I have always felt uncomfortable with teaching students to write thesis statements before they write papers. Writing a thesis statement up front forces a kind of linear process on thinking that isn’t always linear – particularly not among students who are developing their understanding of topics.
In many ways, writing the thesis before writing the essay is like confirmation bias: the writer seeks to prove something already believed without exploring a variety of possibilities.
I understand the notion of a controlling idea, of having an argument that you lead a reader through to its conclusion. I know that good writing, even good student writing, has cohesion and structure. But as a reader of texts beyond student compositions, one who seeks mentor texts students can use as models for their own writing, I usually find the thesis – the key claim, the actual argument – in or near the conclusion of an essay or article.
Why have we come to expect our students to have a concrete statement of what they will argue and how the argument will be structured in the introduction? More importantly, why have we insisted that students have that thesis written before they write the rest of the paper?
When I write, I often have an epiphany or make some significant connection that my initial introduction may or may not accommodate. I see writing as recursive in that I can always add, move, change, delete, and otherwise revise what I’ve written when I have the opportunity to compose electronically and over time, given different settings. Although writing on computers (and even phones!) is becoming more common, students are often given in-class essays where they only have one chance to write what they think, or perhaps one chance to revise what they previously wrote. There is little incentive and little time to give students to revisit a piece over time and place in more traditional classrooms.
I want to validate students’ prior experience and recognize the service of my preceding colleagues, who have probably taught students a familiar formula for constructing a 5-paragraph essay, one which essentially outlines the 3 body paragraphs in the thesis statement. Still, I teach seniors and high-level juniors in an International Baccalaureate class, and I want my students to move beyond the 3-part thesis into more sophisticated statements of ideas. In the lingo of education, it’s past the time when that particular scaffold needed removal. I would argue that this scaffold needs removal long before junior year, but I’ll save that soapbox speech for another day.
This question about thesis writing and its possible connection to confirmation bias occurred to me today as I was helping my students work on a group project. In groups of 3-4, students were given a complex task to brainstorm understanding on topic, connect the topic to a text we’ve already studied from the unit, conduct research / obtain additional articles on the topic, and outline a hypothetical panel presentation where the students would share their learning on that topic. What I noticed is that students felt compelled to write the thesis before they’d worked through their understanding of the topics. Some students were trying to write their outline while they were reading their research. Students were trying to cram all of the different panel arguments into one often convoluted, very complex statement.
My advice to them: create an “umbrella” statement – something that spans the aspects you plan to discuss but does not list them. Write something that connects the aspects in a meaningful way, in a way that is not simply a restatement of the topic in some vague and vacuous claim.
Today it seemed more than ever that students were – even in their research – trying to prove something they already believed about their topics rather than explore the possibilities. One very bright young woman asked me to look at her source, because she felt she couldn’t find good research on her topic. The source was related to the topic, but it didn’t provide a clear answer to her question. Is that because she was looking to prove something she already thought? Or because she was looking for a clear answer to a question she had already formed?
I recognize that students today are immersed in texts with hypertext links and surrounded by distractions. I myself find my thoughts follow circuitous rather than linear paths more and more frequently. I know teaching cohesion is necessary, and that having a controlling idea is important in writing. I just wondered if, in asking students to follow particular kinds of procedures – having a clear research question up front before knowing much about a topic, writing a thesis statement before writing an essay – might contribute in some small way to confirmation bias.
I see confirmation bias as serious concern, not just in schools but more importantly in our culture. We seek to confirm ideas we already hold. We make a claim and look for information – for evidence – to prove that claim.
Such methods leave little room for dialogue, consensus, or compromise. Instead, confirmation bias contributes to fragmentation. Not only do we find ourselves unfamiliar with diverse opinions, fragmentation, to the degree we are currently experiencing it in our society, yields us incapable of listening to those opinions. Perhaps it is an idealistic notion, but societal progress and democratic principles rely on the ability of people to listen to various perspectives, to consider the experience and contributions of other members of a society who just might have something meaningful or insightful to contribute to our understanding, before making a judgement on issues that affect us all.
When I hear or read about some writing instruction, I see directions that suggest students must find quotations to support their ideas rather than derive an idea from the quotations they’ve selected. When I hear or read some approaches to teaching students how to research, the directions suggest students have their research question up-front rather than researching the various questions related to a topic and developing their understanding first.
Perhaps I’m drawing a conclusion from this connection that is unwarranted. I know we also teach students to consider counter-arguments. We may even give students phrases that help them integrate and rebut opposing viewpoints. But to even talk about argument in such a dichotomous way reinforces an us-them mentality.
This is just musing, not really an argument or intending to prove a point. Where do you find my thesis? Is it at the beginning? Perhaps. More likely it will be found in this paragraph: as teachers, we might consider how some of our processes reinforce fragmentation and confirmation bias. We might look for ways to help students participate in dialogue about meaningful topics, to listen and understand and learn before passing judgement. And one way to do that might be to encourage students to draw conclusions from the evidence first, before writing a thesis. What if we ask students about the patterns they notice, or the ideas that recur, or the examples seem out of the ordinary? What if we ask what we don’t already know about a topic? What if we ask students what they are curious about? How can we help students learn to look for and consider information without expecting concrete answers?
What do you think?
