Writing Without Teachers

By Peter Elbow (Oxford University Press, 1973)

My time in K-12 teaching and academia has honed my critical thinking, making me skeptical and evidence-driven. I passed this on to my students, coaching them to question, critique, and debate. In short, I coached them into a culture of doubt.

Doubt is powerful and important; it inspires deep thinking, careful analysis, and passionate defense. However, the shortcoming of doubt is that it can stifle a willingness to welcome new ideas and perspectives and hinder social and intellectual empathy. It was Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers that opened my eyes to the power of belief.

In the appendix, Elbow introduces the “Doubting Game” and the “Believing Game.” The “Doubting Game” trains students to be skeptics, dissecting ideas for flaws and weaknesses. While valuable, it can create a classroom where skepticism dominates, leaving little room for new perspectives.

The “Believing Game” offers a counterbalance. Here, students are encouraged to embrace ideas — not with blind acceptance but with a genuine effort to understand them. The challenge is to suspend disbelief, restate others’ arguments faithfully, and try to believe them. As Elbow notes, we often miss the value in ideas, especially those that seem alien or dangerous, until we actively work at believing them.

For me, this appendix articulates the heart of the book. It’s about inspiring belief in students’ innate ability to write, countering doubt about the value of their own writing voice, and balancing critical thinking with empathetic understanding.

This article appears in the October 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 2, p. 7.