Memo 3a: Connection to the Course Texts

American education will never realize its potential as an engine of opportunity and economic growth until a writing revolution puts language and communication in their proper place in the classroom.  Writing is how students connect the dots in their knowledge.

The National Commission on Writing

             I had some hard time finding a great piece of relevant to my I-Search project information, but I was glad when I did. Hence, Gallagher's Write Like This has confirmed for the millionth time to be an awesome wealth of really useful info.
 Chapter 5, for instance, not only does provide an explanation for why writing is important, but it also suggests some easy-to-implement writing activities to try in the classroom. I, thus, found some great connections to my I-Search project and here they are:
1) the very act of writing creates new thinking; in fact it assists new learning (isn't a part of Critical Thinking?);
2) different kinds of writing activities lead students to focus on different kinds of information, to think about that information in different ways (diverse thinking, or CT?);
3) writing is a process when new ideas are generated, so it is a generator of a deeper thinking (!). Thus simple reading comprehension can be deepened by writing down the ideas about the text ("being asked to commit the words to the page generated new thinking");
4) in fact, writing evokes deeper thinking, it evokes understanding: when we just read or hear the text , our comprehension is just superficial, it is only after we write it down does it become clear and ready to be vocalized. So, I understood this process as critical thinking being born during the digesting phase of the reading, or at least its comprehension. Or, in other words, it seems that we are ready to efficiently discuss a certain topic we have just heard about only after we had put it on the paper and it is verbatim confirmation of our thinking and we tend to rely on it, therefore, we are more confident to go ahead and dive into the discussion about the topic. Thus:

Reading - Evaluating-Writing-Comprehension -Discovery of Thinking

Among the writing activities that the author suggests and the one I think supports my I Search topic is "I'd Like To Know More About..." strategy which provides students with sentence starters, like: "I wonder why ...", "What might happen if ..." and an inquiry on the topic that the students need to conduct. Therefore, while the latter invites them for inquiry and research (that  means the grounds of critical thinking), the former (the sentence starters) steer students into deeper thinking through writing. Loved this one and cant wait to try it out with my students.