Typically, when people talk about innovation in basic education, they tend to overlook the important issue of writing in school. But it is not possible to do good teaching work—across the wide range of subject areas covered in the classroom—without high-quality writing, starting in preschool. Simply delivering lectures and listening to students’ verbalized opinions or ideas does not lead them to reflect on and deepen their understanding of what they have learned. There is a crucial connection between the act of writing and the thinking process involved in consolidating learning. However, the complexity of the writing and editing processes means that, in high school, writing is often restricted to Portuguese language classes or to group projects that are graded but do not require revisions. Here, I intend to discuss how writing about what has been read helps students incorporate the text into their cultural and scientific repertoire through personal reflection.

If mere reading logs contribute little to building solid learning and, above all, to fostering independent thinkers, then more needs to be done. I will focus here on two complementary approaches, particularly in high school teaching: exploring the social function of writing as a historical record of thought and connecting disciplines across areas of knowledge through authors’ reflections.

In the first case, to develop the habit of more elaborate writing based on what has been read, it’s worth suggesting that students read autobiographies and assigning essays that reflect on them. While reading Barack Obama’s excellent book, *A Promised Land*, about his time as president of the United States, I was struck by how clear it is that it’s important to write about one’s own experiences, so that new generations understand history not as a collection of facts, dates, heroes, and trends, but as the decision-making process of real people, in challenging contexts—and that mistakes were made even by admired figures.

Regarding the connection between subjects across different fields of knowledge, as outlined in the BNCC, this “reconnection of knowledge”—as advocated by Edgar Morin—can lead us to consider integrative projects that cannot be fully explained by teachers in mere lectures, but rather must be explored by students through diverse readings and experiences and incorporated into their thinking through their own written work.

For both of these purposes, the teacher’s work involves refining the student’s text and may require more than one round of corrections. However, platforms that support teachers in this task already exist—many of them based on Artificial Intelligence—and should, in the future, enable the use of much more writing to connect students’ experiences and readings with a deeper process of reflection that consolidates the knowledge they have acquired. After all, reading, writing, and thinking are human activities that complement one another in lifelong learning!

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