Summary: NWP awards four successive badges to scorers and leaders at NWP scoring events. NWP Scoring Conferences are national events organized and facilitated by the National Writing Project where Writing Project teachers come together and train to score student writing to determine measurable outcomes of a program. Scoring Conferences consist...
Author: Carl Nagin Summary: This review of George Hillocks’s 2002 book, The Testing Trap: How State Writing Assessments Control Learning, is still a relevant read, providing history and research connected to the issues involved in high stakes state writing tests. The review details the validity and reliability of such tests,...
Author: Carrie Usui Summary: What is the work of a literacy coach? Twelve UCLA Writing Project teacher-consultants serving as literacy coaches in the LA Unified School District spent a weekend retreat exploring that question by writing vignettes as a way to illustrate what it is they do as coaches. Here...
Author: Gerri Ruckle & Jim Horrell Summary: What can we do when confronted with the challenge of helping young poets develop an awareness of the expressive power of poetry as opposed to rhyming lines that that often convey little meaning? By sharing a series of scaffolded strategies illustrated with multiple...
Author: Dr. Kiara Lee-Heart Summary: A writing teacher responds to the famous essay “Why Johnny Can’t Write,” emphasizing the ways that its push for standardization has been particularly damaging for black students.
Author: Denise Marchionda Summary: If you are developing or facilitating a professional development program that includes peer editing as a topic/theme/strand you will want to check out Denise Marchionda’s “two-peer editing system.” Marchionda shares the checklist and specific step-by-step directions she has students follow in her class when editing/reviewing one...
Author: Timothy Ferris Summary: Ferris explains that he writes as a way to learn science and describes the vital role that science has played in changing the world for the better. He discusses how writing for general audiences can help scientists to “clarify their own thinking, by obliging them to...
Author: Danling Fu and Jane Hansen Summary: What’s missing in writing instruction that focuses on organization, vocabulary and sentence structure? What is the role of thinking in writing, and how can we make thinking visible in writing? This article, which could provide a useful focus for a study group or...
Author: Anne Elrod Whitney Summary: Why do teachers so often attribute their personal and professional “transformation” to their writing project experiences? Researcher Anne Whitney considers how participants’ writing time and writing group experience impacts their identity as writers, learners, and instructional leaders. Reading this study could spur an interesting discussion...
Author: Brady Bennon Summary: How does a teacher help students understand and care about global warming in a personal, meaningful way? Moving beyond policy and “big-picture” issues, high school teacher Brady Bennon focused on story. He asked his students to write about their own connections between place and identity, then...