Graphic novels often get a bad rap, often being dismissed as an easier, alternative read.

But framing graphic novels as an ‘easier read’ often misses what the form actually requires. Graphic novels requires a high level of inference and background knowledge - asking students to make meaning through using both words and images - not either one alone. They asks student readers to do many, different things - dialogue v. narration, contrasting imagery, facial expressions and body language, visual symbolisms, motifs, panel sizes and transitions. Even the gutter - the space between the panels, asks readers to infer beyond what is explicitly shown.

This make graphic novels a powerful Tier 1 text type that offers multiple-points of entry while still demanding rigorous and careful, evidence-backed interpretations. Students start with what they notice, and build their interpretations into a sophisticated level of analysis

But access to a text is not the same as access to the thinking it requires. Tier 1 instruction needs to do more than ask students if they understood the text. It needs to explicitly teach students how the readers make meaning - how to notice important details, how to ask questions while they are reading, how to make inferences, how to support interpretation with evidence.

Research-based literacy guidance consistently emphasized direct strategy instruction and opportunities for direct explicit teaching and discussion about a text’s meaning.

In Reading isn’t Optional, Mitchell Brooks emphasized that students must construct meaning, monitor when meaning breaks down and use intentional strategies to repair understanding. Comprehension should not be a worksheet nor a checklist, it is a result of students actively constructing meaning from the text.

As cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf shares in Proust and the Squid, humans beings were never born to read; reading is a recent cultural invention that requires the brain to rewire itself. Reading skill is not a natural skill that develops automatically, it requires intentional instruction, sustained practice and time to develop. For my classroom, this reinforces the need to teach the process of meaning making rather than assume that students already know how to approach the text.

So, rather than waiting to identify which struggles need help “doing the thinking”, we make the thinking visible for everyone. Using visible thinking routines like See - Think - Wonder helps support students make meaning of complex texts.

Close Reading and Annotations: A Middle Schooler’s Paradox

Throughout elementary and middle school, students are asked to read more, to build reading stamina, and read as many books to whatever challenge we pose to them.

But when we are asking them to close read, we are asking them to slow down, to pause and re-read, pay attention to details, and annotate with purpose. These expectations can feel a bit contradictory, and so the goal is to help them understand when and why they need to shift between the two, ensuring that annotations do not become a compliance exercise.

Close reading asks students to return to a portion of text and examine how the details create meaning. With a graphic novel, close reading includes examining the additional visual details as well.

As I continue to emphasis to my students that close reading isn’t a hunt for the “correct answer”, but a more focused way to make claims grounded in text evidence, they begin to move beyond statements such as ‘the character is sad’ to identifying details that reveal how and why the character may be feeling that way.

The Strategy : See - Think - Wonder but make it Middle School

One simple structure that can make close reading (with graphic novels) simple and repeatable is the See - Think - Wonder Visible Thinking Routine from Harvard’s Project Zero Visible Thinking.

In our classroom, the Analysis Elevator is a scaffold that has become a shared visual for levels of thinking. It reminds students that summary is an important starting point, but analysis requires them to move higher - to deconstruct details, make connections, explain their reasoning, infer meaning, evaluate ideas and synthesize evidence.

Analysis Elevator Infographic English

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Using a few thinking moves from the Elevator, I adapted the See - Think - Wonder routine by adding a layer of scaffolding to the think step. Rather then asking students to share what they were thinking, they can use specific thinking moves (summarize, deconstruct, connect and infer) along with sentence stems to guide their thinks. These moves helped give the students a clearer pathway from simple observations to deeper analysis, helping them them to express not only what they notice, but also how the author/illustrator create meaning and why it matters.

As students develop stronger analytical thinking, their wonderings become more complex. They start to consider different perspectives and multiple possibilities and recognize that not every meaningful question has an immediate answer. Additionally, it also signals students that there is something in the text they can return to.

See Think Wonder Annotation Guide

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Annotations as a Window into Thinking

This routine has helped me assess students’ thinking in real time.

During a reading conference naming the thinking move gives us a shared language. I can ask students to explain a connection, or identify a detail to support their inference. I can also identify who may need support interpreting ideas, or students who can thoughtfully infer but need help explaining reasoning. Students have a clearer way to articulate what they are doing as readers, and I have a clearer sense on how to support them.

The annotations are not proof that they have read, they become a window into how students are making meaning. This allows me to respond while students are developing their understanding, whether it is to support or extend their thinking as they are making meaning of the text.

Graphic novels reminded me that rigorous reading is not defined by how many words on a page, but the depth of thinking students can do with a text. Intentionally building reading routines that makes students’ thinking visible gives every student an entry point into reading for depth. My goal is not to wait for students to struggle before teaching them how to think, but explicitly teach the thinking from the very beginning.

Sources:

Brookins, M. (2026). Construction of meaning: Building text understanding layer by layer. In J. A. Schopf (Ed.), Reading isn’t optional: Fulfilling the promise of literacy for secondary students (pp. 263–282). Solution Tree Press

Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. HarperCollins, 2007.

That is not what I mean.

In our dystopian literature unit, students had choices in how they showed their learning. Some of their choices include create a visual essay, design a collage, develop a graphic narrative, produce an op-ed, blackout poetry or a podcast. The final products looked very different, but the expectations and alignment behind them were the same.

Each student needed to make a claim about their novel. They needed to use evidence. They needed to explain and reason how the author’s choices developed and pursued a theme. They have to examine symbols, motifs and complicated character arcs. Students needed to show that they understood their novel’s complex ideas about power, identity, conformity, consumerism, propaganda, surveillance etc.

The assignment was not easier because students had choices. In many cases, it was harder, because it was intentional.

A student writing an essay has to make decisions about structure, evidence, and analysis. A student making a visual piece has to do all of that while also thinking about images, color, placement, scale, symbolism, and design. A graphic novel significant scene requires students to consider pacing, dialogue, point of view, panel size, and what should be shown rather than explained. A podcast requires students to organize an argument that an audience can follow. While the format continues to change, the analytical thinking remains largely the same.

The problem with equating rigor and essays

At the beginning of grade 8, we started with the our biggest monster unit – the Literary Analysis ESSAYS unit. Students read They Called Us Enemy (Takei) and Unbroken, Young Adult (Hillenbrand), wrote a literary analysis separately for both books, and then wrote a comparative literary essay on both. Students need to learn how to write sustained arguments, use evidence, and build reasoning using a very contained structure. This is important and necessary work, in which we did it three times. But an essay is a format and it is not the definition of rigor. By the time we started our Dystopian book club in the middle of April, I wanted to know whether students can interpret a text, support their ideas with evidence, and explain their reasoning through different means.

A student can create a dystopian collage based on Feed and still make a sophisticated argument about how consumer culture reduces people to products. They might layer advertisements over quotations from the novel, use fragmented images to represent damaged identity, or place a character’s words beneath a crowd of images to show how individual voices are overwhelmed.

This type of work is only meaningful if the student can explain it.

“I used repeated ads around the edge of the collage because the Feed is always present in the characters’ lives. The ads crowd out Violet’s words, showing that consumerism is more powerful than individual identity.”

This is not decoration, but analytical work in another form.

Choice needs boundaries

Giving students choices does not mean asking them to “make anything you want.”

That kind of assignment can create confusion, especially for students who need structure before they can be creative. Open-ended work often benefits the students who already know how to navigate school expectations and can leave others unsure where to begin.

The answer is rather no removing choice, but giving students purposeful, intentional choices to choose from.

Expectations are build around choices, with common threads that link all the choices together. Students know what the learning objectives are, what evidence is required and how their work will be assessed. Both me and my ELL push-in were available for conferencing, and I pulled old student examples for them to examine.

For this assessment, students were not graded on the superficial aspect of their assessment. They were assessed on their interpretation, evidence, analysis, thematic understanding, communication, and reflection. The rubric stayed consistent across formats.

A student who wrote an essay and a student who created a visual project were both expected to answer the same essential question: What is the text saying about the world, and how does the author develop that message?

Where UDL fits in

Universal Design for Learning, or UDL, is often reduced to the idea that teachers should give students choices, freely. Obviously, it’s a lot more than that.

UDL starts with the understanding that students do not all access learning or express understanding in identical ways. Some students are strongest in writing. Others can explain complex thinking more clearly through visuals, audio, design, or performance. Some need models, organizers, or scaffolding before they can begin, while others need space to take creative risks.

The goal is not to lower expectations for some students, but the goal is to remove barriers that have nothing to do with the skill being assessed.

If I am assessing whether students can analyze dystopian literature, I should be careful not to accidentally assess only their confidence with formal essay writing, their access to technology, or their ability to guess what kind of project their teacher wants.

UDL asks teachers to keep the goal clear while allowing more than one path toward it. In assessment, that can mean offering students different ways to communicate the same depth of understanding.

Students still need to meet the standard, but they have a few more ways to get there.

Why the reflection matters

The reflection is often the part that turns a creative project into an academic assessment.

Students should be able to explain why they made the choices they made. Why did they use that quotation? Why did they choose those color tones, what does it represent? Why did they choose a close-up in one panel and a distant shot in another? How does their design connect to the themes?

Without that reflection, it is easy for a project to be a craft assignment. With it, students have to make their thinking visible, we get to see their thinking behind it.

The connection to dystopian literature

Dystopian novels ask students to think about systems that limit human choice. They explore worlds where people are sorted, monitored, silenced, sold to, controlled, or taught to distrust their own instincts. Students read about societies that demand sameness and punish independent thinking.

It makes sense, then, to give students room to show their thinking in ways that reflect their strengths while still holding them accountable to challenging standards.

A choice-based assessment does not mean students avoid difficult work. It means they have some ownership over how they do that work. This allows students to meet the rigor with more independence, more reflection, and often more creativity than a single format allows.

As I jokingly told my students – your future might be bleak, but your assessment choices are not.

You can download it here: Architect Mode Manual.

So when AI arrived in classrooms promising personalized support and instant feedback, I found myself quite hesitant about integration. This post is my attempt to name that hesitation and to describe where I’ve landed instead.

What the research is starting to say

The evidence on student AI use is still early, but it is pointing in a direction worth taking seriously. A 2025 systematic review on AI and critical thinking found a significant negative correlation between frequent student AI use and analytical reasoning, with cognitive offloading (letting a tool do thinking the student would otherwise do) as the mediating mechanism (Gerlich 2025). The same review pointed to metacognitive monitoring as one of the casualties: the more students lean on AI, the less they practice the internal habit of checking their own thinking, and the effect compounds for learners who haven’t yet built foundational skills in the discipline. Younger learners in the review showed higher AI dependence and lower critical thinking scores than older learners. Developmentally, the students most at risk are the middle schoolers I teach.

A 2025 MIT preprint by Kosmyna and colleagues adds another piece. University students who used ChatGPT to write essays showed measurable reductions in neural connectivity associated with deep cognitive engagement, compared to peers writing without AI assistance. The sample was small, and the design has limits I don’t want to overstate, but the direction of the findings tracks with what teachers have been observing on the ground.

There is one counterintuitive finding worth holding onto. A three-wave study by Wang and Zhang, with over nine hundred students, suggests that how students orient toward AI matters more than whether they use it. Students who treated AI as a thinking partner, questioning its outputs, building on them, and comparing them to their own ideas, showed stronger transfer learning than students who used it as an answer machine. The trouble is that a thinking-partner orientation requires metacognitive habits most thirteen-year-olds are still building, and the default orientation tends to be the answer-machine one.

When I sit with all of this, I land somewhere honest. The version of AI use that benefits students is sophisticated, and the version available to them by default is not, which is why I’m not in a hurry to put it in their hands.

So, where does AI fit in my classroom?

It fits behind me, rather than in front of me.

I’ve started calling this architect mode. The teacher uses AI in the design phase, building the materials, the scaffolds, and the protocols, and keeps it out of the student-facing layer. The AI doesn’t deliver instruction, tutor, or grade. It helps me build the thing my students will then think their way through, by hand, at the speed of their own minds.

Architect mode draws a different line than the usual “AI yes, AI no” debate I keep seeing in teacher spaces. The line I’m drawing isn’t whether AI is in the classroom; it’s where AI sits in the workflow. Behind the teacher, it works as a design tool. In front of the student, it tends to become a cognitive shortcut. The same technology can pull in two very different directions depending on where you place it.

What architect mode produces: digital scaffolds

The artifacts that come out of architect mode aren’t ed-tech products. They’re something smaller and more specific, and I’ve started calling them digital scaffolds.

The distinction matters more than it sounds. Ed-tech products are pre-built, sold to schools, and tend to assume your context for you. They’re polished, expensive, and often rigid in ways that ask you to bend your teaching around them. Digital scaffolds are scrappy, free, and purpose-built for a specific unit, a specific class, and a specific pedagogical goal. The tool bends around the teaching, rather than the other way around.

No ed-tech vendor was going to build the tool I needed for my dystopian book club unit, so I built it myself.

A case study: the Power EKG

We’ve been reading dystopian novels in book clubs, including The Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, Feed, and The Giver, and tracking how the protagonists’ power rises and falls across the narrative. I wanted students moving past plot summary into structural analysis, sitting with questions about what kind of power is shifting, what causes it, and the question I most wanted them holding: Does the system allow this shift, or does it absorb it?

I built a tool I called the Power EKG Builder. Students plot three to five power shifts on a chart, and for each shift, the tool requires them to choose a power category from four options (political, information, social, narrative), identify the cause, articulate what was gained or lost in terms of the specific power rather than the event itself, and answer whether the system allowed the shift or absorbed it.

Every design choice in that tool is what I’ve been calling friction-by-design. The four power categories force a typology before students can write anything. The required fields keep them from skipping the analytical move and writing a plot summary instead. The system-absorption question is genuinely hard, and the tool tells students that explicitly, so they don’t feel stupid for sitting with it.

The part I want to be honest about is the division of labor. AI built the interface, while I designed the thinking architecture. The categories, the questions, the order they appear in, and the wording that distinguishes “what happened” from “what power was lost” are all pedagogy, and they came from me. AI gave me the speed to ship a working tool in an evening that would have taken me weeks to build by hand, if I could have built it at all.

A note about my dysgraphia students

For most of my students, the Power EKG adds productive friction. It slows them down and forces precision, which is what I want.

For a student with dysgraphia, the calculation changes. The mechanics of handwriting are already a heavy cognitive load that competes with, and often drowns out, the analytical thinking I’m trying to surface. On a paper graphic organizer, that student is spending cognitive budget on letter formation, legibility, spacing, and pencil pressure long before they reach the analysis itself. The friction they’re experiencing isn’t the kind I’m trying to create; it’s the kind I need to clear out of the way.

Some of my dysgraphia students don’t enjoy being singled out with accommodations; they want to use the same tools as the rest of their peers. A well-designed digital scaffold removes the unproductive friction (typing, structured fields, saved progress) so the productive friction can finally happen. My dysgraphia students can think about power instead of about handwriting, and the same tool ends up doing opposite work for different students while serving the same pedagogical goal.

This is the quieter case for digital scaffolds, and the one I didn’t expect to find myself making. Inclusive design and friction-by-design aren’t actually in tension. A good scaffold calibrates friction, adding it where thinking needs to slow down and removing it where it’s eating the cognitive budget meant for something else.

Where I’m landing

I’m still not putting AI in students’ hands. The research gives me real reasons to wait, and my own values give me more.

If I’m honest, this whole project is continuous with the work I’ve been doing on this Substack from the start. The metacognitive habits I’ve been trying to build all year, the cognitive wobble, the second-guessing, the willingness to sit in not-knowing, are precisely the ones the research suggests AI use erodes fastest. Architect mode is, in a way, my attempt to keep building those habits in students while still letting AI do the work it’s actually well-suited for, which is helping me design better learning experiences.

What architect mode has changed is what I can make. I’m building digital scaffolds for other units now, including a claim-evidence-reasoning coach, a structured protocol for lateral reading, and a discussion organizer that pushes students to cite before they react. None of these would have been feasible a year ago, and all of them exist because AI lets me design according to the needs of my classroom.

Maybe the most useful move for a teacher right now isn’t adopting the latest AI platform. It might be slipping into architect mode for an hour on a Sunday afternoon and building the small, specific, deliberately frictional thinking tool that this week’s lesson actually needs.

* * *

A note on what’s next: I’m working on a manual for teachers who want to learn this mode, including how to design digital scaffolds, the prompt patterns I use, how to host them with ease, and the working tools from my own classroom. I’m looking forward to sharing this soon.

* * *

Sources:

Kosmyna, N., et al. (2025). Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. arXiv:2506.08872.

Wang, S., Zhang, H. Pedagogical partnerships with generative AI in higher education: how dual cognitive pathways paradoxically enable transformative learning. Int J Educ Technol High Educ 23, 11 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239-026-00585-x

Gerlich, M. (2025). AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking. Societies, 15(1), 6. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc15010006

This is the problem I was trying to solve when I built my Critical Reading in the Age of AI unit. The rise of AI-generated content has made an already urgent issue even more pressing. When anyone — or anything — can produce polished, convincing text in seconds, the question of what am I actually reading right now is no longer a media literacy bonus lesson. It’s a needed skill.

The unit builds that skill in bite-sized chunks. My students had already spent time on headlines and framing, the four types of bias in news media, algorithms, filter bubbles and echo chambers, the distinctions among misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, and lateral reading. Students had language for how information environments work and how content reaches them. But I wanted to push them further — from understanding the systems that shape what they see to interrogating the specific texts before them. That meant moving from media literacy concepts to close critical reading practices.

A Framework Worth Stealing (In Pieces)

I didn’t build my approach from scratch. I turned to Marilyn Pryle’s 5 Questions for Any Text: Critical Reading in the Age of Disinformation (Heinemann, 2024), which organizes critical reading around five essential questions students can ask of any text in any medium.

What am I reading? What is it showing me? What is it hiding? How am I reacting? How does it work?

Under each question, Pryle offers a range of strategies — specific, teachable moves that push students to look beyond a text itself and see the influences around it, the voices and sponsors, the craft and rhetoric, the intent and message. These aren’t five things to teach. There are five categories, each containing multiple entry points for critical thinking. A teacher can return to these five questions across the year, choosing different strategies each time depending on the text, the unit, and what students are ready for.

That breadth is also the challenge. Hand all five questions and their full range of strategies to a group of middle schoolers at once, and you’ll get glazed eyes before you’ve finished explaining the first one. I’ve still got students who are still learning to annotate with purpose. The cognitive load matters.

Rather than sprint through the full framework, I pulled two individual strategies that fit most naturally inside my Critical Reading in the Age of AI unit. From the strategies under “What Am I Reading?” I chose See the Source. From the strategies under “What Is It Hiding?” I chose Author Bias.

I want to name something here that might seem obvious but isn’t: these two strategies feel like common sense to most adults, particularly those of us who grew up analog and watched the digital world build itself around us. We learned to ask “who wrote this?” and “what’s their angle?” because we lived through the transition from a handful of trusted gatekeepers to an internet where anyone could publish anything. We developed those instincts over the years, often the hard way. Our students skipped that apprenticeship. They didn't learn to navigate information gradually; they just arrived in the middle of it. What feels intuitive to us is genuinely new cognitive territory for a thirteen-year-old who has never known a world without algorithmically served content. These foundational moves deserve real instructional time, not a quick mention on the way to something more advanced.

See the Source: Starting With “What Am I Reading?”

The first strategy asks students to do something deceptively simple, and that’s to figure out what they’re actually looking at before they engage with its content. Who published this? Who paid for it? Is this editorial content, or is something else going on?

I opened with something intentionally low-stakes: a recipe. I pulled up a page from one of my favorite baking publications, Bake from Scratch, and showed students what appeared to be a perfectly normal pie recipe. Then I asked them to look closer. At the top of the page, in faint text, was the word “advertisement.” Most of them hadn’t noticed it. That was the point.

From there, I walked them through the elements of sponsored content — how to spot it and why it’s designed to be hard to spot. We looked at the recipe itself. It called for a jar of Bonne Maman easy pie filling by name. But when it came to butter? Just butter. All-purpose flour? Just flour. No brand specified. The recipe was only specific where the sponsor needed it to be. Once students saw that pattern, the energy in the room shifted. They weren’t just reading a recipe anymore. They were seeing how a text can look like one thing while doing something else entirely.

Then I pulled up a Greenpeace International article about microplastics leaching from plastic food containers when heated. The piece reviews peer-reviewed research, cites specific studies, and presents itself as an informational resource for consumers concerned about their health. It’s well-sourced and clearly written. But before we dove into the article itself, I wanted students to see the source first. We talked about who Greenpeace is — that they’ve been around since the early 1970s, that they do research, run campaigns, take direct action through protests and demonstrations, and that they are a real, credible organization with a clear mission and a clear point of view. Then I put the framing question on the screen: How does who Greenpeace is show up in what Greenpeace writes?

To sharpen the contrast, I put the two texts side by side. Sponsored content hides who is really behind the text — it’s designed to look independent, and you’re not supposed to notice the source. Greenpeace is the opposite: their name is right on everything, and they’re open about who they are. But their identity still shapes the writing. The takeaway I wanted students to land on was simple but essential: even when a source is transparent, seeing the source still matters.

After that comparison, students moved into the deeper investigation. Pryle’s “See the Source” strategy comes with four guiding questions, designed as individual reading response prompts.

Where is this text coming from?

Has anyone sponsored or endorsed it?

Is it on a website that wants to promote a certain message?

How can this source influence the message?

I adapted them into a jigsaw activity. Students worked in groups of four, with each person owning one question and going deep on it rather than skimming all four:

• Where is this text coming from? Visit the Greenpeace “About” page. What kind of organization is it? What is their mission? How do they describe themselves?

• Has anyone sponsored or endorsed it? Research how Greenpeace is funded. They refuse corporate and government money — what does that mean? Is donor funding a kind of sponsorship?

• Is it on a website that wants to promote a certain message? Explore the Greenpeace website. Is it designed to inform, persuade, raise money, or recruit? What do both supporters and critics say about them?

• How could the source influence the message? Close-read and annotate the article itself. Mark emotional language, data choices, what’s included and what’s left out, and the call to action. Find specific evidence.

I provided sentence starters for students who needed a way in:

“The text includes facts about _____ but does not mention _____”

“The call to action asks me to _____, which connects to Greenpeace’s mission because _____.”

These starters were important as they gave students language for a kind of thinking most of them had never been asked to do before. It’s one thing to feel like a text has a perspective. It’s another to be able to name specifically how that perspective shows up on the page.

After some time of individual research and reading, groups came back together. They shared in order, listening and taking notes while each person reported on their question. I required at least one follow-up question after each share — not to create busywork, but because learning to ask a follow-up question is itself a critical reading skill. Then the group worked together to answer a central question:

“Given what we now know about where this text comes from, who funds it, and what the platform promotes — how does the source’s identity show up in the writing? Does knowing this change how we read it?”

Groups synthesized their thinking into a collaboratively written paragraph using a structured writing frame that walked them through identifying the type of organization, its mission, its funding, what the platform promotes, specific evidence from the text, and finally a judgment — whether they found the text trustworthy, mostly trustworthy, or worth reading carefully, and why. That final move mattered. I didn’t want groups to arrive at “it’s biased” and stop. I wanted them to weigh what they’d found and reach an informed position.

The share-out brought the class back together with questions designed to push the thinking one more level: How is the Greenpeace text similar to the sponsored content? How is it different? Greenpeace doesn’t hide who they are — does that make their text more trustworthy, or is it just a different kind of influence? And the question that generated the most energy: Is it possible for a text to be true and still be shaped by the source?

That’s the question I wanted them to wrestle with, because it’s the one that breaks them out of binary thinking. Seeing the source is not about deciding a text is bad or dishonest. Greenpeace is credible. They do real research. They have made a real difference in the world. They are also an advocacy organization whose mission shapes its writing — the language, the data it selects, the emotions it evokes, the actions it calls for. Both of those things are true at the same time. A strong reader holds both.

Author Bias: Moving Into “What Is It Hiding?”

If See the Source asks students to look at where a text comes from, Author Bias asks them to look at what a text is doing — the choices an author makes that tilt the reader toward a particular conclusion, even when the facts themselves are accurate.

I opened with a gut check. Students read and annotated “Is the NFL Safer Than High School Football?” by Alana Semuels, from the November 2025 issue of TIME, for homework. The piece examines how the NFL has made significant changes to reduce head injuries and CTE, while college, high school, and youth football have done comparatively little. It’s well-researched, cites real experts, and includes real data. After reading, students did a silent write: Based on your reading, do you think this article is biased? Yes, no, or not sure — explain your reasoning in 3–4 sentences. Then, a quick show of hands to make the range of opinion in the room visible.

This matters because students already have instincts about bias. They use the word constantly. But they use it as a verdict — the text is biased, or it isn’t — rather than as a starting point for investigation. Beginning with the gut reaction honors what they bring to the table, then gives them somewhere more rigorous to go.

That more rigorous place started with a reframe. I put this on the screen: “This article is well-researched and factually grounded. It’s from TIME. It quotes experts. It includes real data. So the question isn’t whether the article is lying to you — it’s whether the author is making choices that push you toward a particular conclusion, even while reporting accurately.” Most students walk in thinking bias means someone is making things up. The harder and more important idea is that an author can be truthful and still be selective.

From there, I introduced Pryle’s four Author Bias questions:

Slant: Does the author seem to have a slant toward a particular view, even if they claim that they do not?

Evidence: What is the evidence for this?

Effect: How does this bias affect the piece?

Credibility: Does it affect the author’s ethos or credibility?

The power of these four questions is that they slow the thinking down. A student’s instinct is to leap from gut reaction to judgment — “it’s biased” — and stop. Pryle’s sequence makes that leap hard work. You have to name the direction of the slant before you can look for evidence. You have to find specific evidence before you can assess the effect. And you have to sit with the effect before you can make a credibility judgment. Each question depends on the one before it. The thinking becomes visible and sequential rather than instinctive and collapsed.

To support students in finding evidence, I gave them a list of Tier 3 vocabulary — slant, framing, loaded language, source imbalance, omission, ethos — and directed them to look in four specific places:

• Word Choice: Are there words or phrases that carry a judgment or emotional charge?

• Source Selection: Who gets quoted? How many times? How much space does each voice receive? Who gets the last word?

• Structure: What comes first? What comes last? How does that order shape the reader’s experience?

• What’s Missing: Are there perspectives, questions, or information a reader might expect to see that the article does not include?

These categories turn “I think it’s biased” into “here is the exact language that reveals the bias.” That shift — from impression to evidence — is the whole point.

Students worked through Questions 1 and 2 in small groups, finding the slant and building the proof. Then they turned to Questions 3 and 4 individually: What does the bias actually do to the piece? And: Does this slant make Semuels less credible — or can she be biased and trustworthy at the same time?

That last question is where the real learning lives. The easy answer is that bias equals bad. The harder, more honest answer is that bias is everywhere — the question isn’t whether it exists, it’s what you do with the knowledge that it exists. I landed the class here: The author is credible in her reporting, but not neutral in her framing. You can trust her facts while recognizing she has chosen which facts to emphasize and how to present them. Knowing the slant doesn’t mean you throw out the article; it means you read it as one perspective, not the whole picture.

What I Want Students to Carry Forward

The goal of this unit was never to turn students into skeptics who trust nothing. A strong reader holds both the ability to question and the willingness to engage. They can look at a text, see the source, name the perspective, identify what’s missing, and still decide that the information has value. Or they can decide it doesn’t, but then their decision is informed.

I took away the laptops. Oh, the collective groans and whinging.

Instead of Word Docs, comment banks, and multiple tabs open at once, students worked entirely on paper. They planned using a handwritten essay organizer, drafted by hand, and then wrote a second draft—also by hand. Every scaffold was analog—pens, pencils, crossed‑out sentences, arrows in the margins.

To support the inevitable moments of stuckness, I set up an “Unstuck Wall.” A strategy I learned from Trevor MacKenzie, it prompted students to pause before defaulting to me. They could consult anchor charts, revisit their organizer, reread the texts, or confer with a peer before seeking teacher rescue.

The goal wasn’t to make writing harder for its own sake. It was to slow it down—just enough that thinking had to surface.

There was resistance.

What they were really reacting to wasn’t inconvenience. It was a cognitive wobble.

The wobble shows up when familiar supports disappear and thinking no longer feels smooth. Without the ease of deleting, rearranging, or relying on digital cues, students had to slow down. On paper, every word costs something. Each sentence requires a decision, and uncertainty can’t be hidden behind polish.

That discomfort is not accidental. Research on multimodal learning shows that when students engage multiple senses—writing, drawing, speaking—they develop a deeper and more durable understanding. Studies shared in Edutopia’s “The Power of Multimodal Learning” explain that handwriting and drawing activate fine‑motor and visual pathways that typing does not, lighting up more areas of the brain associated with learning. When students physically construct ideas—through crossing out, sketching connections, or annotating margins—they encode their thinking through multiple cognitive routes at once.

I could see that happening in real time.

Pencils hovered mid‑sentence. Paragraphs were rewritten instead of erased. Students paused to reread both texts because they couldn’t rely on fluency alone to carry them forward. Writing became less about sounding right and more about figuring out what they actually thought about the relationship between the two texts.

This is where the wobble matters.

Cognitive science describes this kind of productive discomfort as desirable difficulty—learning that feels effortful but leads to stronger understanding (Bjork et al 2025). Going analog introduced just enough friction to interrupt the autopilot. Students couldn’t glide forward on surface clarity. They had to sit with confusion, make sense of it, and intentionally revise their ideas.

The space between the first and second draft was especially revealing. Because their thinking was externalized on paper, students could see patterns in their reasoning—where comparisons were thin, where evidence didn’t quite connect, where claims drifted. Research on organizational drawing and concept mapping shows that this kind of visible thinking dramatically improves higher‑order reasoning, and the second drafts reflected that. The revisions weren’t cosmetic; they were conceptual.

I’m not interested in rejecting technology - in fact, I’m quite tech savvy and usually so are my students. But lately, I’ve been seeing too much cognitive offloading and not enough critical, original thinking.

Laptops are powerful tools, and my students will return to them for the published piece. But in a moment when digital tools can smooth, suggest, and even generate language for students, going analog quietly returned responsibility for meaning‑making to the writer. The paper did not help them think. It did not anticipate the next sentence or fix unclear ideas. Students had to do that work themselves.

For middle schoolers—thinkers still learning what thinking feels like—that matters.

The cognitive wobble is not a problem to eliminate. It’s a signal that learning is happening. It’s the moment when students are pushed just beyond ease and into growth.

Eventually, these essays will be typed, revised, and polished. But the ideas behind them were formed through effort, friction, and the use of a preferred pen or pencil on paper. Sometimes, the most future‑focused move we can make in the classroom is to slow things down, just enough for thinking to catch up.

Sources:

Terada, Youki. “The Power of Multimodal Learning (in 5 Charts).” Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, 7 Mar. 2025, www.edutopia.org/visual-essay/the-power-of-multimodal-learning-in-5-charts?open=comments-sidebar. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

Bjork, Robert & Bjork, Elizabeth. (2020). Desirable Difficulties in Theory and Practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

Instead, I asked them to draw their thinking.

At first, a few students looked surprised. Some asked if it “had to be good.” Others asked if spelling mattered. What they were really asking was whether this kind of work counted as thinking.

It did—and it does.

From Talk to Synthesis

The Tug of War routine helped students surface competing interpretations: dignity versus compliance, resistance versus survival. But discussion alone isn’t synthesis. I wanted students to step back, look at the whole landscape of ideas, and decide what mattered most.

Visual synthesis became the next step.

Students translated evidence, claims, and moments from the text into images, spatial layouts, symbols, and short reflections. What emerged were not illustrations of the plot, but arguments in visual form.

Why Visual Synthesis?

1. It’s Multimodal by Design

Visual synthesis invites students to think beyond words. Drawing, layout, color, arrows, and symbols all became tools for meaning‑making.

For some students, this lowered barriers. For others, it raised the bar. Everyone had to decide:

• What deserves the most space?

• What belongs at the center?

• What connects, and what conflicts?

These are analytical decisions—not artistic ones.

2. It Demands Critical Thinking

You can’t visually synthesize without prioritizing.

Students had to:

• Select evidence intentionally

• Group ideas conceptually

• Show relationships between moments in the text

• Represent tension, not just summarize events

One student placed dignity and compliance on opposite sides of the page but connected them with repeated images of restraint. Another centered Louie’s body as a site of conflict, surrounded by forces pulling in different directions. These choices revealed the depth of thinking that a paragraph might have hidden.

3. It Slows Thinking Down

Visual work resists speed. There’s no copy‑paste. No rushing to fill space with words.

Students paused. They revised. They erased. They moved ideas when their thinking changed. That slowness mattered; it created space for reflection instead of performance.

4. It’s Intentionally AI‑Free

This mattered to me.

Visual synthesis requires presence: decision‑making in the moment, grounded in the text and in prior discussion. Students had to wrestle with ambiguity themselves. There was no shortcut to clarity.

In a time when AI can generate polished writing in seconds, this work reminded us that thinking is often messy—and that mess is productive.

5. It Makes Thinking Visible

When students shared their visuals, I didn’t just see what they understood—I saw how they were thinking.

I could trace:

• Which moments from the text carried the most weight

• Where students felt tension or uncertainty

• How their interpretations evolved from discussion

Assessment became observational and conversational, not just evaluative.

What This Changed in the Classroom

Students spoke with more confidence about their interpretations because they had already built them. Discussions became more grounded. The writing that followed was more focused and evidence‑driven.

Most importantly, students saw that their thinking—unfinished, evolving, imperfect—was valued.

A Final Reflection

Visual synthesis isn’t an “extra.” It’s not an art project. It’s not a break from rigor.

It is rigor, just expressed differently.

By inviting students to synthesize visually, I wasn’t lowering expectations. I was expanding the ways students could show deep, critical engagement with complex texts.

And once again, they rose to it.

There’s a moment in almost every class when a student looks up and asks, “So… what’s the right answer?”

This year, I’ve been trying to sit with that moment instead of rushing to resolve it.

While reading Part 4 of Unbroken (YA edition) with my 8th graders, we reached one of the most uncomfortable questions in the book:
Should Louie Zamperini survive through defiance, holding onto his dignity at the risk of death, or survive through total compliance with The Bird?

It’s not a question that fits neatly into a paragraph response. And I didn’t want it to.

Slowing the Thinking Down

Instead of assigning a written response right away, I introduced Harvard’s Project Zero’s Tug of War thinking routine. I framed the question, laid out the “rope,” and asked students to argue both sides - using only the text to pull.

At first, there was a bit of hesitation. A few students hovered over the sticky notes, unsure where to begin. Then someone cited a moment of Louie’s quiet resistance. Another countered with a scene where compliance meant survival. One of my quieter students referenced the scene where Louie held the beam as a moment of compliance and defiance.

Slowly, the table filled with evidence.

What struck me wasn’t just what students said, but how they interacted:

• They pointed back to passages instead of looking at me.

• They moved sticky notes when their thinking changed.

• They challenged each other respectfully - and listened when challenged.

By the end, every student had contributed at least one piece of textual evidence. Discussions stretched past 20 minutes with minimal prompting. Several students physically shifted their stance on the “rope” as stronger arguments emerged.

And no one asked for the right answer.

What This Revealed

This activity reminded me that students are capable of far more nuance than we sometimes allow. When we slow down reading and make thinking visible, students don’t just comprehend—they reason.

The Tug of War routine didn’t lead to a consensus. It led to:

• Stronger evidence‑based claims

• More thoughtful academic discourse

• A deeper understanding that complex texts don’t offer easy answers

Most importantly, it helped students see that changing their minds isn’t a weakness, it’s a sign that they’re thinking critically.

Why I’ll Keep Doing This

As an ELA teacher, I want my classroom to be a place where uncertainty is allowed and thinking is public. Where students learn that reading isn’t about finishing faster, but about engaging more deeply.

When we give students space to wrestle with complexity, they don’t shy away from it.

They rise to it.

A Quick Guide to Using Project Zero’s Tug of War in Language Arts

1. Choose a genuine dilemma
Pick a moment, an internal conflict in the text, where reasonable readers could disagree.

2. Frame the extremes
Label each end of the “tug” clearly (e.g., Defiance vs. Compliance).

3. Require evidence only
Every claim must be supported with a direct quote or paraphrase.

4. Make thinking movable
Use sticky notes so students can revise ideas as discussions evolve.

5. Step back
Resist the urge to validate answers. Let the text - and the students - do the work.

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