The Magic of AI in the Classroom: Part One – Unlocking Creative Writing
The Challenge of Creative Writing
Creative writing should feel joyful, but for most pupils it begins with hesitation and the fear of getting that first sentence wrong. Every English teacher recognises the scene: a room full of pupils staring at blank pages, hoping inspiration will appear.
Teachers are skilled at helping pupils break through this - a quiet prompt, a guiding question or a sentence scaffold. Often, that’s all it takes. The difficulty, of course, is scale. One teacher can’t be beside thirty pupils at once. Personalised prompts and timely feedback can’t reach everyone at the exact moment they’re needed.
The Magic of AI
This is where AI changes the picture, becoming the expert writing assistant who can sit beside every pupil simultaneously, offering guidance, prompts, feedback, and support at precisely the moment they need it.
There are countless ways AI can support creative writing — as many ideas as a teacher can dream up — but one approach we’ve seen work remarkably well is our Upgrade-My-Story activity. It tackles the most stubborn problem in creative writing: the anxiety that comes from limitless choice. Instead of facing a blank page, Willow provides pupils with a simple sentence, such as “I stepped onto the path” or “The wind pressed against my jacket.” Nothing overwhelming. Just a place to start.
From there, Willow offers pupils a selection of literary techniques to try, each explained clearly so pupils know exactly how to use them. Suddenly, instead of the vague instruction to “add description,” they have a concrete, creative tool in their hands.
Pupils upgrade the sentence, and Willow offers gentle guidance and encouragement along the way. Crucially however, always keeping the pupil fully in control.
Each new sentence builds naturally on their story and is tailored to the pupil’s level, recreating the kind of iterative process real authors go through. It quietly models what successful planning and ideation look like, helping pupils develop habits they can use beyond the task. Before long, they’re crafting a compelling opening to a story, one thoughtful choice at a time.
Pedagogical Alignment
What makes this activity so powerful is it naturally brings together the strongest principles of creative writing pedagogy. It becomes truly experiential, in the Deweyan sense, as pupils try out ideas, adjust them, and see the effect instantly. It echoes Rosenblatt’s reader-response thinking as Willow reacts as a real reader would, showing pupils which images land and why. And it sits squarely within Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development: Willow challenges writers just enough to stretch them, but never so much that they feel lost.
Impact on the Classroom
Perhaps most importantly, Willow restores real fairness to the writing classroom. Every pupil gets sustained, individual attention at the exact moment they need it. Teachers are freed to step in where their insight and relationships make the biggest difference, instead of firefighting thirty stuck writers all at once. And pupils finish the task with something priceless: proof they can produce something brilliant.