, Serena came across a book called The Writing Revolution that described a method of explicit writing instruction. I'm the co-author of that book and I’m on the advisory board of The Writing Revolution organization, which provides training in the method.

We’re focusing on The Writing Revolution in this episode—not because it’s the only method of writing instruction that can work—but because it’s one highly effective model, and it’s one I happen to know a lot about. The reason it’s so effective is that it incorporates three principles grounded in cognitive science that can unlock the potential of writing to enhance learning.

First, writing instruction should be embedded in whatever content is being taught, at any grade level—not just in English language arts. That helps ensure that in every subject, students are getting the cognitive benefits of writing that we heard about in the previous episode—things like retrieval practice and elaboration.

Second, students should learn about grammar and the rules of complex syntax in the context of their own writing—which, for most students, is probably the only approach that will work. For that, you need to start instruction at the sentence level.

And third, instruction needs to lighten the heavy cognitive load of writing so that students have the capacity in working memory to learn to write and to get benefits like retrieval practice.

One way to reduce cognitive load is, again, to start at the sentence level. Another is to ensure that students have adequate knowledge of the topic they’re writing about. And a third is to have students learn new writing strategies through deliberate practice, which is another concept we talked about in the last episode.

But back to Monroe. After Serena White came across the book, she noticed that representatives of The Writing Revolution organization were scheduled to present at an upcoming state education conference in New Orleans.

Serena White 

I wanted the input and buy-in from ELA teachers about whether this would really work. I mean, honestly, on any campus, they are going to drive the writing instruction. And so I—I asked six of them to attend the session and I asked them to come back and tell me what they thought.

Natalie Wexler

Justin Overacker, the high school English teacher we heard from at the beginning of this episode, was one of the teachers who went to the session.

Justin Overacker 

I read the synopsis the night before this session and I really kind of got excited. I went into that session because I really was actively looking for better strategies. And then of course, you know, we get to the session and it is—it was clarity and it was logic and it was cohesion. And girl, I could see the trajectory.

Natalie Wexler

Serena remembers meeting up with the teachers.

Serena White 

But I'll never forget that evening, we were in the hotel and they came. And I said, “What'd y’all think?” They were like, “Serena, this is what we need. This is what our students need, without a doubt. But we wanna do this right.”

Natalie Wexler

What that meant was: Don’t expect us to train other teachers in this method on the basis of one session at a conference. It’s too complicated. We need to have teachers trained directly by The Writing Revolution organization. That meant Serena had to find the money. 

After she managed to secure a federal grant that covered the cost of the training, the district started with English language arts teachers. Soon, they expanded the training to include district leaders—including Serena herself—social studies teachers, and special education teachers. 

Within a couple of years, all teachers and most administrators in the district had been trained by The Writing Revolution. 

Serena White 

Once we started the training—because we couldn't get everyone in at once, we had to stagger groups—and once they began hearing good things about the training and people, you know, then they were excited about it. There was a core group that was really, really excited.

Then there were these little groups, okay, and anyone who's done district leadership will tell you that, you know, especially some of your upper end high school teachers who have taught English for several—you know, many, many years, decades, they already had a successful way of teaching. And so those were one obstacle. 

And you know, really what sold them though, when they came was when they saw that it could be implemented K through 12, and they knew that in a few years that their students would come to them better prepared, they became, you know, fans of the method also. So, but it was initially getting them in the door. 

Now the other group that really um kind of second guessed me were people like my math teachers. And I was a former math teacher. So at one point I just said— I'll never forget this, it was— she was a principal who was a former math teacher. And she's like, “Serena—” And I said, “Just trust me. Just trust me. I know you don't think you have the time, but I promise.” 

And she became one of the biggest fans. She—her school became one of the top schools implementing it because she saw how it could be applied.

Natalie Wexler

Why teach writing in a math class? One reason is that if you want students to become good writers, it helps to reinforce writing instruction as much as possible. If students have learned, for example, how to use subordinating conjunctions in English class, it helps to have them do that in math class too, by giving them a sentence stem like this: Although fractions are like decimals…

Students then have to come up with a way to complete that sentence, which requires them to recall the meaning of although. They might, for example, complete the sentence with the phrase: Although fractions are like decimals…they are written differently.

But another reason is that—as we learned in the previous episode—writing about what you’re learning can reinforce and deepen knowledge in any subject. To complete that math-related sentence stem, students have to grapple with the concepts of fractions and decimals, figuring out what makes them similar and what makes them different. Math teachers who try that kind of activity find that rather than taking time away from their math instruction, as they might have feared, it makes their instruction more powerful.

Educators in Monroe weren’t looking for a way to align their instruction to the principles of cognitive science. Like most educators, they didn’t know about those principles, because they’d never learned about them during their training. They were just looking for a way to enable their students to write. 

And they did see marked improvements in student writing, across the board. The change may have been most noticeable with students who had been diagnosed with learning disabilities. Here’s Tamla South, an inclusion teacher who works with such students at the elementary level in Monroe:

Tamla South 

First of all, I was getting full sentences. I didn't have to say, “Hey, where's your subject? Where's your verb? What—you know, how to make this sentence juicy? How to make this sentence have meaning? You know, how to make sure that it's connected to what you're talking about?” Once they start getting into it, you saw it. You saw them building quality sentences.

Natalie Wexler

All students were benefiting from the new approach—including Tamla’s own son, Zelmarcus. 

Tamla South 

As a parent, teaching writing was like  um  pulling teeth and pulling toenails and everything.

Natalie Wexler

Tamla says Zelmarcus was a smart child, but writing was a struggle for him. Then starting in 7th grade, he had teachers who used The Writing Revolution—or TWR—including Justin Overacker in high school.

Justin Overacker 

Zelmarcus is a very great example of how TWR can really change a student's trajectory. He always was bright. However, TWR really helped him organize his thinking and express himself really more confidently.

Natalie Wexler

Zelmarcus is now in college, where he has a 4.0 grade average. And tested out of the writing requirement.

Tamla South 

My son writes beautiful. I mean, I can't—there's no way I can explain it to you because his professors in college, all they talk about is how beautiful he writes. And the confidence that gave him because, you know, it used to be—it used to be a stress. But after the writing revolution, it made my job as a parent very easy.

Natalie Wexler

Zelmarcus isn’t the only Monroe student who has impressed his college professors. Here’s Serena White.

Serena White

I know we have heard from students who went on to college and who really had professors ask them, “How did—how did you learn how to write? Because none of my other students can write.” That's very exciting to get that information back.

Natalie Wexler

Justin says that some of his students are now able to ace the rigorous state writing test, which requires them to write an essay comparing, for example, a passage from Crime and Punishment and a poem by Emily Dickinson—neither of which they’ve read in class.

Justin Overacker

I mean, like this is like archaic stuff, and they instantly see it and they get anxious. But then it's like we've trained so much. It's like a marathon. They revert back and they say, “No, no, no, I'm not going to get anxious. I've got a method.”

Natalie Wexler

Tamla has seen the same kind of confidence with her elementary inclusion students.

Tamla South 

They know exactly what to—how to pull from the question, how to restate the question, how to pull the facts that they need to answer the question. You have students—they might need some guidance. But my students, if you put them on the right thing—”Hey, don't forget to this part.” “Oh, okay.” 

So therefore, it's building their confidence. It transforms to each classroom. They're able to write. And I mean, a child writing on their own? That is amazing.

Natalie Wexler 

When I visited Monroe, last year, I spoke to teachers there about what was happening across grade levels—and also saw it myself. Originally, students in Monroe didn’t get The Writing Revolution until 3rd grade, but in the past few years the district has extended it down to the earliest grades. Many of the writing activities at those grade levels are done primarily through oral language.

Visiting one K-2 school, I saw kindergartners finishing sentence stems about the rainforest with the conjunctions because, but and so. First graders supplying information about planets to turn sentence fragments into complete sentences. And second graders putting a series of sentences about the life cycle of the frog into the appropriate order, to create a coherent paragraph.

I could see that children were enjoying these activities. “They love language,” one 1st grade teacher told me. She also said her students’ oral communication had improved “tenfold.” At the beginning of the year, they would respond to questions with one-word answers, she said. But a few months later, they were providing complete sentences. 

“And then other kids will say, ‘Can I add something to their sentence?’” The teacher told me. “And they’ll add a because.”

That helps lay the groundwork for independent writing—and reading—at higher grade levels. Now that the district has been using the method for several years, teachers like Justin are seeing high school students coming in with stronger skills.

Justin Overacker 

Students who have had TWR in the earlier grades really come in with a lot stronger foundation. They really understand sentence structure. They know how to write a clear paragraph. You can tell that they analyze text even more effectively. We really spend a lot of less time reteaching the basics in high school and more time kind of pushing them towards that higher level thinking that high school is really known for.

Natalie Wexler

As they began to implement The Writing Revolution, teachers in Monroe noticed other things happening beyond just improvements in writing. Here’s Tamla talking about her inclusion students.  

Tamla South 

So therefore those quality sentences give them more clear—I know this might sound funny—but it gave them clearer thoughts because they're not everywhere. And so therefore your writing is a—is similar to your thoughts in your head. So if you can write clear, that means you can think clear and you can produce clearer stuff. So therefore, it changes their behavior in their writing, their speech, and the way they talk.

Natalie Wexler

Justin was seeing the same thing with his high school students.

Justin Overacker

So at the start, yeah, the focus was on writing instruction, but like, as we started something kind of unexpected, to me, kind of amazing began to happen. Like we realized that teaching students to write clearly was actually teaching them to think clearly. We as English teachers had to say, okay, it's not just English teachers. Like this is teaching students how to write and that—they're writing in every subject. 

So like the sentence level strategies like because, but and so, and the subordinate conjunctions, they weren't just improving grammar, they were helping students process, connect ideas. And suddenly students that have struggled to explain what they were reading could break it down and they could paraphrase it and then analyze it. So obviously they're reading comprehension started to grow alongside that.

Natalie Wexler

Both Justin and Tamla say these changes have led teachers in the district to adjust their expectations of what students can do.

Justin Overacker 

We had a very deficit-based thinking. And TWR throughout these 10 years has really revolutionized not only student writing, but like, teachers' values-based thinking. Like growth mindset.

Natalie Wexler 

Tamla told me that people used to believe that students like those she works with just couldn’t write. 

Tamla South

It’s like, it’s society saying that they —you know, they don't have the capability of writing. But now, you have special service students who doesn't mind writing three or four paragraphs. 

And so many people have already told me, “Well, you know, they're gonna be a zero.” No. My babies are not zeros. They are—they are fluent writers. And their writing has substance.

Natalie Wexler

The district has also seen some improved test scores—especially in the schools and classrooms where teachers are doing the best job of implementing The Writing Revolution method. At one school serving grades three to five students outperformed the state average at all grade levels on the 2023 state writing test. 60 percent of fifth graders scored in the highest category, as compared to a state average of 44 percent. Scores for economically disadvantaged students and Black students exceeded the state average for those groups on all but one measure.

So, can other districts use writing instruction to spark these kinds of changes? The educators I spoke with in Monroe said yes—but with a few caveats. A fundamental one is that the curriculum they’re using needs to be rich in content, beginning in the early grades. Here’s Serena again.

Serena White

It's hard to build a complex paragraph and sentence structure around something that's a relatively simple idea. You're able to use those higher leverage strategies when the, when the content is—gives you something to work with, so to speak. 

Natalie Wexler

Many elementary reading curricula don’t provide rich content. Instead, as we mentioned in the last episode, they put comprehension skills like “making inferences” in the foreground and use texts as a means for students to practice the skills. That means skipping from topic to topic, with only superficial treatment of each one. Students are unlikely to acquire enough knowledge of any one topic to write about it coherently.

Another caveat is that, as Serena White told me, the method isn’t as simple as it looks. Teachers need to adapt the method to whatever they’re teaching, and that can be challenging. In Monroe, all teachers were using the same curriculum, but some were doing a better job of adapting TWR activities than others. Serena remembers accompanying TWR staff to observe classrooms in different schools, on one of their periodic site visits.

Serena White 

I think it was a middle school and I think we had observed a lesson on the Hatchet. And then we went to another campus and we observed the same lesson on the Hatchet. And the teacher had—those two teachers had developed two different Writing Revolution activities. And one was of better quality than the other. And so, when in comparing that we were like, “Wait, there's absolutely no reason for this—you know, because we do have common curriculum—for there to be any difference in, in quality.

Natalie Wexler

That led to the formation of a core group of teachers in Monroe who came to be called “The Revolutionaries.” With the guidance of The Writing Revolution organization, they created ready-made activities embedded in the content of the district’s English language arts curriculum, Louisiana Guidebooks.

Once other teachers didn’t have to figure out those activities for themselves, they were much more likely to use the method. And the activities created by The Revolutionaries are now embedded in the state-created ELA curriculum for grades 3-5. That means anyone who uses the curriculum, which is freely available online, can also use the writing activities.

But Serena—who now works for The Writing Revolution organization—says it’s still valuable to have a group of teachers in the district take on the task of creating activities using the method. 

Serena White

Because part of what it did is it built leadership within every grade level of my ELA teachers because, you know, when you're doing that level of work you can't help but learn about the method more deeply. And so when they would get together for grade level meetings, that—they became the grade level expert on that.

Natalie Wexler

And as with many things that actually work in education, educators might need to be patient about seeing higher test scores across the district.

Serena White 

The first couple of years, it's more hit or miss depending on the teacher, you know. Their adoption of the method, how comfortable they are with and with creating the activities and embedding it in their curriculum. It's not that you don't see success in the very beginning, but it's—it's in patches, so to speak. 

But then after year three, especially if you're able to have revolutionized materials, then you begin to really see the impact. And once a school gets to a point where they've really increased the—how they're performing, then it seems to just grow every year.

Natalie Wexler

As we’ve seen, explicitly teaching kids to write about what they’re learning is about a lot more than improving their writing—important as that is. It’s also about boosting reading comprehension, learning in general, and fundamentally, thinking. 

Findings from cognitive science explain why: when kids write, they’re increasing their ability to retain information, and they’re deepening their comprehension and analytical abilities by elaborating on that information. They’re also learning how to use and understand complex sentence structure.

But cognitive science also tells us that writing is really hard—so hard that many students don’t get its cognitive benefits. The key to unlocking the potential of writing is to modulate the cognitive load it imposes—in other words, to make it less overwhelmingly hard.

The other thing about writing is that it’s something many teachers know they need help with. Few get good training in how to teach it, and most curricula—along with most state standards—have unrealistic expectations for the kind of writing students will be able to do with limited instruction.

Teachers across the country may not be searching for a way to implement principles backed by cognitive science—at least, not yet. But, like the teachers in Monroe, they may well be searching for an effective way to teach writing. And if they combine a content-rich curriculum with a carefully sequenced method of writing instruction, they’ll find that their students not only become better writers, they also become better learners and thinkers.

Ideally, teachers will have a grasp of the scientific principles that explain why that’s happening. But even if they don’t, if they try teaching writing explicitly, in a manageable way—in whatever subject they’re teaching—they’ll start seeing what it can do for their students. Here’s Justin again.

Justin Overacker 

Like some non-ELA teachers still really hesitate to use TWR because they think it's all about one thing, writing or reading, or they're worried about teaching grammar, but it's really not, right. And when you—when that trajectory changes and they see it's all about thinking, it's a tool for learning. And that moment that teachers realize that, everything changes.

Natalie Wexler

And when students learn to write in more complex ways and think in more complex ways, teachers in Monroe told me, they become more confident and better equipped for whatever lies beyond high school. Justin and I spoke shortly before some of his students would be graduating, and their futures were on his mind.

Justin Overacker 

And in high school again, I think this is important because you're building on years of structured practice, right? Of helping students write with clarity and with purpose and confidence across disciplines. And let's be real, like, these are skills that are very essential for college and career and life. L-I-F-E. Okay. Exit, exit, exit, out into the real world! Like, that's what you're about to do. I have students that are six days away from walking out into the world.

I just—it's an emotional time because they're about to go out into the real world. And you want—you want our future to have the very best opportunities. And you want them, if they're not gonna have those opportunities, to know what barriers are in the way. And to not be scared to explain the significance and use because, but, and so if there is some kind of barrier in the way. And you know that you've equipped them with that.

Whether you're a kindergarten teacher or a 12th grade teacher, you're equipping students with things and knowledge that they're going to need. I'm gonna read their names at graduation. And it's just so much emotion knowing what you have done. And maybe we teachers don't think about that that often, but we need to. [laughs] Because that’s why we do it. 

Natalie Wexler 

That’s it for Season 3 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast: Literacy and the Science of Learning. We hope you’ve found it illuminating and useful.

We’ve shown that if we want students to reach their full potential, we need to stop seeing literacy and learning about content as two entirely separate things. Literacy practices grounded in the science of learning—cognitive science—can make teaching easier, and make learning easier for students, in any subject.

We know most educators don’t have the opportunity to learn about these principles and practices during their training or even afterwards. If this series has piqued your interest and you’d like to find out more, there are lots of resources that can enable you to go deeper. We’ll link to these in the show notes. 

 This season has been hosted by me, Natalie Wexler, as well as Dylan Wiliam and Doug Lemov. We’ve each recently published a book that provides even more information about what we discussed on this podcast. 

Dylan Wiliam is a co-author of Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival, which is available as a free download. 

Doug Lemov’s book, The Teach Like a Champion Guide to Science of Reading, comes out at the end of July. 

And I, Natalie Wexler, have recently published Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning. We hope you check them out. 

This podcast is produced by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Learn more about their work at: knowledgematterscampaign.org. There, you can find curriculum resources, blogs, and sign up for their periodic newsletter. And thanks for listening.