 Hi, my name is Tracy to go home a spinosa and this is a video on the think write MBE model thinking to write and writing to think We'll do this by first explaining the model itself, and then we'll talk about 11 complementary tools that can be used to enhance the model itself So let's begin with the model The model has 15 different stages of writing and here in the very center You'll see that we consider writing as the very highest form of thinking Why because if you look at your brain as it's writing It is doing some of the most complex neural network connections possible. It has to look for memory It has to have motor coordination often times. There's emotional networks involved. It's really one of the most complex processes You have do you think about this? It's a very cyclical process, right? You have a lot of ideas in your head and you might consider this pre-writing And then you finally get some things down on paper Which is writing itself and you share them with others and get feedback and then you revise your work And then you put it out there in the world and you have other people critique it Well, this cyclical process occurs as we go through these 15 different stages So a special idea about this particular model is that while there are 15 stages You don't have to begin at any one place, but let's just say typically you would begin here at understanding What is it that you have to write? What is the assignment or what it is that you're being asked to produce, right? And after that generally our go-to place in our minds is to figure out What do we already know about that particular topic? Everybody's going to be pushed to try to think about all the different connections They might have to the topic that's going on before they even get anything down on paper And then you're allowed to ruminate which is not a negative thing, right? You're just bouncing those ideas off around in your head Maybe sort of free thinking connecting different thoughts and trying to see how the things that you already know about the topic Might gel or might combine to help you with your new writing assignment And then you reflect which is a very purposeful process where you look into the different sub elements of your topic Perhaps and to identify the needs and purposes of what it is that you have to get down on paper And once you've done all of these prerequisite thinking skills Then you might begin to actually get stuff down on paper, right? To write and connect and to figure out a logical order of the information you want to present and Create an outline and then you're asked to plan and think about how much time do you really need to get this all done? To finish your research do your drafting get feedback and get your work completed on time And after you plan then you may delve deeper into research itself Now this is definitely sure for academic papers and nonfiction work But oftentimes with fiction as well looking into historical information for example to place characters in the right context Or to understand specific scientific elements or concepts so that you can integrate them with authenticity into your work And then you begin to draft and draft and draft and to get your words out on paper and the order And in the plan using the outline that you've already created and once you've completed that draft What you need now is to have another set of eyes on your work And so here you have peer exchange where you might send it out to a friend or two Just to get some general feedback or some guidance or you might get some formal feedback from a teacher or a mentor Or somebody has expertise in your area And if you're sufficiently intellectually humble then you accept that feedback and those exchanges and you begin to edit Your work and refine it work through the details even further and then we'd ask you to revise your work and their vision has to do with looking at you know stepping back from it and now thinking does everything still fit and What are those technical things as far as mechanical tools are concerned? Do I need to refine and revise my work even further in terms of perfecting word choice or setting or the Organization or should one paragraph come before another right? Once you've done that and your paper is just about ready You have to proofread it and this means check for every single little comma and if paragraphs are arranged completely Or if you've cited all of those sources that you needed to cite or if you've been consistent Throughout in the way that you make reference to different characters in your piece Then we've integrated all of those comments and all of those other reflections and you've tightened it up And you're sure you've done all the research necessary you can consider it complete Oftentimes people say it's not done. It's just do right so you have to submit it But there you have this point of celebration. We hope but Once it's submitted you may just start all over again and have a new question that's emerged from this old process that you've just gone through Now the reason that think right and be used different from other writing programs is that all of these are absolutely vital Processes but not everybody will go through this in the same order and in fact some people skip some steps You might get an assignment you think you understand it so well You jump straight to the draft stage and then you proofread it and then you submit it, right? Other people might spend a whole lot of time just thinking about the assignment and ruminating on it and connecting ideas And then they might have to rush to the stage where they've drafted they skip the planning, right? They might have to revise it because they've got so many mistakes, but then they have to submit it anyways Get other people go to Outline stage then they get pure feedback and from the pure feedback then they'll begin their drafting And then they consider it complete without going through other stages So while we know that all of these are vital stages for writing and everybody goes through them at different paces They may go through them in a different order and depending on your personal familiarity with the genres You may not have to do all of the steps because you know the structure so well So finally within the model look at these sort of peripheral concepts recognition of information Generation of new ideas the discovery of different information metacognitive skills Linking and connecting ideas the formalization of finally structuring it into something that you can present to the world and Strategizing about how you're going to get your work completed and explaining and justifying the writing structure to others the collection of new Information and reconformation of the data you have and evaluating your final product so that you can then celebrate This external parameter is just as vital as those 15 stages and they actually run in parallel with them and All of this is surrounded by a perimeter of Teachers pedagogical knowledge if this is being done in a classroom setting Then it's all guided by that teacher's knowledge in the way that they can actually put their finger on the pulse of where each kid Needs to be or where each student needs to begin in order to maximize their own writing processes Now another reason that the think-write and be process is different is the MBE part the mind brain and education element to it and looking at the different stages that you go through as you write by Understanding or ruminating or planning or getting feedback or having to revise information We realize that these are different mental processes and you'd measure this differently from psychology Neuroscience and education as different perspective taking on the same writing process So what's so fascinating here is that you can actually look at brains in a stage of Rumination in the default mode network when they're just letting things go as Compared with for example reflecting deeply in a mindful state and you see different Neurological states of the brain as well The big and interesting idea here is that these are using different Networks in your brain and the beauty of it is that toggling back and forth between different networks is what leads you to Produce the best writing product possible So not only is this good Basically for the structure of your brain and going back and forth and using different networks at different points and appreciating how writing is Taking advantage of all of these different types of pathways in your brain is to accept that This is also a classic example of universal design for learning universal design for learning Looks at teaching interventions in a way that is very different that it tends to the needs of all learners Basically it comes from architecture the idea that some of us can do stairs, but all of us can do ramps So why not build ramps right the idea of the think-write and be structure is that we provide Opportunities for success for different people at different entry points to the same information So by providing or designing Learning in such a way that there are opportunities for people to approach the information in different ways creates this universally acceptable methodology for teaching so we can say with confidence that the think-write and be process exemplifies universal design for learning as well So that's our model So now let's look at some of the tools that can be used to complement the existing model There's 11 different tools. You know that the model itself is a paradigm shift in thinking about writing But when combined with these additional tools, it can be even more powerful Now it's clear that each of the tools could also be used on their own and the model could be used on its own When combined, it's actually a more encompassing proposal. So let's look at the tools So for each of the 15 different stages within the writing process, there are different activities attached to them So there's between one and two dozen different types of entry points in terms of activities for each of the different stages of writing And each of these it's written up on a kind of a recipe card So you can see the title of the activity its main objective What age groups that applies to and where the information came from as far as being a methodology or an activity to apply within a writing Construct and then the steps that are needed to complete this and what types of writing tools Mechanisms or other tags are being addressed in this particular activity as well as the mind, brain and education objectives that are met by each of the different activities and By asking learners to produce different types of writing products at each of these different stages of writing It really makes much of this learning process of writing, which is very invisible to the naked eye Something that is actually visible now in a writing product We know it's kind of tragic that many people feel that they're just not good at writing because they get judged on a certain Type of a product or the things that they're producing and not on the quality of their thinking Well, this is actually giving more weight to that thinking before writing process And what it also does is respect the idea that many people don't begin Their writing process at the same exact stage even though we teach in schools if everybody should read the directions follow The instructions and then produce the same kind of work. That's really not how your brain is working out Right, so we realize that some people may spend an awful lot of time Maybe they'll get an assignment and they'll jump right into a draft stage and then they'll think about what they did And then they might revise with their work and then they'll think about well, some of these ideas aren't connecting as best as As good as I thought they'll create a different kind of an outline Then they might jump to a research stage and ask their friends what they think about it and then submit it So we know that there's all kinds of ways you can go about doing this Some of them are more appropriate than others and some of them are more efficient than others depending on the individual Their prior experience and what they already know about the genre of writing they're asked to be working in So the first tool has to do with activities The second tool has to do with the spider rubric the spider rubric is nothing more than a Quantitative measure of how much time the individual is spending at any one of these different stages of writing This is really important and quite powerful for students because it will then help them see Where they spent most of their time for example that last kid spent a whole lot of time thinking about stuff, right? And he spent a whole lot of time talking to his friends about things But maybe he didn't spend very much time at all on creating an outline or editing his work or doing any kind of significant revision What's very important about this is to allow the students time to look at that and to think about what they did And then what would they do better the next time? Oftentimes learners will get to the end of a writing assignment and then think if I just spend a bit more time Researching this or I wish I'd created a better outline before I started well This actually helps you make visible that entire process and after multiple Experiences with this after looking at your own spider rubric over time You can really see how different types of writing call upon different skill sets for you And where you spend most of your time and this helps you figure out your own rhythm and your own structure as a Good writer the third tool is another kind of a rubric. This is called a product Process and progress rubric in which we take all of the 15 different stages of writing But we evaluate it on the level of a product a process or your progress Oftentimes in school. We only celebrate the end product We give you a grade for how well you did on the exam or the final essay But we rarely tell you how we thought you did as far as your process was concerned Did you think about it in the right way? Did you approach the project in the right way? Did you consider the research that was necessary? Did you have a good process? Other things we oftentimes fail to acknowledge is the amount of progress that a student might have made maybe he's Didn't do so great in planning, but you know what? It's a lot better than it was the last time, right? So the idea would be to reward Progress as well as the process not only the final product The fourth tool is something that we're really very excited about it's called a wiki repository of writing Errors and we want to invite all teachers to participate in this we realize it's a pretty Thankless job giving a lot of extensive feedback to students on their written work It takes an awful long time to do it and oftentimes only the student himself or herself Benefits from that what we'd like to invite all teachers to do is to Contribute to the wiki repository of writing errors We've categorized them by types of errors that occur and the type of feedback that a student should receive in order to improve For example a lot telling the student that you know including the word and is kind of dangerous because when you put in the word And into a research question you automatically have more than one question Or when you ask the students, you know to define terms before they're used because they could be misinterpreted explaining why this is a necessary change and Questioning whether or not it would be better if it was done in one way or another by offering these types of repository of errors by correcting with Extensive feedback which guides the student often through question forms the student will be able to Identify ways of improving their writing in a more concrete fashion And the repository is made up of errors from all different age groups These that are up here right now happen to be from a university course But the main idea is that that the feedback is quite extensive which helps guide the writing process in the future So again the wiki repository of errors is a great tool to be able to use within your classroom setting And we know that several teachers will only use this as a single tool But when it's used together with the model for example and some other tools, it's actually even more powerful For example a fifth tool we have is a list and a mapping of the writing genres So the list of writing genres basically Lists more than 200 different ways that people write from shopping lists to academic papers So trying to celebrate the variety of ways that people can write and each of these is hyperlinked to an Example of each of these different pieces of writing It also divides the pieces of writing by whether or not their fiction or nonfiction to help learners get a sense of the different and Great variety of writing that exists. This is paired with what we consider a mapping Quadrant of the different writing styles and some of the activities that we have within the think-write program Ask students to actually do this plotting themselves on a quadrant of things that are Fiction or unreal to real things nonfiction things facts, right? And on another scale of things that need to have a lot of Sustaniation a lot of sources versus less versus you have on the one extreme here things that are real But need a lot of factual backup things like textbooks or things like Academic papers or things that get put into journals have to be really substantiated even if they are by based on fact To the other end of the spectrum where you have things that can be pure fantasy Or with a poetic license Let's say that you can actually go to those extremes and another Extreme you might have here things that could be maybe unreal or sort of real Partially real and might need some kind of Substantiation for example historic fiction or things like blocks which could fit into any one of these categories, right? And you may have other things that are just basically things that are common knowledge at another extreme So the idea here is to allow students to see the great variety of different writing genres that exist and Understand that maybe they're good at one type of genre writing, but maybe not so good at another a Seventh tool that we have within the think-write and be model are worked models of different writing genres So for example a fifth grade creative writing worked model We've hyperlinked some other people who have set up their worked models for different types or levels of writing This permits an even broader review of the type of information that might be looked for or the level of writing That's expected at different grade levels as well as different genres of writing An eighth tool we have has to do with examples of literary devices There's more than 50 different literary of devices that are out there allegories out alliteration foreshadowing oxymorons all of these can be used within fiction and nonfiction writing But oftentimes they're not as familiar to teachers or to students So here we've hyperlinks to others who have given lists and examples of literary devices So the teachers and students have them easily accessible in case they want to incorporate them into their writing as well as Incorporated them into some of the activities that we have within the think-write and be model for example when a student is Drafting they're asked to review the list of literary devices to see if any of them are appropriate for the type of genre of writing that they're conducting a Ninth tool that we have are examples of writing rubrics And we do this because many teachers tend to lead towards one direction or another They're very hyper vigilant of some of the tools like you know or all the commas in the right place or has the student Structured the essay in the right way whereas other Rubrics lean towards the idea of great ideas and is it the right voice or is it the best word choice to express that idea? And so we see that there's a great variety of rubrics out there and we've hyperlinked to many of them So the teachers get a sense of the white spectrum that exists There's no such thing as objective evaluation of writing writing is very very subjective And so one way we can try to reduce that subjectivity is by using rubrics that are shared with the students so that they understand our Expectations are we very hyper vigilant about sentence fluency or organization or spelling or are we giving a lot more credit towards a voice or ideas or Activity it's very important for teachers to realize that there's a huge spectrum and that the judgment call that they are making May not be what other teachers would expect in the same assignment a 10th tool that we offer here in the think-write program has to do with the hints for teachers So if you have one of those recipe cards with these activities there many of them are attached to specific hints For example this one that says how to clean house and how to let your mind wander for a while and give yourself You know one to five minutes to just clear your head and do something else now What's important here the students are just you know letting it go and maybe toggling back and forth between that default mode and very Specific focus tension. That's great, but they might not know what they're doing So the hand calls out to the teacher to remind them the importance of doing this and what is actually going on in the Brain when they're doing that so that they can help share that with students so that they're part of their own learning process Finally an 11th tool. We have our recommendations for different kinds of resources Books that have inspired us or that have sent us in the right direction as far as stylistic writing is concerned Or things that have to do with the structure and format of great writing as far as style books are concerned And a third category has to do with books that are written about the brain and reading and writing that might be of interest to you So that's the model those are the tools Why does this work? There's two main justifications for using the thing great structure first People don't become good writers overnight. You know, they're not born that way This has a lot to do with a growth mindset in believing in yourself as becoming a great writer Unfortunately, we have studies that show that kids even as young as third grade have already Self-assessed and decided they are not good writers Which is a tragedy because they can and should become great writers So one of the things we hope to achieve with the think-write and be Structure is to make sure that all kids think that they can be great writers The second reason this works is because different people are better at different types of writing or genres of writing And they take different approaches to these things and take different amounts of time in that process, right? So different genres are going to lend themselves to different abilities and different people mainly because your brain adapts to what it does Moats kids who have a lot of practice writing poetry are really good at writing poetry And kids who just do academic reports are really good at doing academic reports It doesn't mean they can't do other types of writing It means though that the speed and accuracy with which they can do things is directly correlated with how much rehearsal they have We also think the think-write and be program works because students get to choose where they begin And there's a variety of activities in each stage of writing So they get to choose also what type of activity they want to do and then they can look and see what they did at the end of the day and Quantifiably and quantitatively Assess themselves and think about their own writing process and decide was that successful or not And then they themselves can pass that judgment about whether or not they're getting better or not at their writing process And then the biggest question of all, what would they do differently the next time to continue to improve? So what are the most frequently asked questions we have about think-write and be? First of all, we cannot be used with all genres of writing some people who say well, I'm a professional writer and I write Blogs or op-ed pieces. Can I actually use think-write? Absolutely the activities are such that they can be used for any genre of writing A second question is what age groups can use this we found that about 80 percent of our activities can be used with kids Three to five with guidance and 99 percent of the activities can be used by anybody nine years old and up Another question is whether or not individuals can use a think-write program or is it just for schools? Absolutely, the app is meant for individuals to use as well as for schools to use as a complement to their regular writing programs Do you need a computer to use a think-write and be processed? Absolutely not you can download all of the recipe cards and the Activities and guide yourself through those 15 stages of writing by selecting different activities to do along the way In the big question here, how long does it take to learn the writing process? Just like everything else in education the answer is it depends it depends on how much rehearsal you've already had Remember your brain adapts to what it does most the more practice you have in different genres of writing the better you get at Each of those genres so it's all relative to what you already know the more you know the more you can know So hopefully you're going to explore all of the different genres of writing possible using the think-write program So in summary, what are the benefits? Basically, this demystifies the learner's writing process instead of thinking. Well, I'm a good writer. I'm a bad writer It's like it's a binary decision. You're either good or bad. It's not true There's multiple levels to writing oftentimes people beat themselves up because I didn't get anything down I didn't write down anything. Well, they didn't produce maybe something written But maybe they were doing a lot of thinking about that and this sort of celebrates those invisible parts of writing basically It's a solution to writer's block because you can never be blocked because there are hundreds of activities to do So if you find yourself getting stuck Perhaps at this research stage or at a proofreading stage Then go to a different stage of writing and do other activities that will unblock you and then you may find That whereas you were stuck at one stage of the writing you might find that you flow in another stage of the writing As we said the overall benefit is that the learners begin at the stage of writing of their choice And they spend the amount of time they need at each of the stages As a consequence this differentiates all learners needs by allowing each learner to begin at their own starting point and to build from there So that's a think write and be process if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask So on behalf of my colleagues Jovina Zerino, Chris Rapley, Marie Kay, Adriana Avellano And myself especially. Thank you very much for your interest. We hope to hear from you soon. Thanks