This methodology can be used with a range of genres. Check out our printable List of Writing Artifacts.

This methodology can be used with all age ranges. The activities are divided by levels, not ages, as prior experience is a better indicator of what a person can learn than their chronological age.

Level 1: roughly ages 3-6

Level 2: roughly ages 7-10

Level 3: roughly ages 11-15

Level 4: roughly ages 16-24

Level 5: 24 years onwards

This program is free.

Individual writers as well as classroom learners can use this methodology.

Like all questions in education, it depends. A person who goes through all 15 stages and does all of the suggested activities may spend several weeks in the process. However, most people only do 1-3 activities and many skip different stages, depending on the assignment and their own best process.

ThinkWrite uses the Understanding By Design framework of Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins (1995) to create a coherent structure for student learning. ThinkWrite is based on clear objectives, identifiable indicators of progress, and a variety of activities that relate to the objective(s).

ThinkWrite is a practical application of the UdL concept expressed by CAST (Roe & Novak, 2016). ThinkWrite embraces the philosophy that since only some people can do stairs but everyone can do ramps, we should build ramps. ThinkWrite provides the resources to permit learners to identify and then fill in gaps of prerequisite knowledge before advancing to the next stage of learning.

ThinkWrite uses the ability to “think about thinking” to improve thinking itself, and does so through the visible process of writing. ThinkWrite builds off of classic metacognitive models (e.g., Flavell, 1976, 1978, 1979) to build a new framework of clear steps to advance metacognition by valuing the many different levels of cognition that exist.

ThinkWrite begins with the premise that everyone has the potential to be a great writer, if only we celebrate all parts of people’s learning process. To develop writers across the ages, ThinkWrite values the uniqueness each of them brings and helps each of them to master their own experience of writing. Writers are encouraged to explore the more than a hundred different writing artifacts (genres) that could be produced, and to use different modalities of communication to further their learning.

ThinkWrite removes the veil once hiding the experience of writing, making the act of writing accessible to more than just a privileged or “talented” few.

ThinkWrite uses formative assessments such as informal and formal feedback, a product-process-progress-potential rubric, and a personal spider rubric. These forms of assessment enable personalized feedback as well as conversation around the thinking behind writing, giving non-traditional parts of writing “credit” even though they inform rather than become the final summative product.

Mind Brain Education science tells us that there is no learning without emotion, but the social and emotional aspects of writing are seldom part of traditional writing instruction. ThinkWrite brings the often neglected and yet vital social and emotional skills to the fore of the writing process and makes them part of direct instruction and conscious writing practice, whether it is cueing the writers’ emotional intelligence in knowing their audience and being able to anticipate their needs, to negotiating the emotional and social demands of giving and receiving good, actionable feedback, or developing a sensitivity to emotional cueing as one anticipates the next word or struggles to get started. ThinkWrite’s activities explicitly exercise the neural networks of self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness and social skillfulness to aid in the large and small decisions that go into any writing task.

ThinkWrite has over 100 Writing Activities, each aimed at addressing different phases of the writing process. Each activity in itself proceeds in a step-by-step manner that typically engages multiple “levels” of this familiar method of classification. Successful writing of complex texts demands students engage at all levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and ThinkWrite makes this engagement concrete:

Student writers must Remember prior learning,
Understand what they are being asked and “the rules” of the genre they are writing in,
Apply their skills and these rules successfully,
Analyze the task and their own work during the process,
Evaluate not only their work, but metacognitively, their writing process and strategically consider “next steps.”

In addition to Creating the final product, the activities each result in a variety of created responses that visual the students activation of the targeted neural networks along the way, allowing for coaching and feedback on each step of the process.

In addition to the activities, the spider rubric also provides a means of tracking their path through the writing process, a metacognitive tool that can take the writer through each phase of the Taxonomy in turn as they reflect on their own writing and how to best set goals and move forward on the next task.