By: Naveen Valsakumar, Co-founder and CEO, Notion Press
Lubhna Dongre was fourteen when she began writing what would later become Stepping Stones: Taking Towards the Goal. What started as a set of notes on ideas about purpose, contribution, and ambition slowly grew into a manuscript shaped by her observations and by messages and letters from people she admired. She was trying to organise what she was learning and turn it into something that might help other students her age.
That is the quiet strength of writing. Long before a piece of work reaches readers, it helps the writer slow down enough to understand what they think.
This kind of clarity is rare in a traditional classroom where students are trained to recall the “right” answer and teachers are rushed by a pre-set curriculum. And yet it is central to the way meaningful learning takes place.
How Writing Helps Students and Teachers in Ways the Classroom Can’t
When students write without the pressure of grades, their relationship with learning changes. A diary entry, a page of fiction, or a reflective paragraph stops being a task and becomes a way to make sense and express emotions they may not have the maturity or vocabulary to articulate out loud. Writing gives form to thoughts that otherwise stay scattered. It gives students a chance to pause, something the school timetable rarely allows.
Teachers experience it differently. The pace of teaching leaves little room for reflection, as lessons change, classes move on, and new chapters begin. But short reflections, lesson notes, or collected classroom observations often give teachers the opportunity to learn something new and see the patterns they hadn’t noticed. Years of instinct suddenly make more sense when expressed on the page.
The experience of Richa Gupta, who taught English for nearly two decades, illustrates this. During her years as an educator, she routinely designed creative writing exercises, set up a Literary Club, and created writing contests within her school. She often wrote sample pieces herself to demonstrate structure or tone. Later, when she began writing fiction, she realised how deeply those years had shaped her. The stories her students brought to class, the queries she had to answer became part of how she built the ensemble cast in Skeins and in her later short stories.
These experiences point to something educators have observed for decades: writing is thinking made visible. In Bloom’s Taxonomy, the highest stage of learning is “creating,” built on a progression from remembering to understanding to analysing. Writing nudges learners upward almost automatically. When a student shapes an idea in their own words, or when a teacher articulates why a lesson worked, they are reorganising their understanding into meaning.
This blend of reflection and creation is also why story-based approaches have consistently shown better learning outcomes. Initiatives such as Katha’s StoryPedagogy, which has been integrating stories into everyday learning for decades, have found that children engage more deeply and ask more meaningful questions when lessons are rooted in narrative. Evaluations of Room to Read’s literacy programmes show similar patterns: when children regularly read and write stories, their comprehension and reading fluency improve significantly.
Stories slow the learning process down just enough for it to become thoughtful while keeping it fun, relatable, and thus, engaging.
For students and educators, alike, writing offers something schools rarely prioritise: the space to think. And what has aided this creation of space is the popular adoption of self-publishing.
When Writing Starts Reaching Others
For some students, that quiet moment of clarity on the page eventually grows into something they want to share. This is what happened with writers like Nikita Raikwar, who wrote Body Positivity: Tackling Negative Body Image while still in college, drawing from her own experience with body image over the years. Her urge to share her story without months of convincing an editor got her into self-publishing, a decision that taught her different aspects of publishing a book.
Raikwar isn’t an outlier when it comes to learning from the publishing process. Apart from the technical knowledge gained, the experience teaches young writers to take their ideas seriously and gives them conversation openers during interviews. And that gives them an edge in a competitive academic environment.
In a sharp contrast to previous generations, universities, scholarship committees, and even internship programmes these days place equal emphasis on grades and non-academic pursuits. A thoughtfully created book, whether it’s fiction, commentary, research, or personal essays, shows a student’s curiosity, initiative, and commitment.
This shift has worked in favour of authors like Udita Pal, whose experience publishing Adulterated Love became a talking point that helped her secure a role as a digital marketing executive. Her journey reflects a broader pattern echoed by many young writers and early-career professionals: today, a book can act as a business card. And that same instinct of using writing to articulate identity and expertise is what draws many teachers into publishing.
For many educators, especially those outside traditional school systems, such as tutors, coaches, or independent instructors, a book becomes a way to gather years of experience into something tangible. It helps them communicate their teaching philosophy, reflect on what they’ve learned, and differentiate themselves in a crowded private education market.
Some educators see this impact unfold on a much larger scale. R.D. Sharma wrote his first textbook simply because there was no Indian-authored Linear Algebra book aligned to the national curriculum at the time. Over time, that book led to a body of work that continues to help Indian students. That’s what writing a book can do for educators: turn their experience into a lasting identity.
Whether it begins in a classroom or outside it, writing helps you make sense of your understanding, while publishing allows that understanding to be shared. Together, they hint at how learning itself is starting to evolve.
What This Means for the Future of Education
As education shifts toward skills like critical thinking, creativity, and communication, writing and publishing offer a simple way to practise them. Students learn to shape their thoughts with intention; teachers find a language for the experience they’ve gathered over years.
Self-publishing doesn’t replace traditional learning, but it widens the space in which learning can happen. Its value for students and educators ultimately lies in giving people a way to organise their thinking, state their perspective, and share it in a form that feels complete.
If education is moving in a new direction, it may be towards this: a system where expression sits alongside achievement, and where every learner, whether a child or an educator, has the means to speak in their own words.
