267: How Inquiry-Based Freewriting Can Deepen Student Writing
Sun Feb 01 2026
Teaching students to write well has always been challenging, and newer developments have made it even more difficult: The internet offers unlimited text to plagiarize, standardized testing has pushed us to teach more formulaic writing, and AI constantly offers to do our writing for us. Frustrated with her students' lack of confidence and the robotic style of their writing, language arts teacher Nashwa Elkoshairi tried adding freewriting before and after her inquiry-based units. The results, she says, were dramatic: Students became more confident as writers and their writing developed far more depth and complexity than she'd ever seen before. In this episode, she joins me to talk about how she weaves freewriting into her classroom practice.
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Thanks to Renaissance and SchoolAI for sponsoring the episode. To read Dr. Elkoshairi's article about how she uses inquiry-based freewriting, visit cultofpedagogy.com/inquiry-based-freewriting.
To learn more about Grammar Gap Fillers, visit cultofpedagogy.com/grammar.
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Teaching students to write well has always been challenging, and newer developments have made it even more difficult: The internet offers unlimited text to plagiarize, standardized testing has pushed us to teach more formulaic writing, and AI constantly offers to do our writing for us. Frustrated with her students' lack of confidence and the robotic style of their writing, language arts teacher Nashwa Elkoshairi tried adding freewriting before and after her inquiry-based units. The results, she says, were dramatic: Students became more confident as writers and their writing developed far more depth and complexity than she'd ever seen before. In this episode, she joins me to talk about how she weaves freewriting into her classroom practice. ___________________________ Thanks to Renaissance and SchoolAI for sponsoring the episode. To read Dr. Elkoshairi's article about how she uses inquiry-based freewriting, visit cultofpedagogy.com/inquiry-based-freewriting. To learn more about Grammar Gap Fillers, visit cultofpedagogy.com/grammar.