We write to discover what we think and to bring precision to those thoughts. However, the things that make writing hard—facing a blinking cursor on a blank screen, translating our incoherent thoughts into concrete ideas on the page, enduring the emotional and embodied discomfort that accompany this challenging process—are precisely why students might choose to outsource their thinking to AI. Other reasons come to mind: work that students find irrelevant, high-stakes assessments that offer little opportunity for feedback, and gradebooks that incentivize point maximization instead of understanding (Nguyen, 2026; Schneider & Hutt, 2023).
As educators, we are rightly concerned about what researchers refer to as cognitive surrender in the face of AI: turning over our human judgment to a seemingly oracular word generator (Shaw & Nave, 2026). That said, we teachers need to avoid a corresponding pedagogical surrender of our own. We need to teach students how to read in a way that directs their attention to both what the author says and how they say it. Reading with these two goals in mind will give students insight into the choices that effective writers make. This foundation, combined with regular feedback on shorter writing assignments, can help students move from compliance to intellectual exploration in their writing assignments.
The Reading Connection: The What and How of It
Students cannot write well if they don’t have clear mental models of effective writing. Students cannot build these models solely from a rubric, peer editing, or teacher comments on their writing. They need to read clear and engaging writing—in other words, mentor texts—in an ongoing way in their academic courses.
One school community I joined as a new teacher revised a foundational course for all 9th graders and transitioned away from a textbook to a reader that featured primary sources, excerpted selections of academic scholarship, newspaper and magazine articles, and essays. Deeper engagement followed; students were excited by what they learned and came to class eager to discuss. These high-quality reading assignments enabled students to read in two different modes, what I call what reading and how reading.
What reading is the default mode in many classrooms. It asks students to reflect on the meaning and interpretation of a text: What is the main idea? What claims does the author make? What evidence and arguments support those claims? As a pedagogical move, what reading is common practice, and you can do it with a textbook, because a textbook’s purpose is typically to convey information as straightforwardly as possible.
What you can’t do so easily with a textbook is the second kind of reading, which requires an authorial voice to react to. How reading asks students to inquire into the choices a writer makes to accomplish their goals: How do they organize evidence to make a persuasive claim? How do they know when to give voice to a reader’s objection—and then respond to it? How do they transition from one idea to the next? Students who cultivate the habit of how reading engage in a writerly apprenticeship where they spend part of their time with a text trying to understand the different choices the author made, as well as the effect those choices had on the author’s writing. They expand their understanding of the organizational and rhetorical moves writers rely on to clearly express their ideas. When teachers supplement how reading with routine in-class writing exercises, students can try out these same writerly moves and receive targeted feedback on their efforts to incorporate those moves in their own prose.
Frequent, targeted feedback helps students refine their mental models of effective writing and do most of the thinking and working themselves.
This approach can work even for teachers who may not have the curricular flexibility to replace textbooks. Supplementing existing resources with short scholarly excerpts accomplishes the same goal. For example, selections from religion scholar Diana Eck’s (n.d.) essay, “From Diversity to Pluralism,” enriched our study of the First Amendment. Students saw how Eck distinguished between two seemingly similar words (in this case, diversity and pluralism) and constructed a multipart argument based on this contrast that drew on a broad sweep of American religious history. Drawing attention to this intellectual move helps students recognize it in future reading assignments and gives them an approach to try out in their own writing.
The Writing Connection: A Focus on Underlying Structures
A classroom that emphasizes feedback, attention to the writing process, and shared understandings of effective writing supports this approach. Two canonical sources for writing instruction inform this approach as well.
In The Writing Revolution 2.0 (Hochman et al., 2024), the authors explain their approach to explicit and scaffolded writing instruction. In the “because/but/so” exercise, students start with a sentence stem connected to their course content and complete the sentence three different ways, using one of those three conjunctions each time. For example, students might receive the stem “American history has had many moments of religious exclusion” and then use the three different conjunctions to write about three distinct aspects of American religious history from Eck’s essay. As they do this intellectual work, students see for themselves the outsized impact that seemingly small choices—such as which conjunction to use—can have both in their writing and in the texts they read.
In They Say, I Say, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein (2024) provide sentence-level templates that help students attend to certain features in academic writing, enabling a kind of how reading. For example, an author of a text will often first survey the field (“they say”) and then offer their own interpretation or argument (“I say”). These templates—such as “Of course, some might object that ___” or “I agree that ___, but I still think that ___”—help students organize their thoughts when they sit down to write. Graff and Birkenstein argue that templates “make students more conscious of the rhetorical patterns that are key to academic success but often pass under the classroom radar.”
Effective writers signpost. They use words like “yet” and “although” to set up contrasts. As students learn to attend to these rhetorical patterns, they gain deeper insight into what the text says and build stronger mental models of recurring patterns in argumentation and organization. What reading and how reading are thus complementary and mutually reinforcing.
The Feedback Connection: Frequent and Targeted
Many students get feedback on their writing. However, if this feedback happens irregularly or long after an assignment has been submitted, it might not have much impact on student learning. The alternative to time-intensive summative feedback isn’t no feedback; it’s frequent, targeted feedback that helps students refine their mental models of effective writing and do most of the thinking and working themselves. Tom Brinkerhoff, my colleague and department chair at Princeton Day School, describes his approach as giving students “a lot of at-bats” with their writing.
Brinkerhoff’s high school students routinely engage in low-stakes writing—in their notebooks, on the board, or on a notecard as an exit ticket. At the start of class, writing doubles as retrieval practice, in which students recall something they learned in a previous lesson. In an advanced placement (AP) seminar class, students might be asked to define a logical fallacy and then rewrite a fallacious claim that has been projected on the board. On an exit ticket in a history class, 9th graders might be asked to write about how a person’s individual memories provide details that go beyond the historical record.
After class, Brinkerhoff reads the notecards looking for patterns: What is the class doing well? Where are they stuck with their writing? In the next class, he will address what the exit tickets revealed. He might need to remind them of the difference between paraphrasing and analyzing a passage; he might ask the class to work together to unpack the author’s claim and then, in their own words, link this claim to the author’s main argument.
Early in the school year, Brinkerhoff focuses assignments on individual high-impact intellectual moves—for example, properly contextualizing historical evidence. Students do how reading and analyze exemplars. They look at anonymous work from former students (some of it more successful than others) and frequently practice the skill themselves in a low-stakes way. Then he has students write a paragraph or two, asking them to highlight the sentences where they demonstrate their understanding of this intellectual move: have they included the significance of an event, the purpose of a document, a given person’s point of view? If they’ve done it well, their assignment is returned to them without comment. If not, they get one word of feedback: context.
We need to design learning environments where students experience the struggle and sense of achievement that can come from trying to put the right words in the right order.
A student who sees this word understands one of three things: (1) the paragraph lacks historical context, (2) the historical context is there but is insufficient, or (3) the historical context is there but is irrelevant. However, the student doesn’t know which of the three applies to their writing. Their job is to figure it out on their own or with a partner, referring to the models of effective historical contextualization they looked at earlier in the semester. As the year progresses, Brinkerhoff teaches additional skills to his students and can still give one word of feedback—it could be thesis, claim, context, or evidence—because he has crafted assignments with a narrow focus, built a shared understanding of effective writing, and explained his one-word feedback system to students.
Another delightful example that shows how teachers can give targeted feedback is the “comma paper” assignment (Johnson, 2019). Matthew Johnson tells his students that they are free to write about whatever they wish and that their writing will be assessed only on their proper use of commas; they must use at least 20 commas and at least 4 different kinds, and there should be no missing commas. The focus of the assignment is not the content of students’ writing but, instead, their understanding of how commas work and how to deploy them correctly.
Johnson uses the search function in his browser to find every comma. He flags each mistake but doesn’t correct it—or even say what the problem is. He gives students time in class to reflect on the feedback and incorporate what they learned.
Neither Brinkerhoff nor Johnson do the thinking for their students: instead, they indicate where more thinking is required and dedicate classroom time for students to do the follow-up work of improving. These targeted feedback interventions also ease teachers’ workloads (Housiaux & Dickson, 2022) because they enable teachers to give feedback that is, in the words of Dylan Wiliam (2017), “more work for the recipient than the donor.”
Start with Success
In an interview with The New York Times about running, educator Carl Hendrick argues for a different way of understanding the relationship between motivation and success: “It’s not that you need to be motivated in order to get the achievement. It’s actually this reverse kind of way around” (Dodd, 2026). In other words, we should design for student learning and small moments of success. When we do this, motivation follows.
We should not tell students to “be gritty” or “have a growth mindset” before assigning them challenging and high-stakes writing tasks. Instead, we need to design learning environments where students have a range of mental models of excellent work, practice writing regularly, receive frequent feedback, and experience the struggle and sense of achievement that can come from trying to put the right words in the right order. Small wins compound. Focused and frequent feedback can be more powerful than big chunks of it delivered infrequently.
We can also reimagine what learning looks like by engaging with the questions of purpose and meaning that our students bring with them to school each day: Who am I? What matters? What world should we try to create? We can design classrooms, learning experiences, and assessments that don’t just ask students to “do school” (Pope et al., 2015). Instead, we can ask them real questions that have real stakes and real audiences to help them see that their learning contributes to the urgent and messy human project of clarifying competing values, living well with others, and creating a more equal society—human work that we should never surrender to a machine.
