The tool, called WeWillWrite, aims to make the learning process more exciting and the features of good writing easier to see, understand and incorporate, according to a recent news release. The hope is that this novel approach can help improve student literacy.
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores released this year show 70 percent of U.S. students are not proficient at reading. The last time NAEP released writing scores was 2011, and 75 percent of U.S. students were not proficient then.
To combat these issues, WeWillWrite was developed by a startup in Norway, where it was piloted by students and teachers from 2023 to 2024, the company’s website says. Before it officially launched last week, the tool underwent two phases of beta testing among 50,000 teachers and 1 million students in the U.S. and Canada.
SOMETHING COMPLETELY NEW
Aaron Grossman, a fifth-grade teacher in Washoe County, Nev., and his students were among those beta testers. Grossman, who has been teaching elementary school for more than 20 years, said WeWillWrite brought something completely new to his classroom.
To use WeWillWrite, the teacher chooses several story challenges from the tool’s library based on what grade they teach, from elementary to high school, and what form of writing they want to focus on, such as persuasive, narrative or informative. The teacher then presents the first challenge to the class using a projector, smartboard or large monitor.
Each student has a computer or tablet, and the class is divided into random teams. They can see which team they’re on but not the identity of their teammates, and no names are attached to any of the writing — it’s anonymous to everyone but the teacher. To start the challenge, the large display and student devices show the same AI-generated image and human-generated prompts to get creative juices flowing. For example, an elementary school challenge shows a picture of a toothbrush with eyes and asks, “What if it had a personality? What would it think? Tell the story as if you were the toothbrush.” Further prompts include questions such as, “What are its favorite things or worst fears? How is it treated? What happens when you’re not in the bathroom?”
A timer starts, and students have anywhere from two to five minutes to complete the challenge. From there, they vote to select the best text from their team. The finalists go up on the main display for review, and the whole class votes for the winning passage. Then the next writing challenge begins.
REAL-TIME REVIEW
AI comes into play during the review process, as it pinpoints for the whole class any literary techniques used in the finalists’ writing, such as hooks, metaphors, similes, adjectives and onomatopoeia. Students get to see these techniques demonstrated in their own classmates’ work and tend to use more of them in the next round of writing, Grossman said.
“The kids really want to be part of those finalists, and if it says this one was highlighted for onomatopoeia, almost immediately when I get the second piece of writing, every kid’s including onomatopoeia,” he said. “That’s what’s so different, is the instant application based on the feedback that we’re seeing as an entire classroom.”
Grossman said he can review data from the challenges later to see which concepts need to be reinforced. For example, if not many students used adjectives in a descriptive writing challenge, he said he would then circle back and offer a more robust lesson on how and why they should be used.
“I’m getting feedback that is much more diagnostic, and then since I can be more diagnostic, I can be more prescriptive,” Grossman said. “And because I get that so quickly, it can impact my instruction really quickly.”
He added that the ability to immediately see where students are with various standards-based literary devices can be especially helpful for inexperienced teachers, as it offers real-time, formative data about where to go next.
“We have a lot of novice teachers in our workforce. We have a lot of educators who are called ARL — Alternative Route to Licensure — so how do you give them a floor to work from?” Grossman said. “How powerful is that, to get that formative data as a novice educator? It guides them to think about what information kids need to boost their own achievement.”
