Close your eyes for just a moment, and imagine a classroom, neither bound by workbooks nor confined by traditional classroom success metrics. This classroom no longer requires learners to compliantly fill in blank boxes or empty lines, seeking only correct answers; instead this classroom environment incentivizes learners to internalize lessons, ask questions, and transfer learning through consistent reflection. Imagine, too, a classroom where grading is transformed, no longer a transaction between teacher and learner, exchanging correct answers for point totals, but instead where assessment becomes a conversation that slowly builds over time through trial, error, and meaningful reflection on learning.
This is the dream of the journaling classroom, where students consistently engage in on-demand, cognitive writing across all subjects—and all within blank journals that students gradually fill, day by day, until they reach the end of the year and revel in the story they’ve written about their own learning.
It’s true that it’s a shift from conventional practice. The textbook industry wants us to rely on workbooks and worksheets, but the reality is that these resources more often make teaching and learning mindless, with students circling answers, filling in words, or at their best, writing a few sentences in relation to the occasional short answer question. Mindless teaching leads to mindless learning, and the research is clear, students won’t learn what they’re not actively thinking about.
We need to free ourselves of conventional workbooks and worksheets, significantly decreasing our dependence on them. Cognitive writing in learning journals offers us an opportunity to do this: it will build writing fluency, create sustainable practice once teachers adjust to it, and move us closer to our collective goals for equity and inclusion in the classroom.
Journaling gets kids writing–and builds writing fluency.
Writing fluency is not consistently built when teachers over-scaffold long form pieces through genre-based units of study. In fact, when teachers only teach writing through these genre-based units, they tend to focus on correctness and perfection over the process of writing. To build writing fluency, students need repetitive practice, in short bursts, smoothing out the process of helping students turn their abstract thoughts into the written word, so long as they have consistent feedback to ensure growth (Koenig, Eckert, & Hier, 2016).
Tim Shanahan (2022) recommends reading and writing throughout the entire school day to build writing fluency, including across different subjects. What’s more, research suggests that writing across the subjects can “reliably enhance learning” (Graham, Kiuhara, & MacKay, 2020), increasing the likelihood that students will retain key learnings, so long as writing prompts are intentional and matched to clear learning objectives.
Cognitive writing within learning journals offers students a unique opportunity: instead of bringing three or four writing pieces to published perfection over the course of the year, it allows them to start fresh each day, quite literally turning the page to a fresh day of learning, free of yesterday’s failures and open to the possibility of new, more fluent writing successes as each day unfolds.
It’s sustainable.
Best practices must also be sustainable practices. I define sustainability in terms of the mutualistic benefits said practices offer both teachers and learners. If a practice is sustainable, it’s not only good for kids, it’s good for teachers, too.
Take, for instance, building agency and independence in the classroom. The research shows that independent learning is good for kids because it’s culturally responsive and increases the likelihood that students will transfer skills into other areas of their lives (Hammond, 2015). Building learner agency and independence is also good for teachers, too. This can’t be overstated. When we scaffold learner agency in the classroom, teaching students how to make productive and educative decisions, we allow them to share in the energy demands of learning in our classrooms. Because they are not relying on us to micromanage them or validate their every move, teachers are free to do the things that teachers need to, like pulling small groups, providing individualized feedback, or distributing scaffolds as students engage in learning tasks.
Cognitive writing is sustainable for this very reason–it puts students in the driver’s seat. Instead of engaging them in mindless learning tasks that require them to circle correct answers or fill in boxes on a closed-ended worksheet, they are actively internalizing lessons by writing about them, no doubt substantiating Graham, Kiuhara, and MacKay’s (2009) findings that cognitive writing can enhance learning across the content areas. This reduces grading, as well, as teachers are no longer having to score worksheets, and instead, can use instructional time to coach students through learning journals, helping them articulate and shape their thinking in response to open-ended tasks.
It’s equitable.
Because cognitive writing is naturally open-ended, it’s also naturally differentiated and equitable. The goal of equity is to meet all students’ needs in the classroom, but before we discuss how cognitive writing meets those needs, we must first define what those needs are.
While it’s important that we meet students’ academic needs, we must first consider basic human needs like psychological safety, a sense of belonging, and a positive self-image (Maslow, 1943). These factors matter just as much, if not more, than finding tasks’ and scaffolds within students’ zones of proximal development. The pedagogy of cognitive writing meets these basic human needs, as the open-endedness of the tasks and prompts that structure cognitive writing create multiple pathways for engagement, representation, and expression.
For those of you familiar with universal design, you likely already know that universally designing our classrooms, our curriculum, and our assessment practices entails creating the following: various pathways for students to engage with tasks in our classrooms, be it through front-end scaffolds or multiple ways to interpret a question; multiple options for showing what students know, all the while ensuring that the ways students are meeting learning targets; and finally, opportunities to express their personal reflections in relation to the content we are trying to teach them.
In fact, it is this latter benefit that distinguishes cognitive writing most noticeably from worksheets and workbooks. When students engage in cognitive writing, they not only are free to engage with the task and represent their thinking in various ways, they are also provided opportunities to share individualized reflections, articulating the nuances in what they’ve gleaned from our lessons. These reflections may be slightly different from their neighbors’, while still pertaining to and existing within the boundaries of the learning target.
So what does this look like?
Take, for instance, a math task where students are asked to add multi-digit numbers. Traditional, inequitable teaching would encourage us to model and gradually release a teacher-directed strategy onto students, perhaps the standard algorithm where students stack, carry, and add digits by place value. Sure, this is most efficient, but for many students, this method is too abstract: they need concrete or semi-concrete tools to access the task, such as base-ten blocks, number discs, or a number line.
Cognitive writing would allow them to express these methods in their journals, describing them. After students have ample time to engage with the task, teachers engage students in discourse, where students share methods for solving the problem. Teachers, then, curate a discussion where various methods create a pathway of efficiency from concrete methods (i.e., base ten blocks) to more abstract ones (i.e., the standard algorithm). At the end of the discussion, students can “stop and jot” an individualized reflection that helps to personalize a universal experience.
For instance, one student might write I will try using number discs tomorrow, while another student might write, I tried to stack and carry today, but I made a mistake when I added 9 + 5. These are both highly individualized learning statements, enacted through learners’ agency and self-reflection, as opposed to the teacher individualizing the curriculum on behalf of students.
Towards Sustainable Personalized Learning
When all three of these benefits–writing fluency, sustainability, and equitable learning–weave themselves together through cognitive writing, we find a model for sustainable personalized learning, a feat that many teachers feel too overwhelmed to attempt.
In fact, many teachers falsely conflate these terms, individualization and personalization. But if they were synonyms, we wouldn’t need both of them. Individualization requires creating something unique to the individual, while personalization entails making learning meaningful to the individual. Within this distinction lies the sustainability of personalization–and cognitive writing provides us a tool to unlock it.
Through a universal, open-ended task, teachers find sustainability through simple and mindful planning; however, by teaching in such a way where students have multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression, students are able to personalize the experience for themselves, documenting this in their journals by articulating their responses and individualized reflections.
Dare to Dream
I’ll admit it–it’s scary to take the plunge into this often messy, certainly uncertain way of teaching. After all, worksheets tend to make us feel safe: they provide us a degree of certainty and control through “correct” and “incorrect” answers, through their structure and predictability. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned about learning, it’s that it’s unpredictable, hard to control. In fact, when we try to anchor it down too much, we end up working against our students–and against ourselves.
