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Writing, Thinking, and The Brain: How Neuroscience Can Improve Writing Instruction
Friday June 6, 2025 1:40pm - 4:00pm CDT
Writing is the highest form of thinking, as evidenced by neuroimaging that shows that more neural networks are activated during writing than during any other cognitive activity. When repeated, this activation builds and strengthens the neural networks that undergird the wide variety of thinking capacities involved in writing through a process known as neuroplasticity, the physical changes in brain structure that constitute learning.  The learning sciences tell us that frequency and precision of practice, feedback (and feedforward), the development of metacognitive capacities, strong relationships and sustaining cultures are all essential to building better writers. ThinkWrite addresses writing from a holistic perspective, looking at all of the systems and subsystems involved in the process.

This session will acquaint you with a powerful new model of the writing process grounded in the research of Mind, Brain and Education science (MBE), the confluence of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and educational research. This presentation covers a brief overview of the neuroscience of learning, presents the 15 stages of thinking that support the writing process, and will familiarize teachers with the neural networks that underlie these thinking stages along with targeted ways to stimulate and strengthen them to maximize each individual’s writing potential. This model and these activities are geared to all levels of writing instruction from pre-K through 16 and beyond.

Teachers will be provided with tools in the form of activities that target the specific stages of thinking involved in writing and rubrics that will help them give feedback on the process and the otherwise invisible thinking involved in good writing. We will examine what it means for writing teachers to become thinking coaches, and tackle how to give feedback on thinking stages that may feel more unfamiliar to us as well as on the product, process, progress and promise of a student’s writing.

Today, new technologies such as generative AI hold great promise and potential for coaching thinking and writing; simultaneously, if not properly employed, for all of their promise, these same tools threaten to undermine the development of the brain structures needed for good thinking and writing by supplanting the agency of students in different phases of the writing process, eroding their thinking capacities, weakening both the individual student and the society and culture we hope they will sustain and build. This presentation will provide a brain-based framework for considering how and when to use such tools in writing instruction. We will interrogate the power and potential of the rapidly developing generative AI technologies through the lens of the most recent research.

Good writing is not simply the residue of good thinking; the practice of writing shapes our thinking capacities by changing the underlying neural structures within the brain. This growth within the brain is how we each learn as individuals.  What’s more, the thinking capacities grown through writing practice are essential to the proper functioning of democratic systems; capacities such as effective communication, evaluation of evidence and analysis, cognitive flexibility, emotional and cognitive empathy and perspective taking, along with the resilience due to better executive control of emotions in the face of setbacks and challenges benefit not just the individual student but the larger social systems that sustain us all. Teachers of writing will leave this session with a new, more precise model of the writing process and the knowledge of their essential role in both their students’ growth and in building a more resilient society.
Featured Speakers
avatar for Chris Rappleye

Chris Rappleye

Upper School English Teacher, Mary Institute & St. Louis Country Day School
Chris Rappleye has taught English at MICDS since January of 1989, primarily in the Upper School, and has coached cross country and track and field for almost as long. He has consulted and presented for the ACT as well as for the College Board's Advanced Placement program in English... Read More →
Friday June 6, 2025 1:40pm - 4:00pm CDT
  Workshop

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