Dr. Steve Graham is the Warner Professor in the Division of Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University Teachers College. For 42 years he has studied effective writing instruction, how it develops, and how writing is used to support reading and learning. Dr. Graham is an active researcher in the field of how motivation in writing, both print and digital, is related to students’ writing success. This includes developing new measures of motivation and examining what writing motivation looks like in both teachers and students.
Dr. Graham recently shared his thoughts on the current status of teaching writing and the limits and possibilities of AI in generating writing content. Below is a condensed version of his presentation.
Our Changing World
All of a sudden, our world has changed when we think about writing. Rapidly new digital tools that we can use to write have entered the scene.
About seven years ago, while working in Brisbane, Australia, I was taking my usual morning walk. Coming around a corner, were about 60 high school students all strolling along. And when I looked closer, I realized none of them were directly talking to each other. They were on their phones, communicating, and I suspect some were communicating with each other. They were texting, and I thought, ten or twenty years ago, I would have thought I was on another planet.
This pace of change has been very rapid. Now with the rise of AI chatbots, all of a sudden we have a new world in terms of writing. We’re going to have to decide—as writers but also as teachers—what we’re going to do and how this is going to play a role in our lives.
Why Teach Writing in the Age of AI?
AI is here to stay. We need to learn how to manage it in ways that are advantageous to ourselves and to our students. I’m not crazy about the idea of somebody writing for me instead of engaging in writing myself, so you’ll see what I think we need to do during the age of AI. But first, I want to share the various ways that we write and the limits of AI in terms of these various ways.
Some of the Ways We Use Writing
We communicate with each other more now through writing than any other time in history. We text, we tweet, we blog, we email, we instant message, and occasionally people still write letters and send postcards.
The great thing about this is that it makes connecting with family, friends, and making new friends much easier, in a different way than before. Writing is ubiquitous in the 21st century. Although most of us are constantly doing this, we don’t necessarily think of these things as writing.
One basic thing that we use writing for is to inform others about who we are and who we were. Our signatures identify us and autobiographies and diaries tell our story—in addition to biographies, obituaries, and inscriptions on gravestones. We write digitally and by hand to share information everywhere. Some examples are books, magazines, newspapers, scientific reports, travel guides, powerpoints, memos, blueprints, personal correspondences, faxes, and multimodal presentations.
We use writing as a powerful tool to persuade others. Writing is used to entertain, enjoy ourselves, and explore who we are personally.
We write to heal physical and psychological challenges that we face. This is becoming one of the basic tools in psychology for dealing with issues from depression to mental illness.
We ask students to demonstrate what they know through writing so we can determine if we’ve been successful in our teaching. But even more powerful and important is that writing is a tool for learning.
A meta-analysis was conducted a few years back on the effects of writing on understanding and recall of material across science, social studies, and math, from kindergarten to grade 12. The results showed that writing had a positive impact, and the positive effect was increased when children write about the material they are reading, whether it’s language arts, social studies, science, or math.
Data also supports the idea that when you teach writing, students become better readers. For example, increasing how much students write results in a positive effect on students’ reading comprehension. Not only on researcher-designed assessments, but on norm-referenced or state level assessments, which are really hard to move the needle on.
Teaching specific aspects of writing, like spelling, text structure, or the process involved in writing, results in word reading and reading comprehension improvements. Writing is a powerful tool that we’re constantly using with positive effects for learning.
Now all of a sudden AI is here and it can actually compose text for us. This is the first time we’ve ever had a situation where a machine can create text that is reasonably constructed and makes sense.
The Limits of AI
Let’s look at the limits of AI. A machine can’t write about our psychological and physical issues to help us feel and do better. Reading what a machine writes about us is not going to lessen our depression. It will not help with mental health issues we may be encountering, or alcoholism or drug addiction.
It’s true that a machine can compose a letter or an email. However, the ideas we share with others need to come from within if they’re going to be meaningful. AI can’t help us explore who we are internally. To find out who we are we have to do our own hard work.
If we want to learn something, we actually have to get down in the dirt and dig. For example, if I conduct a research study and AI collects all the data, analyzes it, and writes my paper, what do I actually know? In order to learn, I have to be the one to handle the data and think about it in order to draw any firm conclusions.
While AI has direct access to everything that’s been written before, AI cannot write to show what we know, which is an important aspect of writing in schools. We lose many things if we have AI do the work for us.
The Power of Writing
Why is writing a powerful tool for learning? When we’ve read, experienced, or learned in the classroom, writing provides us with a tool for exploring the ideas presented. Because we can write it down, the ideas are available to us to reflect upon and to analyze later. At the most simple level, think about note taking. When someone presents us with material, we have to decide what is most important to put in notes. This means engaging with that material and making judgments.
For a summary you have to do the same thing. Most of the types of writing we do in school involve integrating information. If we have disparate ideas and bring them together, that excercise can sometimes lead to new insights about that information or provide ways to think about that information in more efficient ways.
When we write, we often think about what we already know. That gives us an opportunity to connect old information with new information. And when we write, we reconsider information as it’s transformed into words. If I’ve got a particularly difficult idea in my head that I’m trying to get on paper, the idea may be a bit fuzzy and not fully conceptualized. Writing forces me to think about that idea more carefully to make sure my reader can understand it. And thinking about it sometimes leads to new insights. So that fuzzy idea starts to turn into a more concrete one.
There is a personal involvement in writing because we have to decide how to treat the ideas we’re obtaining. We have to become personally involved and engaged with that material.
For example, we’re often asked to read something at school, analyze it in a particular way, and then write about it. This process means we see the information not once but a second and maybe a third time. One of the most powerful tools in terms of remembrance is rehearsal. This technique engages us with writing in multiple ways, with various types of writing providing different benefits.
You can see how AI can’t easily do these things for us. If AI finds the information, organizes it for us, and then writes out a composition, we can read that and we might understand what’s going on, but we haven’t done the hard work of engaging with that material. The engagement aspect is what most likely will result in new insights.
One way to think about AI is that we may want it to help us construct sentences or find information so we can think about it. But ultimately, we’re responsible for what we say in our writing. We have to understand the information, and that AI cannot do for us.
Managing AI as a Tool
We want to be sure that AI remains a tool we use, not a tool that replaces our thinking. I’m happy that this tool is available. I think we will find it helpful for designing our lessons as teachers and for using it as a writing tool for ourselves and our students.
But we need to decide who manages who. We have to have a good sense of how AI operates and how we can use it in productive ways. And here’s what I think is the kicker on this: What it means is that part of a writer’s job in the future will be to manage AI and orchestrate how to do that.
Which means we need to know how to write. If we don’t already know how to write, then we’re going to be less successful at using this tool.
Here’s a simple example. Let’s say that I have an idea and I’ve generated a sentence but I’m not happy with it.
I ask AI to give me three options for that sentence. That’s great, but I still have to make a decision about which of those options best display my intended meaning and will be clear to the reader. So I have to make decisions and be actively involved in the process.
My text may be clearer, but I still need the skills to recognize if it’s better or not. That’s a learned skill and one we can help kids with as we move into the future. AI can help in terms of refining what we write.
Now, a lot of our students don’t write as well as they could, or should, or need to in order to engage with writing in all of its various forms. We want to make sure that they acquire the skills that they need to do so. So what do I think we need to do?
Devote More Time to Writing and Teaching Writing
Firstly, and most importantly, we need to devote more time to writing and teaching writing. Why do I say that? We’ve done a series of surveys of teachers from first grade to twelfth grade to determine how much time students spend writing, how much time is spent teaching, and the use of various procedures.
We typically see a total of about 25 minutes a day spent on writing in the fourth through sixth grades. That’s 10 to 15 minutes writing and 10 to 15 minutes teaching writing. It’s not enough.
It’s almost as if we think by the time kids reach fourth grade, they’ve learned all they need to know about how to write. And in some ways, it becomes even worse at the secondary level. Because, when we ask teachers about the types of writing students do, what we typically see is that they are filling in blanks, writing lists, brainstorming ideas, or writing a one-paragraph summary.
We need to ensure students are engaged in more writing and that we are spending our time teaching writing. That we’re using it to support learning in science, social studies, math, other content areas, and reading as well.
We need to get better at coordinating writing activities throughout the time kids are in school. A teacher’s day is packed! We need to look for ways to make time available so that students will be able to use writing in functional ways and not lose the power that it gives them.
What Students Need to Learn
We write for many different purposes, whether we’re in school or involved in other writing communities. Whether we’re a little kid at home with parents or guardians or in an online chat room, there are many different purposes for writing and a variety of communities in which we write. We need to learn how to operate in those communities and understand the purpose and the types of structures that exist for them.
We want students to take agency; to plan and set goals for themselves within the parameters of what teachers ask of them. So, where do we get the most bang for our buck? In goal setting and planning in advance. When we teach students how to plan, the quality of their writing improves drastically.
Students need to know what constitutes good writing in various environments. They need to know how to improve what they write with revising and editing.
That means they have to have a good sense of the criteria and characteristics of good writing in a particular space. They need to learn to be fluent in sentence construction, writing, spelling, and typing. Those are thinking skills and will never be automatic. They have to have a good sense of the organization of paragraphs and the structure of different types of writing.
Students need to know how to manage the writing process. Sometimes teachers manage everything, including where kids sit, what they do, and what their goals are. But when we think about ourselves and our writing, we have to orchestrate. We have to find the place where we’re going to be comfortable writing.
My wife plays music when she writes. With me, it needs to be completely quiet. I have to have a place that’s kind of isolated and have certain things around me, a cup of iced tea, etc. I’ve learned that because I’ve been allowed to manage my own writing environment.
Students also need to learn how to work with others when writing. This is not only important because as people, we learn from others, but as they move out of school into other contexts, they’re going to be using writing conjointly with other people.
Managing AI Ethically and Effectively
We’re going to need to learn how to manage and use AI efficiently and also ethically. We’re conducting a survey in Norway right now with secondary teachers. Norway has encouraged the use of AI in writing and in other ways. We wanted to know what teachers thought. And I can tell you, teachers were very concerned about unsanctioned use of AI for writing and the unethical issues that may arise.
This highlights how we want to be sure that we help students learn how to use this tool ethically. We want them to use this tool in ways that are going to be both safe and healthy.
Examples of AI as a Useful, Ethical Tool
So how do we help our scholars use AI as a writing tutor ethically and responsibly? We can think of particular skills in which AI could be helpful. For example, AI could help with sentence construction or sentence combining, where we might have written two sentences and ask AI for a couple of examples of how they might be combined effectively.
Help from AI could involve sentence construction and paragraph instruction. We take a paragraph, scramble the sentences, and we put it back together. Then we let AI put it back together, and we compare and analyze them. So there’s a lot of different ways that this can work.
Let me give an example of something that a teacher in Texas shared with me recently. Sometimes we want to share with students miscues that occur in their paper and how that affects meaning and what to do when certain miscues occur. But the problem is when we take a kid’s paper and put it up for everybody to see, that kid knows it’s their paper. That’s a little embarrassing. So this teacher took papers that were written by their kids, and had AI make the same errors and miscues. They then used that as an example instead.
There are a lot of ways that AI may be useful to us in terms of helping students develop these foundational skills that are transportable to any writing community.
Convincing Administrations
So how do we convince administrations that writing time is just as important as teaching kids to learn how to read?
We need to make the case of how necessary writing is and all the different ways we use writing. Then we convey the message that writing is a complex skill, more complex than reading because it’s a production task versus a reception task. We’re not saying that reading is easy for everybody, but writing is even more complex. You can be a good reader but not a great writer.
There’s this view that writers are born and not made because we sometimes see writing that looks like art,. We’re amazed that people can put something together and use language in the way they do.
But most of us learn to write by engaging in it and by getting help from others, with assistance and teaching that helps move us forward.
I think the most powerful way to convince administrations that writing instruction is important is to point out what it does for reading and other things in the school curriculum.
The science of writing and the science of reading are incomplete. In 2000, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development did their report with the Big 5. But they didn’t look at writing. If they had, writing would have been part of that. Because we know that when we teach spelling to students, word recognition or decoding improves along with their reading comprehension.
Text structures used in writing provide students with handles that they can use to comprehend texts that they’re reading. Knowing that a story usually has certain parts makes it a little bit easier to understand. If we teach kids processes that go into goal setting, analyzing, predicting, etc., those are the same things that we apply to a large degree in reading.
And the empirical evidence suggests that when you teach writing, students become better readers. And when you teach reading, they become better writers. One of the things that I think is particularly important is we need to look for ways of integrating our reading, writing, and learning instruction so we can be more efficient.
I think in the future we will see large program material companies and others who design writing instruction use more of that integration. We have to use time more efficiently. We need to make the case that this makes for a better learner in multiple subjects including science and math, where elaborating on how we found the answer can have a positive effect on understanding and recall.
High-Yield Writing Processes Benefit Reading Comprehension
Most people have heard of reading with a writer’s eye, where we examine a text with a group of kids to think about what the author is trying to say and consider the different ways they use words. The missing piece is that we don’t apply that in our writing.
Let’s say that we look at how an author has a cliffhanger before moving to the next chapter. We analyze that but we don’t necessarily try it out in our own writing.
What we want to do is look for opportunities to extend what we’re learning and reading to improve our writing, and that means thinking about our audience. And often we don’t have enough writing tasks where we have a real audience on the other end.
I’ll give a great example of this. If you live in Maryland, Delaware, or Virginia and you’re a kid in the elementary grades, at some point during your elementary academic career you saved the Chesapeake Bay. My daughter’s class did that, and it seems to be a common class project in the fifth grade.
They saved the day by working on a stream that eventually ran into a river that ran into the Chesapeake Bay. That may not sound like it has anything to do with writing but they wrote two grants. Both were submitted to the College Park government where the school was located. They wrote a paper for the University of Maryland newsletter and they wrote a letter to the Washington Post.
They weren’t published, but they had a real audience. The College Park newspaper did publish a letter. The students then wrote letters presenting their point of view that went in mailboxes throughout the neighborhoods, and they had a rally where they wrote on signs. And it was amazing. The teacher just had to get out of the way, because the kids were in this activity that they saw had real value.
The primary purpose wasn’t writing, but writing was the tool for carrying the message and getting the job done. And in some ways, the more that we can integrate writing into what we do, whether it’s civics, science, or some other aspect of learning, the more likely we’re going to see students engage in this process for its own particular power.
Related Reading
The Liberatory Impact of Evidence-Based Writing Instruction
Teaching Writing Conventions for Effective Communication
Reading and Writing: Reciprocal Opportunities to Become Both Brilliant and Infinite