Inquiry-based freewriting boosts students’ confidence and voice

A middle school teacher describes how inquiry-based freewriting—built around driving questions and supported by culturally responsive classroom practices—helped students move from writing that was “surface-level” and short to transformational reflections of mo

When the classroom began with a blank page, students didn’t always know what to do with it. Freewriting—open-ended. continuous writing without stopping to polish. correct. or plan—was “something so foreign” to many of them at first. They were used to templates, predictable grading, and the safety of being told exactly what to write.

For Nashwa Elkoshairi, the problem started long before that first freewrite. Teaching writing. she says. had been shaped by standardized testing. scripted programs. tight timelines. and pressure to meet state report card expectations. She leaned on formulaic structures and strict rubrics to help students grow. but the result was writing that felt lifeless and generic—something transactional. meant to check a box and earn a grade.

Mark-ups and low scores, she says, drained confidence. Choice boards improved the surface-level experience. but she still saw a teacher-centric routine—built around a strict rubric with “too many expectations.” When she began her PhD dissertation. she chose the question that had been building behind her classroom practice: how to help students take ownership of their writing and trust their voice.

Her answer came through freewriting. She describes it as an open. continuous writing practice where students let their thoughts spill onto the page without stopping to polish. correct. or plan. The point. she says. is discovery rather than perfection—an approach meant to help writers uncover ideas they didn’t realize they had.

Elkoshairi adapted ideas associated with Elbow, Macrorie, and Dewey into her context by embedding structured freewriting within an inquiry-based learning cycle. The changes she reports were quick to show up.

At the start of the year, her students struggled to produce 150 words. By the end, she says, all students had moved to “transformational reflection,” with writing over 500 words. Even though this work happened in a virtual setting. she argues the problems it targets—and the practices that emerged—aren’t limited to online instruction.

The reason she believes it matters now is blunt. “Writing is thinking — when it’s not a recipe,” she writes in her account. With AI and social media becoming everyday tools and attention spans narrowing. students need an avenue to process and explore their own ideas. She warns that when AI-generated text becomes common. students risk losing confidence in their own thinking and voice—and. instead of writing to think. some begin leaving the thinking and writing to AI.

Her experience, she says, suggested the issue wasn’t laziness. It came from years of students being taught—through assessment pressure and punitive grading—that they aren’t good writers. Freewriting, in her telling, is meant to interrupt that story.

She also draws a sharp line between scaffolds and traps. Approaches like RACES, five-paragraph essays, and sentence frames can be effective at first, but she argues they can suppress curiosity and creativity—and even identity—by keeping students locked into the format.

For Elkoshairi, the shift required more than new writing prompts. It required conditions.

She frames her classroom work through Culturally Responsive Leadership (CRL). describing it as beginning with critical self-reflection and extending into how teachers support teachers. shape school environments. and engage students and families. She points to researchers including Muhammad Khalifa and colleagues and describes CRL’s Culturally Responsive School Leadership framework as a guide for thinking about broader commitments behind CRL.

In her classroom, she says CRL set the conditions for inquiry through freewriting—because safety and inclusion make thinking authentic. She translated those broader ideas into four grounding practices for her middle school students:

Every day, she says, she returns to Kindness, Respect, and Courage, naming moments when students live those values.

She emphasizes predictable routines—greetings, connection questions, SEL check-ins, and collaborative bulletin boards—as a way of rooting students so they have room to connect and be seen.

She describes authentic vulnerability, telling students it’s okay to be themselves and modeling that with pieces of her own life and humor, with an emphasis on a judgment-free zone.

And she highlights warm, reflective feedback: focusing on what students did well, posing questions that help them grow, and giving space for self-assessment to build confidence.

Only after those conditions were in place, she says, were students ready for the inquiry-based freewriting work she built around driving questions.

The approach uses inquiry-based freewriting anchored around a driving question—examples in her account include “How do stories connect us?” and “What drives the choices we make?” Elkoshairi says she tries to make those questions relevant for middle schoolers. The driving question, she emphasizes, is not the standards-based task; it’s the anchor that fuels curiosity. Standards still matter in her design, but she says they are taught through the media analyzed during the inquiry cycle.

She outlines a sample four-week unit built around the question: “Why does friendship matter?”

In Week 1. she uses the entry freewrite on the driving question so students can draw on their own experiences and opinions. She describes it as a baseline snapshot of their thinking. Prompts are available as scaffolds for students who need help getting started. but she says students are always free to use them. adapt them. or write beyond them.

That week then shifts into informational texts on friendship. Students watch a video titled “How Friendship Affects Your Brain,” and they read an article on friendship. They identify the author’s purpose and perspective, annotate using Nonfiction Signposts (Beers & Probst), and post their stance on Padlet. She also includes short exit tickets and quick checks aligned with standards such as explaining purpose. tracing an argument. and citing evidence.

Week 2 keeps the driving question the same—“Why does friendship matter?”—but she says the texts change. Students look at friendship through story. reading short stories including “Charles” and “The Treasure of Lemon Brown.” They annotate with Signposts. post stances on Padlet. and complete performance tasks focused on unreliable narrators. narrative shifts. and contrasting characters. The standards she cites for this week include analyzing how point of view shapes a story. comparing character perspectives. and supporting analysis with textual evidence.

By Week 3, students move into a narrative writing project that grows out of their reading and thinking. Elkoshairi describes it as a performance assessment that counts as a major grade. The project asks students to design a narrative scene exploring friendship through perspective and point of view.

She says students use brainstorming options to plan their scene. post on a Storyboard Padlet for feedback. draft and expand their scene across multiple days. and apply narrative standards including point of view. character perspective. dialogue. description. brush strokes. and even hyphenated compounds for style. She describes rigor as maintained through a standards-based rubric that assesses both narrative writing and students’ ability to transfer reading skills into their writing.

The unit closes in Week 4 with an 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. Elkoshairi says they write with their original freewrite in mind. along with the informational texts and videos. the stories and characters. their narrative project. and the classroom discussions and Padlet posts.

She describes the exit freewrite as a place where standards and identity meet on the page. In her account, students explain how their thinking shifted—been challenged or confirmed—while weaving personal experience with ideas from the texts.

Even the assessment structure is built to keep the writing open enough to invite ownership. She says the freewrite is intentionally low-constraint and assessed on two criteria: reflecting personally on the topic and meeting a word count that increases across units. Spelling and conventions are not emphasized, and students are encouraged to think on paper rather than perform correctness.

Feedback also plays a role in how students learn to stay inside their own thinking. Elkoshairi says she begins by addressing students by name. then goes into “brag mode. ” highlighting only positive thinking and writing moves. She narrates students’ moments of critical thinking, synthesis, or meaning-making. She also says she connects with their writing “as if in conversation” with their ideas. while modeling vulnerability to build trust.

When students first met the approach, Elkoshairi says they resisted and complained. She includes student reflections that show how disorienting freewriting can feel when students are used to strict instructions. One student said. “My first freewrite was pretty short. and I didn’t really know what I was doing.” Another said. “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.”.

Her account links that early tension to a classroom habit: templates, predictable grading, and safety in being told exactly what to do. Freewriting, in her view, breaks those habits.

But as weeks passed, she says students began to notice shifts they couldn’t fully name at first. Their writing loosened, confidence grew, and entries stretched into unexpected places. One student described a turning point after reading previous freewrites. saying. “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 reflections emphasize a new relationship to questions and to self-trust. One student wrote that they started to understand the questions more and could write more thought-out freewrites. adding. “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 said the practice nudged him past surface-level thoughts into deeper reflection. describing more intention and focus. more self-awareness. and an effort to identify patterns and improve them.

Elkoshairi says the writing she saw matched students’ descriptions: she found their freewrites often stronger than their more structured writing projects. She adds that students weren’t only growing as writers—they were growing as people. One reflection captured that shift: “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.” Another student wrote that freewriting allowed them to think about topics more in depth because while 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.”.

A different student offered one of the sharpest endorsements in her account: “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 those reflections changed Elkoshairi’s thinking about what belongs in English class. She began to wonder what happens when this inquiry-based freewriting space spreads into other subjects.

She argues it could work across content areas because it centers big ideas rather than isolated tasks. In her structure. the essential question anchors both entry and exit freewrites. letting students begin by exploring what they already believe or know and revisit the question to show how thinking or learning has shifted. That approach, she writes, supports conceptual growth and consolidation through lived experience.

She offers examples of essential questions across disciplines: in math. “How do we decide when a risk is worth taking?” and “How do we notice patterns in our own lives?” and “How do we decide the best way to solve a problem in real life?” In science. “How do living things depend on each other?” and “How does change affect the way we grow?” and “How do small actions create big changes in a system?”

In social studies. “How do people learn to live together?” and “How do our experiences shape what we believe is right?” and “How do rules help or hurt a community?” In CTE/STEM. “What do we do with an idea?” and “Where does creativity come from in our everyday lives?” and “How do we turn curiosity into something real?” In arts/PE. “How do people express who they are?” and “How does creativity help us share what

we feel?” and “How can movement. sound. or color tell a story?”.

Her conclusion ties the method back to the long road that brought her there. She describes moving from formulaic writing and strict rubrics to inquiry-based freewriting as a journey that took four years. a 275-page dissertation. and “a brave class of 8th graders.” She says the biggest takeaway was that students flourish when they’re given room to grow—and that part of that means learning to trust students.

Elkoshairi also extends her thanks beyond the classroom. She acknowledges Dr. Trumble, Dr. Wake, Dr. Herring, and Dr. Dailey from University of Central Arkansas. saying their support made her feel seen in her academic life and challenged her to grow “not just as a scholar. but as a person.” She describes her schooling experiences as moving through classrooms feeling largely invisible. attributing that to factors including her name. her headscarf. or her Egyptian background. before experiencing what it meant to be recognized and supported.

In her account, the throughline is recognition—of voice on the page and of identity in the room. Freewriting, in this telling, isn’t just a technique. It’s a deliberate way of telling students that their thinking matters enough to write down and revisit, even when it begins messy.

freewriting inquiry-based learning writing instruction culturally responsive leadership middle school ELA student voice formative feedback Padlet Storyboard Padlet educational innovation