Gifted Thinker, Meager Writer

In con­ver­sa­tions with sev­eral teach­ers this week I have observed the same scene repeated. They have highly ver­bal gifted stu­dents in their class­rooms who, when asked to write, pro­duce min­i­mal out­put. Their first draft is often their only draft, and the process seems excruciating.

We spec­u­late (admit­tedly with­out any direct evi­dence or research) that for these stu­dents, the mechan­ics of writ­ing get in the way, slow­ing down the process to the point that the student’s thoughts race ahead of the pen­cil. In fear of los­ing the ideas that flow so read­ily, the stu­dents give up rather than try to keep up.

With some exper­i­men­ta­tion, we have cre­ated an approach which seems to be work­ing well to get these stu­dents putting out writ­ten work which matches their ver­bal abil­i­ties. We have installed Audac­ity, a free open-​​source sound record­ing and edit­ing pro­gram, onto sev­eral class­room com­put­ers. The stu­dents have the option for each assign­ment to begin the writ­ing process ver­bally instead of on paper. They sim­ply record what they want to say, save the file, then later can go back and tran­scribe their words onto paper or into a word processor.

The results have been won­der­ful. Even some stu­dents who didn’t seem to have par­tic­u­larly strong ver­bal skills have asked to use the pro­gram and are pro­duc­ing some of their best work this way. Teach­ers have caught me in the hall­way or pulled me aside in the class­room to tell me excit­edly that they are see­ing great results already, and that stu­dents who were for­merly reluc­tant to write are now eager to get to their next writ­ing project.

The exper­i­ment is still in fairly early stages, and I’m sure we will run into glitches along the way, but so far, it seems to be a win-​​win!