The Writing Revolution

During the 2019 administrative retreat, two curriculum areas were chosen as development projects to increase efficacy and rigor in our program. These curriculum areas were writing and spelling. While we are still in the early stages of our spelling curriculum implementation, we reached many of our writing curriculum goals for the year including choosing a writing cohort to attend trainings and lead professional development in house, implementing The Writing Revolution’s curriculum goals, as well as embedding more writing work across a variety of subjects. At Parkside, we believe that everyone is a teacher and everyone is a student. We hope to instill a love of learning in not only our students, but our staff.

The Writing Revolution by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler is a prominent writing program that was developed at The Windward School. It is based on large statistical research studies for best practice in writing and utilizes strategies outlined in publications such as the Elementary and Secondary Institute of Education Sciences (IES) Practice Guides by Steve Graham, et al., Approaches from Teaching Basic

Writing Skills (TBWS): Strategies for Effective Expository Writing Instruction by Judith C. Hochman and TBWS Templates by Betsy MacDermott-Duffy. These sources are incorporated with findings from Writing to Read: Evidence for How Writing Can Improve Reading (Graham, S., and Hebert, M., 2010.)

Dr. Hochman has presented several times at Parkside over the years about her previous writing program (Teaching Basic Writing Skills), but she has expanded and updated her work with The Writing Revolution. In the Fall of 2019, seven Parkside staff members participated in The Writing Revolution professional development series with a focus on expository writing at The Windward School’s Manhattan campus. Expository writing is considered the form of writing, that when done well, contributes most to student academic success. This form of writing is used to inform, explain and describe a concept to the readers. In expository writing, paragraphs are organized in a lucid manner to give readers a thorough understanding of the topic. At Parkside, we believe that part of professional development learning is processing, digesting, and sharing. To this end, our writing cohort met weekly in order to collaboratively plan and initiate a series of professional development trainings in house for our staff.

Like with many of our curriculum adaptations, aspects of the program were modified in order to fit the unique needs of our students including using co-location anchors, scaffolded goals and visual supports for all graphic organizers. Teachers in all ten classrooms successfully implemented sentence skill work including sentence types, conjunctions and appositives into their classrooms. The program is designed to spiral from year to year, with consistent review of all sentence level skills with the child improving towards mastery.

In addition, many teachers began to teach their students how to “quick outline” as a tool for writing organized paragraphs and essays. The program is based on the idea that all writers should acquire skills at the sentence level prior to writing paragraphs or essays. Very often, quick outlines are not used as a pre-cursor to paragraph writing but simply used as a support for organization and idea generation using key words and phrases. Even our youngest students are learning to generate strong sentences both in their writing and oral speech.

In addition to the strong student work we saw as a result of this program implementation, the adoption of The Writing Revolution allowed for increased clarity around student specific writing goals as well as a space for staff collaboration. Teachers throughout the year were often seen sharing materials, visuals and ideas for scaffolding when teaching sentence skills.

In our year end reflections, many teachers reported more success and accuracy in their student writing than ever before and were able to seamlessly transition writing from instruction from in person to virtual with the support of SeeSaw, a digital portfolio program. We look forward to continued growth and success within our writing program. The students will begin this September building on their skills from last year. 13