Building a solid foundation on pen and paper

By Meghan Kocar, Humanities Coordinator 

The other day, in World Cultures class, I asked students to take out their devices and log onto Google Classroom to access a classwork assignment I had posted there. 

My students mocked me: “Where is our real teacher? You’re not Mrs. Kocar!”

It is not only rare that I encourage my students to take out devices; on the contrary, with eighth, ninth, and tenth graders, I rarely allow screens out in the classroom. I encourage my students to take notes…on paper. Plenty of research suggests that taking notes the old fashioned way helps students learn the material better.¹ Moreover, it helps prevent students from giving into the temptation of Roblox and other delights. I often give handouts for students to write on or annotate. Their engagement is clear: they are paying attention; they are writing; they are looking up and asking questions; they are talking to each other.

Granted, students will go on to college and university and have to deal with the distractions their devices offer. For this reason, I do permit juniors and seniors to make their own choices about where they take notes. Some are eager to reunite with laptops, but many choose to stick with pen and paper. The latter tend to be the students who are most engaged. In classes with students on laptops, it can become difficult to tell who is paying attention, and students are more able to hide behind their device rather than jump in and connect with each other. (I would argue that, just as restricting cell phones during the school day has resulted in more community-building throughout the Upper School, so too does limiting laptop use in the classroom.)

Homework presents more of a challenge to helping students remain screenless. Homework assignments, after all, are posted online! It is super convenient to attach a PDF for students to read. It is easy to grade homework questions submitted through Google Classroom. Am I guilty of this? Absolutely. But when I want my students to wrestle with a tougher reading–a primary source, an excerpt of literature or philosophy, I give hard copies. I want them to annotate with pencil in hand. Stuart students know that highlighting and underlining won’t suffice during an annotation check in their humanities courses. We want to see margin notes, questions, connections. Physically working with the text makes the impressions deeper in our students’ mental processing. They learn better; they focus more.

The breakthroughs in AI technology have thrown us a curveball. As teachers, we think and talk at length about how to balance the exciting opportunities AI presents with the significant ways it can undercut student innovation and creativity. We know we have a responsibility to teach our young women how to use AI effectively. We also know that unless they master foundational skills in critical thinking, planning and outlining, writing, and a host of other aptitudes, our students will not be prepared for this new future. So, from time to time, we open up our devices, and we learn how to approach, play and experiment with, manage, and manipulate AI to make it useful to us, to help it elevate–rather than stifle–our creativity. 

Perhaps the biggest challenge AI presents in classrooms is its potential use by students to plagiarize essays. The immediate solution has been a return to paper and pen writing. This is not a perfect solution, of course: penmanship can be problematic, and it gets messy when students want to move sentences around. For larger essays, we are exploring technologies that can enable students to use their devices while prohibiting them from accessing online materials and aids or limiting to which sites they can have access.

For smaller writing, however, in-class, I have found that written work has been successful, not only in reducing online access, but also–more importantly–in building better writers. My tenth graders this term have gotten regular practice hand-writing paragraph responses (e.g. art analysis, history ID, passage analysis). Although the impetus was to limit AI use, I see my students learning to organize their thoughts more effectively, trust their instincts more (rather than agonizing over how to begin), and compose responses faster. If it means they are growing their skills, I can deal with some messy writing!

Technology is not my enemy–not by a longshot. The teaching tools I have at my disposal are fantastic, and I make great use of them. Padlets, Kahoots, Canva templates, image generators…there are so many helpful resources for me to utilize and for my students to use. But in order to ensure that these tools augment–not replace–basic learning skills, we start with pen and paper.

 ¹ Among them: Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581