Research-based teaching has long been a distinguishing trait of higher education. Engaging students in research-like processes has been employed to great effect in learning and continues to be encouraged by educational studies. The literature on this subject reflects how ‘technical’ or ‘field’ exercises tend to dominate the common understandings of research-based learning. Here we address a specific area of inquiry overlooked by previous studies: whether and how reading, thinking and writing indeed share the same learning potentials as the practical foundation for research-based teaching. In the humanities and social sciences, integrated acts of reading, writing and thinking account for an obvious and substantial overlap in student and researcher practices, creating a clear opportunity for research-based teaching. Moreover, our empirical data point to reading, thinking and writing as quintessential to the processes of knowledge production in these disciplines, making it imperative to seek out ways of furnishing students with personal experience and competence in these aspects of research. We have conducted 19 ethnographic interviews and one focus group with faculty staff about their research practices and collected 24 portfolios in which students reflect auto-ethnographically on their educational practices. Analyzing this qualitative material, we explore how researchers and students respectively read and write to develop and advance their thinking in those learning processes that the two groups fundamentally share as the common aim of both research and education. Despite some similarities, we find that how the two groups engage in and benefit from reading and writing diverges significantly. Thus we have even more reason to believe that centering practice-based teaching on these aspects of research is a good idea, insofar as the ways students read and write need altering to correspond to the practice of research and prepare students accordingly. In the paper, we discuss therefore the possible challenges of grounding research-based teaching in reading, thinking and writing, as indicated by our empirical findings We then propose a set of experimentally designed curricular frameworks that have been shown to alter student engagement in reading and writing, encouraging their learning to become more research-like. Finally, we return to the literature on research-based teaching, asking how an emphasis on reading, thinking and writing can be understood in relation to the foremost models in this field (Brew 2012; Healey 2005; Levy 2009) and the questions it might raise about their conceptual principles of categorization.