This is Jennifer Gonzalez, welcoming you to episode 267 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast. In this episode,

we'll be talking about how free writing can dramatically improve your students' academic writing.

Teaching students to write well has always been pretty challenging. Writing requires a synthesis of so many skills that teaching it has never been a simple, straightforward process.

Over the last few decades, newer developments have made that process even more difficult.

The Internet offers unlimited text for students to plagiarize. Standardized testing has pushed

us to teach more bland, formulaic writing. And now, of course, AI is a constant presence, tempting

so many of us to let it do the writing for us.

Many of us, teachers and students alike, are becoming less confident, less fluent, less agile

as writers. My guest today was struggling with these issues for years until she realized a classic

writing technique

could turn things around. Nashua Alcashari has been teaching English language arts at the

middle and secondary levels for 10 years, both in person and virtually. And through most of those

years, she was frustrated with the quality of her students' writing. She found it to be kind of

robotic, lacking in any real voice. Then she started having them do regular free rights, where they just

let their thoughts spill onto the page without stopping to polish, plan, or correct, with only a word

count as their end goal. And things began to change for the better.

She has developed a systematic way of applying free writing to more structured writing assignments,

and she's gotten fantastic results from her students, both in the quality of their writing

and in their confidence as writers. This process worked so well that she made it the focus of their writing and in their confidence as writers.

This process worked so well that she made it the focus of her doctoral dissertation at the

University of Central Arkansas.

By the way, she wanted me to give a quick shout out to her professors there.

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