Listen to the interview with Nashwa Elkoshairi:

Sponsored by Renaissance and SchoolAI

Teaching writing has always been a challenge for me. Standardized testing, scripted programs, tight timelines, and pressure to meet state report card expectations had left me at a loss. I leaned into formulaic structures and strict rubrics to help students grow as writers. Unfortunately, these strategies left students’ writing lifeless and generic — a transactional activity that is meant to check a box and earn a grade.  

These confined structures and punitive grading left my students feeling they could not write well; marked-up papers and low grades led to a loss of confidence. Feeling at a loss, I tried pulling in choice boards to elevate student voice. They could choose their format and how they presented the information, but in the end, it was just a disguise for the same routine: a strict rubric with too many expectations. Their writing was a little better, but the student experience was still mostly stress and compliance; despite the added choice, it was still teacher-centric. 

When the time came for me to begin my PhD dissertation, I knew this was the problem I wanted to take on: How do I help students take ownership of their writing and trust their voice?

Freewriting Leads to Change

As I researched, I realized that most students have not had the chance to truly write like real writers do: The literature and texts we study in class show expression, thinking, and wrestling with ideas, not following formulas or strict rubrics. Following the lead of Elbow, Macrorie, and Dewey, leaders in reflective writing and freewriting, I explored different freewriting methods. 

Freewriting is an open, continuous writing practice in which students let their thoughts spill onto the page without stopping to polish, correct, or plan. The focus is on discovery rather than perfection, which helps writers uncover ideas they didn’t realize they had. I decided to adapt the ideas of these scholars to my context, embedding structured freewriting within an inquiry-based learning cycle. 

My students’ results were dramatic. They began with surface-level thinking, struggling to produce 150 words. By the end of the year, all students had moved to transformational reflection, with over 500 words. Writing became student-centered for the first time in my career. While this work took place in a virtual setting, the challenges it addresses and the practices that emerged are not unique to online instruction and can be used in any learning environment.

Why This Work Matters Right Now

Writing is thinking — when it’s not a recipe. When students can write about topics and ideas that matter to them, they make connections, rethink prior assumptions, and transform their thinking. With the ubiquity of AI and social media and dwindling attention spans, students more than ever need an avenue to process and explore their own ideas. And as AI-generated text becomes common, students risk losing confidence in their own thinking and voice. Instead of attempting to write themselves, a growing number are leaving the thinking and writing to AI. I realized it doesn’t stem from laziness, but from years of thinking that they are not good writers. I decided to disrupt this by shifting the narrative and creating structures that allow students to build writing fluency with more accessible topics by drawing on their identities and lived experiences. When writing is meaningful and authentic, students just might recognize that their thinking matters and is strong enough to stand on its own. 

I found that formulaic approaches (like RACES, five-paragraph essays, or sentence frames) suppress curiosity, creativity, and, worst of all, identity. While these can be effective scaffolds at first, they can also become traps that leave student writing stagnant and expressionless. It keeps students locked into the format, leaving no space to think beyond it. Check. Done. Structured freewriting opens the door for students to take risks, own their ideas, think on paper, and be themselves — all without penalty. The inquiry-based approach opens cognitive doors that structured writing tends to close. Students shift from compliance to curiosity; writing turns into a space they actually want to explore.

CRL Creates the Conditions 

Before I dive into the instructional process, let me set the stage. Often enough, school structures don’t naturally align with culturally responsive approaches. I realized that if I were to take an identity-based approach with my instruction, I would have to take the lead to disrupt inequities in belonging and voice. 

To guide that work, I turned to the foundations of Culturally Responsive Leadership (CRL). Researchers like Muhammad Khalifa and colleagues describe CRL as leadership that begins with critical self-reflection and extends into how we support teachers, shape school environments, and engage students and families. Their Culturally Responsive School Leadership framework offered a helpful visual for understanding the broader commitments behind CRL, and I began thinking about which parts of that framework I could meaningfully enact in my own classroom.

CRL sets the conditions for inquiry through freewriting. When safety and inclusion come first, thinking becomes authentic and welcome. As a teacher-leader, I translated the larger ideas of CRL into four grounding practices that aligned with my students, my course structure, and the relational needs of middle school students:

• Clear values that guide our community.
  Every day, we return to Kindness, Respect, and Courage, and I name those moments when I see students living them.
• Predictable routines that help students feel rooted.
  Things like greetings, connection questions, SEL check-ins, and collaborative bulletin boards give students room to connect and be seen.
• Authentic vulnerability.
  I let them know it’s okay to be themselves, and I model that by sharing pieces of my own life and humor, emphasizing a judgment-free zone.
• Warm, reflective feedback.
  I focus on what students did well, pose questions that help them grow, and give them space for self-assessment so they can build confidence.

Once these conditions were in place, my students were finally ready for the kind of reflective work that inquiry-based freewriting demands. 

Inquiry-Based Freewriting in Action

Inquiry-based freewriting is a routine anchored around a driving question, such as “How do stories connect us?” or “What drives the choices we make?” I always try to find questions that are relevant for my middle schoolers. The driving question is not the standards-based task; it’s the anchor that fuels curiosity. Because it starts with something human, students grow in ways the standards alone could never capture. The standards themselves are taught through the media we analyze during the inquiry cycle.

Below is an outline of a sample unit that addresses multiple ELA standards for reading and writing and culminates in students writing a narrative piece, but it starts and ends with a freewrite that builds fluency in writing and thinking.

Week 1: Setting the Question and Building Background

Driving question: Why does friendship matter?
Main standards: informational reading, author’s purpose and perspective, basic research, and narrative writing

Students start with the entry freewrite on the driving question, using their own experiences and opinions. That gives me a snapshot of their baseline thinking. At this stage, prompts are available as scaffolds to support students who need help getting started, but students are always free to use them, adapt them, or write beyond them.

From there, we move into informational texts on friendship:

• Students watch a video, such as “How Friendship Affects Your Brain,” and read an article on friendship.
• They identify the author’s purpose and perspective, annotate with Nonfiction Signposts (Beers & Probst), and post their stance on Padlet.
• They complete short exit tickets and quick checks that align with standards like explaining purpose, tracing an argument, and citing evidence.

On paper, this looks like a solid informational text mini-unit. Inside the unit, it is the first layer of inquiry that will later feed both the students’ project and their exit freewrite.

Week 2: Shifting Into Literature and Point of View

Main standards: literary reading, point of view/perspective, unreliable narrators

In Week 2, the question remains the same: “Why does friendship matter?” We shift texts. Students now look at friendship through story. They:

• Read short stories like “Charles” and “The Treasure of Lemon Brown.”
  
• Annotate with Signposts, post stances on Padlet, and complete performance tasks on unreliable narrators, narrative shifts, and contrasting characters.
• Practice standards like analyzing how point of view shapes a story, comparing character perspectives, and supporting their analysis with textual evidence.

Assessments can be traditional multiple-choice/short-answer or more performance-based. The standards stay visible and rigorous, while the driving question and routines keep the work anchored in meaning.

Week 3: Writing the Narrative, Applying the Standards

Main standards: narrative writing, purpose and audience, description, dialogue, style

In Week 3, students move into a writing project that grows directly out of their reading and thinking. Rather than treating reading and writing as separate skills, this project brings the standards together in a single performance assessment that counts as a major grade. Students design a narrative scene that explores friendship through perspective and point of view.

Across several lessons, they:

• Use brainstorming options to plan their scene.
• Post to a Storyboard Padlet to get and give feedback.
• Draft and expand their scene across multiple days.
• Apply specific narrative standards: point of view, character perspective, dialogue, description, brush strokes, and even hyphenated compounds for style.

This project is where everything comes together. The skills students practiced as readers in Weeks 1 and 2 — analyzing purpose, perspective, and point of view — reappear here, but now they are demonstrated through students’ own creative choices as writers. Rigor is maintained through a standards-based rubric that assesses both narrative writing and students’ ability to transfer reading skills into their writing.

Week 4: Exit Freewrite and Synthesis

Main standards: research and synthesis, reflective writing, explanation with evidence

At the end of the unit, students complete the exit freewrite on the same question: Why does friendship matter? Optional reflection prompts are available as supports, but students determine their own focus and approach.

This time, they write with:

• their original freewrite in the back of their mind
• the informational texts and videos
• the stories and characters
• their own narrative project
• our discussions and Padlet posts

As they write, students naturally explain how their thinking has shifted, been challenged, or confirmed. They weave together personal experience with ideas from the texts, showing growth in both understanding and voice. The exit freewrite becomes the place where standards and identity meet on the page — students are explaining, synthesizing, and reflecting, just through a more human doorway.

So how does this level of thinking emerge without a detailed prompt or rubric? The freewrite is intentionally low-constraint. Students are assessed on just two criteria: (1) reflecting personally on the topic and (2) meeting a word count that gradually increases across units. Spelling and conventions are not emphasized; students are encouraged to think on paper. Without the pressure to be correct or perform, students begin to take ownership of their ideas. As they write more freely, they naturally draw on narrative moments, explanations, and insights from our readings — blending narrative, informational, and early research thinking without being explicitly prompted to do so.

Feedback Approach

In alignment with making writing student-centered, I focused my feedback on building their confidence and building relationships with them. To begin, I always address students by name, then dive into full-on brag mode, highlighting only positive thinking and writing moves. I narrated students’ moments of critical thinking, synthesis, or meaning-making. Often, students write but don’t understand the power behind the moves they make, so my goal here is to show them how powerful writers they genuinely are. Pulling in CRL, I would also connect with their writing as if in conversation with their ideas. I also draw on my own experiences and thoughts, modeling vulnerability and building trust with my students. 

How Do Students Respond?

At first, students resisted and complained. Freewriting was something so foreign to them. They didn’t really know what to make of it. One student said, “My first freewrite was pretty short, and I didn’t really know what I was doing.” 

 While another student referred to his first attempts, 

“Okay, look, look, look, I’m not gonna lie to you. I… I didn’t have the best first impression like I already said with the freewrites. No, I did not like them in the beginning, but the more… units we went through, the better the units got, and the more I liked the freedom.”

Moments like these revealed the initial tension students felt when asked to write without a template. They were used to assignments with clear directions, predictable grading, and a sense of safety in being told exactly what to do. Freewriting interrupted those habits.

As the weeks went on, though, students began to notice shifts that they couldn’t quite name at first. Their writing loosened. Their confidence grew. Their entries stretched into places they didn’t expect. One student captured this turning point when he looked back at where he started:

“After reading my previous free writes, I can tell how much I have grown as a writer. As the year progressed, the flow and depth of my writing also progressed. This is because I let my thoughts go. I wrote what I was feeling, without the pressure of being perfect. There were no limits, which made my writing so much easier to read and write.”

Other students saw similar changes in themselves, especially in how they approached thinking on the page. One wrote about beginning to trust the questions more, and trusting herself more, 

“As the year went on I started to understand the questions more and was able to write more thought-out freewrites. I also think that throughout this year I have grown in my ability to just write what I’m thinking. In the beginning of this school year I was thinking too hard about what would be right to put in the freewrite and towards the end of this year I just let my ideas flow more freely.”

Another student explained how the practice nudged him past surface-level thoughts and into something more intentional,

“I think they evolved to include deeper reflections on my personal feelings and opinions…with more intention and focus. I feel like I had more self-awareness. I tried to not only describe my thoughts, but I started to try to analyze my thoughts deeper and I tried to identify patterns and look for ways to improve those patterns.”

The level of thinking and writing I saw from students mirrored their statements. I found that their freewrites tended to be stronger than their more structured writing projects. They not only grew as writers, but as people. Even students felt it, as one reflects, 

“The freewrites opened up my mind to many different things; it made me think more about the topics and changed my views on different things.”

Freewriting allowed them to consolidate their learning in contexts that made sense to them. It also led them to discover things that were hidden until the writing process surfaced the ideas, as one student writes, 

“I also feel like freewriting has allowed me to think about certain topics more in depth, because as I was writing, I would sometimes go into an unexpected direction, as if the freewrite itself was leading me further and further down an unexplored alley, and I was surprised at times what thoughts came to me even as I was writing.”

That same kind of clarity showed up again in a different reflection, where a student paused in her writing to say,

“I LOVED the freewrites! The prewrites challenged me to begin thinking about the unit, but the postwrites helped me reflect on everything we learned. The freewrites helped me learn a lot, not only as a student, but as a person as well…I know I’ll use it outside of school too.”

Hearing students talk this way shifted something for me. Watching their thinking stretch across the year made me wonder what could happen if this kind of space for inquiry-based freewriting lived beyond English class into other subjects, too.

Extending to Other Subject Areas

Inquiry-based freewriting could work across all content areas because it centers on big ideas rather than isolated tasks. The same essential question anchors both the entry and exit freewrites, where students begin by exploring what they already know or believe, then revisit the question to show how their thinking or learning has shifted. This structure highlights conceptual growth and connection to lived experience, leading to consolidation of knowledge.

Examples of Essential Questions Across Subjects

Math: 

• How do we decide when a risk is worth taking?
• How do we notice patterns in our own lives?
• How do we decide the best way to solve a problem in real life?

Science: 

• How do living things depend on each other?
• How does change affect the way we grow?
• How do small actions create big changes in a system?

Social Studies: 

• How do people learn to live together?
• How do our experiences shape what we believe is right?
• How do rules help or hurt a community?

CTE/STEM: 

• What do we do with an idea?
• Where does creativity come from in our everyday lives?
• How do we turn curiosity into something real?

Arts/PE: 

• How do people express who they are?
• How does creativity help us share what we feel?
• How can movement, sound, or color tell a story?

Closing

My journey from formulaic writing and strict rubrics to inquiry-based freewriting has been long. It took 4 years, a 275-page dissertation, and a brave class of 8th graders to help me find a solution that worked for my students and made me feel good about how I was teaching. My biggest takeaway has been that students flourish when we give them room to grow, and part of that means learning to trust my students. I hope that this approach has empowered their voices in my class, giving them the confidence to carry that voice beyond the classroom. 

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge Dr. Trumble, Dr. Wake, Dr. Herring, and Dr. Dailey from University of Central Arkansas. These professors made me feel truly seen in my academic life and consistently challenged me to grow — not just as a scholar, but as a person.

For much of my schooling, I moved through classrooms feeling largely invisible. Maybe it was my name, my headscarf, or my Egyptian background — but for the first time, I experienced what it meant to be recognized for who I was and what I could contribute. Their support shaped my confidence, my thinking, and my path forward. I wouldn’t be where I am today — or who I am — without them, and I’m deeply grateful.