Thoughtful Learning Blog

Thoughtful Learning Blog

The Thoughtful Learning blog features articles about English language arts, 21st century skills, and social-emotional learning. Insights come from the teachers, writers, and developers at Thoughtful Learning, who have been creating top-notch instructional materials for more than 40 years.

Mar
4

2021

Awaken Creativity—and Students

To innovate and problem solve, students need to exercise their creative muscles as much as their critical ones. 

You don’t need to teach art or theater to inspire creative thinking. You just need to provide students opportunities to think differently, even if it’s in short bursts. 

Today’s activity introduces a fun way to apply a topic or concept in a brand new context. 

Featured Activity: Creative Uses of Square-Pegging

Use these challenges to inspire creativity and engage students.

Feb
25

2021

Writing to Celebrate Women's History

Zitkala-Sa

March marks the beginning of Women’s History Month. While women deserve recognition every day, this time of year presents a perfect opportunity to pay homage to women of the past and present.

The five writing activities below prompt middle and high school students to explore women’s achievements while also honoring the ongoing fight for progress and equality.

Writing a Historical Dialogue

This prompt introduces students to 16 women who have contributed greatly to history, arts, activism, and science. Students choose one of the contributors, complete additional research, and write a dialogue between themselves and the person.

Goals for Gender Equality

After learning about a gender discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. women’s national soccer team, students consider contemporary examples of gender inequality in school, sports, and other group settings. Then, in an essay, students define gender equality and why it matters.

Feb
18

2021

Cures for Vague Writing

The Hull House, Chicago

“Could you be more specific?” Teachers love to ask this question, and for good reason. It encourages students to clarify their thinking with specific answers rather than generalities. 

Students should ask this same question while they write. Without concrete details, writing falls flat. Vague ideas cause dull reading and misunderstanding. Specific details build interest and understanding.

Feb
11

2021

Developing Fluent Readers

Illustration of a moose jogging

When it comes to reading, fluency is fundamental. 

Students can learn strategies to comprehend new information, predict upcoming text, and connect reading to personal experience. In the process, they improve speed, accuracy, and expression.

Improving fluency requires regular practice and support. You can give your young readers the support they need by following the steps in the Fluency Development Lesson (FDL). 

Feb
4

2021

How to Evaluate Media

Illustration of Youth Using Cell Phones and Laptop Computers

Fake news. Biased information. Divisive commentary. Today’s media landscape blurs the line between fact and fiction. Our students are left to sort out the truth. 

Passive reading and viewing won't do. Students need to learn media literacy—the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media critically and responsibly. 

This essential 21st century skill builds better learners and citizens.

Featured Activity: Evaluating Media Messages

Teach your students to evaluate the key parts of any media message.

Jan
27

2021

Unifying Paragraphs

Student holding a colorful puzzle piece

Sometimes writers must cut their favorite sentences because they don’t support the focus. Stephen King calls this process, “Killing your darlings.” It is one of the most effective revising strategies—and one of the most painful.

Asking students to cut their writing can lead to quizzical stares. They often believe more writing is better writing. And for students who put a great deal of effort into expressing an idea, having to delete or reimagine that idea can feel demoralizing.

Jan
14

2021

Teaching Revision Strategies

Two students sharing writing. One holds a piece of paper.
Thoughtful Learning

Author Shannon Hale describes her writing process as “shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” Hale's metaphor speaks to the power of revising.

How to revise, though, remains a mystery to many student writers. They tend to write one draft, correct a few surface errors, and submit their work without contemplating deeper improvements. As a result, potential castles never take shape.

You can demystify revising by giving your students time, support, and practice with concrete revision strategies.

Nov
9

2020

Mapping Your Writing Process

Pirate holding a map illustration
© Thoughtful Learning

Good writing comes to life through a series of steps: prewriting, writing, revising, editing, and publishing. By teaching this process, you make writing more manageable for your students. 

But even after you introduce the steps and strategies for applying them, some students may still view their own writing as a straightforward act that must be completed in one sitting.

You can dispel this misconception by having students map out their own unique writing method. 

Oct
21

2019

Connecting Writing with Media Literacy

Connecting Writing with Media Literacy
(c) Thoughtful Learning

You routinely connect writing with reading, but how often do you connect writing with media literacy? It's a symbiotic relationship. You teach students to write about different topics for different audiences and purposes. They can use the same skills to engage media about different topics for different audiences and purposes.

Most writing teachers, though, wouldn’t consider themselves media-literacy coaches. They might not even know how to define media literacy: the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create communication in various media formats.

The same critical-thinking skills you teach in the writing process can help your students evaluate media for truth, fairness, and bias—skills increasingly necessary for academic success and responsible citizenship. Likewise, developing media-literacy skills prepares students to ethically share ideas in writing.

How can the writing process teach media literacy?

Students learn that good writing takes time—prewriting, writing, revising, and editing. As the old saying goes, "Easy writing makes hard reading, and hard writing makes easy reading." So students learn to appreciate well-crafted ideas—and, equally importantly, dismiss shoddy ideas when media are slapped together. Thoughtful writers make thoughtful readers, listeners, and viewers.

Let's look at each stage of the writing process to see how it can help you teach media literacy.

Prewriting

To meet the specific demands of a writing task, students should first consider the communication situation—sender, message, medium, receiver, and context:

Students who can analyze the rhetorical situation for writing can also analyze the same situation for the media they consume. All media is constructed, so all students can learn to deconstruct it—breaking it into its parts, considering how they work, and evaluating them. This rhetorical awareness helps students use sources ethically and reject media that uses them unethically.

This video can introduce the communication situation to your students:

Sep
10

2019

Teaching the Whole Child (in a Fragmented World)

girls dancing and jumping in mid-air
Derek Latta/Shutterstock.com

“So, you’re a teacher. What do you teach?”

“I teach children.”

In an environment of standards and assessments, we sometimes struggle to focus on the kids, who are, after all, the reason we teach. Yes, they can be infuriating, but they can also be amazing and inspiring. The greatest moment for us is when that light comes on in a student’s eyes, when the child “gets it” for the first time. It’s like a sunrise that only we get to witness.

So education is about reading and writing and ‘rithmetic, but before all of those, it’s about kids—minds, bodies, and souls. The whole child. We all instinctively know this, but so little of our curriculum reflects it.

Sobering Statistics

Over 70 percent of us recognize the importance of teaching social-emotional skills, not only for the well-being of our students but also for easier classroom management and higher test scores. However, a recent article in Education Week presents some sobering facts:

  • 43 percent of us aren’t sure how “to help students who appear to be struggling with problems outside of school."
  • 23 percent of us say our biggest struggle is helping “students who appear to be experiencing emotional or psychological distress."
  • 50 percent of students in the U.S. experience childhood traumas such as neglect or abuse, which impact their learning and remain with them for the rest of their lives.
  • Less than 40 percent of us have learned teaching strategies for dealing with childhood trauma.

So we do what we always do—figure it out. Lacking formal training, 70 percent of teachers rely on talking with students to help coach them through emotional distress. But most of us would prefer concrete strategies that we can easily learn and teach without derailing our content instruction.

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