As regular readers know, I’ve been a longtime fan of inductive teaching (see The Best Resources About Inductive Learning & Teaching).
I was reminded of this when reading a post by Stephen Fitzpatrick, who writes a good SubStack on how he’s handling AI in the classroom. In the post, he’s describing the process he’s having students use to write a research essay these days, which came out of conversations he had with a few of his top students to learn from them how they were approaching it. Here’s a paragraph about one of those interviews:
Her organizational system was equally revealing. She would start with a general sense of her argument, create categories for her body paragraphs, and then research into those categories – color-coding primary source evidence, leaving herself analytical notes in the margins so she wouldn’t forget why a particular passage mattered weeks later. “You kind of need to catalog your thoughts a little bit if you’re working on something more long-term,” she said. She wrote her topic sentences last, because the structure emerged from the thinking, not the other way around. When I pointed out that she seemed to be outlining and writing her paper as she researched it, she agreed. “It’s extremely iterative,” she said.
That paragraph is pretty much a precise description of how essay-writing can be taught inductively. The image at the top of this post comes from one of my older pieces, An Outline For How Students Can Learn To Write Essays Inductively.
Though Stephen doesn’t lay-out his whole system for having students write these days, this kind of process is clearly a part of it.
I’d suggest that perhaps lots of other teachers should consider it, too.
I’m adding this info to The “Best” Strategies For Creating AI-Resistant Assignments.
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