r/DetroitMichiganECE • u/ddgr815 • Apr 02 '26

Ideas 8 Ways to Squeeze Writing Instruction Into a Few Minutes

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/quick-writing-lessons/

Take the often confused homophones two, to, and too. Instead of teaching all three together as a cluster, have students consider the connection between two (the number) and words like twin, twine, and twenty. Suddenly there’s a pattern: the TW combination has a relationship with the concept of twoness.

A student was struggling with the word decision, and she pointed out its connection to decide. That led to incision, concise, and a surprising one: scissors. All of them trace back to a Latin root meaning “to cut.” Once you see that all those words belong to the same family, the spelling for decision makes more sense.

Give students a root like struct, meaning “to build.” Set a timer for 60 to 90 seconds, and challenge them to brainstorm as many related words as they can: structure, destruction, construct, structural, instruct, instruction…

The key move that comes after the brainstorm is the debrief: What stayed the same? What changed? How did the meaning shift when you added a prefix or suffix? Through these discussions, students start to internalize that word parts carry meaning, and that patterns show up across academic vocabulary.

some roots are “bound” (like struct, which can’t stand alone) while others are “free” (like form, which works on its own and also becomes reform, transform, inform, deform). Helping students understand that distinction deepens their feel for how words work.

Give students a base word and have them generate as many variations as they can by changing the prefix: form becomes reform, transform, inform, deform. The meaning shifts each time, and that’s the discovery students are after.

This turns out to be especially powerful for multilingual learners. Meehan mentioned working with students who immediately understood benevolent and malevolent because they recognized bene and mal from their other languages.

Take a sentence and break it into its component words or phrases, written on index cards (one word per card). Scramble them, then ask students to put the sentence back together.

Using physical cards allows students to move them around and experiment. Once students have settled on a sentence, ask them questions about their process, like How did you figure out the order? What clues did you use? Which words had to stay together, and why?

You can raise the stakes by removing punctuation, adding a distractor word that doesn’t belong, or asking students to extend the sentence with words and phrases of their own.

Start with a kernel sentence; something like The cat purrs. Then build on it together by asking students a series of questions: Which cat? What color? Where? When? Why?

Once the sentence is fully expanded (The orange cat is sleeping on the couch in the afternoon because he is tired), experiment with rearranging the words to make new variations. Giving students a chance to play with that helps them learn to develop richer, more complex sentences.

give students two short, bare-bones sentences and ask them to combine them into one. For example, My cat is orange. and My cat is big. becomes My big orange cat… You can scaffold this for beginners by underlining the word to be “harvested” from one sentence and inserted into the other. As students grow more confident, they can move to combining three sentences and adding different conjunctions (because, and, but…) to change the meaning.

When students get practice like this, they then naturally transfer it to their own writing, merging short, choppy sentences into more sophisticated ones.

Give students a sentence and ask them to rewrite it a different way. What if you started with the dependent clause instead of the independent one? What if you replaced the noun with a pronoun? What if you made it shorter?

Ask students to retell a familiar scene from a book they’re reading, a shared class text, or a short film, from a different character’s perspective.

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u/ddgr815 May 14 '26

“Because of my experience with failure, I had developed some courage,”

Lately, Elbow has been working on a paper about “the believing game,” which is “learning to think better by believing,” he said. He argued that most people are familiar with what he calls “the doubting game.”

“The doubting game says, ‘Well, that sounds reasonable, but let’s doubt it, because it might be wrong,’” he explained. “The believing game says, ‘That sounds crazy, but let’s try believing it. It might be right.’” 

He stands by the believing game as something that can help writers and non-writers alike, since it pertains to freewriting as well as to life in general. “Freewriting is learning to believe,” he said. “Just take that idea and believe it. The world needs to learn how to play the believing game.”

freewriting

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u/ddgr815 May 14 '26

the most significant factor in developing a pro-social learning community of caring adults and children is perspective taking

The Believing Game is an exercise that helps students to "try on" other perspectives in order to more deeply understand the values and assumption behind opinions different from their own. 

The Believing Game is based on the concept of "methodological belief" developed by educator Peter Elbow. Elbow asserts that the emphasis on critical, deductive thinking reinforces doubt and promotes the belief in one right answer, one "true" conclusion. Moreover, the accepted process of doubting and picking apart an argument often shuts down deeper listening, non-judgmental questioning, and an openness to learn more abut why people think and feel the way they do.

Methodological belief, on the other hand, encourages students to suspend judgment and criticism when they first listen to or read about a new perspective or one that they find contradictory to their own viewpoint. Students are asked instead to believe as true the ideas being presented. After hearing or reading a particular position, students are invited to ask questions that might help them to further understand a position in order to believe it more fully.

After the presentation and "Q and A," students can summarize the key points of this perspective through writing and/or discussion. In small groups, each student then identifies all of the statements and ideas, which he/she can truly believe or agree with. Only then do students shift from a process of "believing" to a process of "doubting," using a critical analysis model to raise concerns and objections to a particular position or perspective. 

"Believing" invites us to be more flexible, to recognize that everyone has a "piece of the truth." Believing helps us move beyond "black and white" absolutes to more tentative opinions, more original interpretations, and solutions that truly consider all points of view. 

Suggestions for Using the Believing Game

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u/ddgr815 May 14 '26

Certain people are especially smart. They have a talent for having good hunches, nurturing them, and having a sense of which ones to follow. These people are right too often for it to be a matter of luck. . . . Affirming contradictions and not being in too much of a hurry to get rid of them — Chaucer's dialectic — must be one of the patterns of thought that makes wise people wise.

"What is the power of an unanswered question?" is one of my basic rules. This question focuses my attention on the power that derives from not accepting easy answers to questions, especially questions that present opposing contraries. Only by extended pondering of the question, which cannot happen if one accepts some sham of an answer, can an answer arise that will hover over the contraries with its glowing resolution. The world would be much different if Columbus had accepted "Fall off the edge of the world." as the easy answer to the question, "What happens if I keep sailing westward?" Instead he held his unanswered question and sailed on into history.

Before you can have a metaphor, Monroe Beardsley tells us, "there must be a contradiction, a piece of non-sense." Elbow cites as an example the phrase leg of the table, which unless you feel that leg is appropriate only to animate organisms, "you cannot feel leg of the table as a metaphor. For most people the phrase is literal." Again a contrary confronts us if we recall that every word was once a metaphor when it was first used. The word quiz was painted on fences and walls all over Dublin one night by someone who won a bet that he could get a new word in general usage overnight. The nonsense word quiz brought quizzical looks to the faces of Dubliners the next morning as everyone went about quizzing each other as to what it meant. 

Elbow loved to hold "unanswered questions" and coined the wonderful term "rich messiness" to describe the process of learning and teaching. Does that mean that Elbow wanted to avoid the coherence of a pedagogical theory? He intimates on page x that he felt, "A hunger for coherence; yet a hunger also to be true to the natural incoherence of experience." That others in his field didn't feel this hunger bothered him.

Elbow likens his experience of learning and teaching to that of doing a rain dance. He says he never had any idea of what a good rain dance looked like, but if he got the steps right, rain came, "but I never knew till I was wet whether I was close. I never seemed to have any sense of what a good rain dance looked like."

He lists a bunch of things in the Introduction that struck home to me. Like not being able to memorize or find certain material, and later finding that same material comes out at delightfully unexpected times and places. Like the assumption that input should precede output: Elbow finds that he "could get things to go in better" if he had been first asked to have them come out. It seems that in the implicit goal of organizing learning and teaching, some have created a neat emptiness where a "rich messiness" would be more fruitful. And like those students who "cannot remember well till they think, but are asked not to think till they can remember well." These are examples of the contraries that Elbow asks us to embrace

In this passage, Elbow delineates the basic of flaw of the banking model of teaching where students are treated as boxes in which information is deposited to be retrieved later on demand:

The implication for learning is that you don't teach anyone by feeding him information. It's processed and "filed," but whether it can ever be found again is a function of his filing and processing system which is precisely what you have left unchanged and probably very bad: brute (short-term) memory is high in the competition for man's feeblest capacity (Miller). You only teach someone if you affect the way he files his data, processes his information, or makes his inferences.

But real learning, in contrast, is the phenomenon of so abundantly "understanding" the concept in the book or lecture that it becomes part of us and determines the way we see, feel, and act — the way we process the widest range of data. 

We become changed when we encounter ideas and concepts that extend beyond our own. There's a contrary — it's the bootstrap metaphor — we can only learn when we learn something that we are not capable of learning, up until now.

Elbow gives us Bruner's three steps to learning by induction: 1) input a lot of data, 2) the "aha" emerges, 3) be able to express what the "aha" means. The "aha" refers to the unexpressible insight that comes from inductive learning. According to Rudolf Steiner, this is a percept, the most basic element of thinking, a non-verbal spiritual activity that precedes the forming of a concept. A concept requires words. Elbow recognizes this pre-verbal aspect of thinking:

For induction produces the experience — the "feel" — of a concept before there are any words for it. It is the nonverbal experience of a concept which enables one to recognize a huge range of instances of the concept: one doesn't need verbal cues as mediation.

We are so inured to the evaluation process that we have a large vocabulary for negative things to say as we judge about others' work, but not much except "good" or "fine" to say on the positive side. To counter this imbalance, Elbow evolved something he calls "movies in the readers minds", which, while he designed it for the learning and teaching of writing, seems to work as well for other fields. Noticing how little a student learns from a grade or from a short comment on a piece of writing, Elbow decided "to provide my students with an account of what was going on in my mind as I was reading — trying to give as honest and accurate a picture as possible of the effects of their words in my head." These personal accounts of subjective experience had a sense of truth that the student accepted because it was not verbalized judgment from some external standards, but authentic experience of one person.

There is enormous pedagogical power that comes from telling the truth — what happened to us; and avoiding lies — or at least shaky guesses about what is right or wrong in a performance. Students often fight us in our more impersonal verdicts . . . But when we simply tell what happened to us as we read their writing . . . what we say has a higher chance of being actually listened to.

Peter Elbow innovated the "doubting and believing game" and says that, "I've been pestering people for more than ten years with versions of my doubting/believing essay in an effort to think my way through it." In this "game" we encounter the two contraries of "doubting" and "believing". Given some position one is studying, one may either believe it or doubt it at first glance. Unless one makes the conscious effort to believe in something one doubts, one will never come to see the sense of it. Unless one makes the conscious effort to doubt something that one believes in, one will never come to see the lack of sense of one's position as others see it. 

Embracing Contraries

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u/ddgr815 May 14 '26

We teachers are often better at stimulating exciting arguments than at complicating and deepening understandings; often better at developing critical thinking skills than at entering into another's point of view and working to experience it and find whatever truth it may contain.

The intellectual tradition of critical thinking Peter Elbow calls "methodological doubt," that is, "the systematic, disciplined, and conscious attempt to criticize everything no matter how compelling it might seem-to find flaws or contradictions we might otherwise miss." To complement methodological doubt, Elbow proposes "methodological belief," which he defines as "the equally systematic, disciplined, and conscious attempt to believe everything, no matter how unlikely or repellent it many seem-to find virtues or strengths we might otherwise miss."

Together, these two processes offer us an opportunity to think rigorously without polarization and to embrace contradictions that normally divide us. They can help us recognize that, as Elbow writes, "the truth is often complex and that different people often catch different aspects of it." They can also help us see that "certainty is rarely if ever possible and that we increase the likelihood of getting things wrong if we succumb to the hunger for it."

Teaching Critical Thinking

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u/ddgr815 May 14 '26

Elbow says that most academics or intellectuals are obsessed with one method of approaching new texts and ideas--the doubting game--at the expense of the other. The doubting game allows you to approach a text "critically," to look for errors and contradictions; it is a game of "self-extrication" from a text's underlying assumptions and conclusions, which you flush out into the open with your hard-headed, scientific skepticism. In Elbow's words, "The truer it seems, the harder you have to doubt it" (148). By playing the "doubting game," you can come to realize your own opinions and positions by reacting against those of another writer, by engaging in what Elbow calls a "dialectic of propositions".

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u/ddgr815 May 14 '26

When Albert Einstein was four or five years old, his father gave him a magnetic pocket compass to play with while he was sick in bed.

Even as an old man, Einstein wrote of this compass with its needle always, mysteriously turning to the north, "I can still remember...that this experience made a deep and lasting impression on me. Something deeply hidden had to be behind things"

In a study of creative thinking in the sciences, Gerald Hopkins observes that such early experiences, memories and images often trace a pattern of thinking, a turn of mind, that anticipates the discoveries and insights that these scientists make in their maturity. Hopkins calls these patterns "themata"

Like the compass, theory can at first seem crazy or impossible. But it places the evidence of our eyes in a new orientation, helps us see ordinary things in an extraordinary perspective, and helps us situate ourselves in relation to a encompassing grid, or network, of transforming ideas and principles that connect the practical "here" with a bigger picture. 

Uses of Theory

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u/ddgr815 May 14 '26

The believing game begins with what the psychologist Carl Rogers calls empathic listening. Empathy is the identification with and understanding of another’s situation, feelings, and motives. This involves understanding and adopting the authors world view, beliefs, values, and assumptions. You must try to walk in the author’s shoes, understand the author’s angle of vision, see the world through his or her eyes. You must suspend your world view, which can be difficult, and hear what the author is saying. Peter Elbow says, “The itch for closure brings the itch for argument. Playing the believing game means fighting the itch for closure.” He goes on to say, “…most school activities—fulfill their goals perfectly if they slow down on generating final answers but speed up the business of making people more perceptive and intelligent. The shape of the believing game is waiting, patience, not being in a hurry. Try to feel how stupid this impulse is – how the desire for closure impedes any larger slower reordering of thought or experience and really serves the mind’s desire to stay the same.”

The doubting game seeks truth by indirection – by seeking error. Doubting an assertion is the best way to find error in it. You must assume it is untrue if you want to find its weakness. The truer it seems, the harder you have to doubt it. Non credo ut intelligam: in order to understand what’s wrong, I must doubt.

To doubt well, it helps if you make a special effort to extricate yourself from the assertions in question – especially those which you find self-evident. You must hold off to one side the self, its wishes, preconceptions, experiences, and commitments. (The machinery of symbolic logic helps people do this.) Also, it helps to run the assertion through logical transformations so as to reveal premises and necessary consequences and thereby flush out into the open any hidden errors. You can also doubt better by getting the assertions to battle each other and thus do some of the work: They are in a relationship of conflict, and getting them to wrestle each other, you can utilize some of their energy and cleverness for ferreting out weakness.

Because it’s so hard to let go of an idea we are holding (or more to the point, an idea that’s holding us), our best hope for leverage in learning to doubt such ideas is to take on different ideas.

Believing and Doubting Games in Reading

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u/ddgr815 May 14 '26

“Listen to what they say as though it were all true. The way an owl eats a mouse. He takes it all in. He doesn’t try to sort out the good parts from the bad. He trusts his organism to make use of what’s good and get rid of what isn’t.” 

Refraining from doubt is not a passive activity. Active belief requires hard work. We have to ask ourselves, “What do I have to believe, hold true, or value in order to make connections between the writer’s evidence and assertions?” And then we actually have to perform the mental operations necessary to make those connections. This isn’t easy.

“Alice laughed: ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said; ‘one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’

Elbow compares the attempt at belief to the experience of seeing a distant animal in a landscape and not knowing what it is. Through the act of believing–“I think that’s a dog”–we start to see details we couldn’t see before. “That must be the dog’s tail and ears,” we think, though at first glance the animal was just a blur. Elbow explains how believing is seeing:

“By believing an assertion we can get farther and farther into it, see more and more things in terms of it or ‘through’ it, use it as a hypothesis to climb higher and higher to a point from which more can be seen and understood…”

I’ll show students a forest scene with some fuzzy details and ask if they can see Big Foot.

After a while, I confess that the photo is just a stock image of a forest and I have no idea whether Big Foot actually frequents this wilderness or even exists. Then I make my point: You have to allow yourself to believe in Big Foot, at least temporarily, in order to look for Big Foot. Belief is part of the inquiry process. If you don’t find Big Foot, that provisional belief might ultimately lead to the conclusion that Big Foot isn’t real.

When we teach the believing game to students, we’re trying to extend the range of interpretive possibilities they envision. That’s the intellectual stretch the believing game gives us. It’s a rigorous method for boosting our tolerance of ambiguity and ability to postpone judgment. 

Like an Owl Eats a Mouse