What Happens When Schools Take Writing Seriously

My interview with Toni-Ann Vroom and Dina Zoleo of The Writing Revolution

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t that impressed with the writing instruction my kids received at our local elementary school. Basic spelling and grammatical errors went unfixed. To put it charitably, kids were told to focus on getting their ideas on the page and not worry too much about getting everything correct.

It took me a while to make this connection, but they also weren’t writing about anything. Instead, they seemed to be doing a lot of personal essays about themselves. But frankly, most elementary-age kids just don’t have that much to draw on.

So I was struck by a different approach when I first learned about The Writing Revolution’s methods via Nat Wexler. Not only did they preach deliberate, thoughtful writing instruction, but they believed that writing was a way to build new knowledge about the world. That is, writing isn’t just an empty vessel—it’s a tool to help students learn.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Drs. Toni-Ann Vroom and Dina Zoleo, the co-CEOs of The Writing Revolution. We talked about the importance of systematic writing instruction, how their organization works with teachers to help students learn to write well, and a new AI-powered tool called “Judy” that supports classroom implementation. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Chad Aldeman: Do kids need systematic writing instruction, or does it come naturally?

Dr. Toni-Ann Vroom

Toni-Ann Vroom: Writing is one of the most challenging academic skills, and it’s often overlooked when we think of the three R’s—reading, writing and arithmetic. We know that students need explicit instruction in math and reading. But then there’s a sense with writing that after teaching handwriting, spelling, grammar that the rest is something students will just discover. Maybe by reading a lot, they’ll pick up writing? Or, because writing is a form of communication, if a child can speak then they will be able to write?

But there’s a very big difference between spoken and written communication. And, when students do not receive explicit instruction in writing, they tend to write like they speak. Many of our students are writing in a conversational tone. It’s stream-of-consciousness writing, with lots of run-ons and fragments, because those often appear in our spoken communication.

Because writing is so cognitively challenging, students need to be taught in a systematic, structured, and scaffolded way. What we have found to be the most effective is to build from the sentence to the paragraph, and from the paragraph to the composition. We can’t expect students to write an essay well when they don’t even know how to write a full sentence.

Dr. Dina Zoleo

Dina Zoleo: If I could add to that, what we see in a lot of the schools is telling versus teaching and a lot of assumptions of what students can and cannot do when it comes to writing. We are big believers in the science of reading but we feel that writing must be part of that equation, that to be fully literate, you need to be able to read and write, and that students also need explicit instruction in writing.

Aldeman: You mentioned explicit writing instruction starting at the sentence level. What does that look like, and how does The Writing Revolution help?

Vroom: The Writing Revolution is a nonprofit that works to support educators and schools in implementing the Hochman Method, a scaffolded method teaching of writing. We work directly with teachers to show them very explicit, clear strategies to use in their classrooms. For example, we’ll show them a strategy like how to teach students to use a conjunction in their writing to extend their response.

Oftentimes, teachers receive a one- or two-word response from students. The teacher may ask a question like, “why do we recycle?” and the student may respond simply, “the environment.” Instead of that, the teacher could use a sentence strategy like, “Many people recycle because…they want to protect the environment” and, “Many people recycle, but…some people throw their plastic in the trash” and, “Many people recycle so…there’s less garbage in the landfills.”

These strategies can be embedded in whatever content that they’re teaching. So when students are learning about recycling, when they’re reading The Call of the Wild, when they’re learning about the New Deal, they are using these strategies as a way to have students think about the content, articulate their learning, check their understanding, and teach them writing at the same time.

Aldeman: How much of these strategies can be tweaked and tailored to whatever teachers are doing in their classroom?

Zoleo: It works as an overlay on whatever teachers are creating. It’s not a curriculum. It’s not a program in a box. It’s a methodology. It’s a group of strategies that teachers, whatever they’re teaching, can use and embed in their lessons as a way to build knowledge and use writing as a learning tool.

Because writing is thinking. When students are using these strategies, they’re thinking much more deeply about the content that they are learning, and then through their writing they’re demonstrating what they’ve learned.

Vroom: The method is content agnostic, in that the method can be used with any content, but it is content reliant.

Students learn writing best when it’s embedded in the content that they are learning. We believe the strategies should remain consistent from one subject and grade to the next, so that students have one coherent approach. What changes is the content that they’re writing about.

Aldeman: What would a classroom using The Writing Revolution look like? What would be different and why?

Zoleo: Our deepest work is with schools and districts. The ideal is that the method is used across grades and subjects, so that students are getting multiple exposures throughout the day.

It can be done in one class. That will help. But where we’ve seen, and we have research and evidence about this, is the greatest gains are happening in schools where students are going class to class and they’re seeing the same strategies throughout the day. There’s a common language around writing.

What changes is the content, but they’re still following the same strategies. In math, they’re still doing a “but, because, and so…,” but it may be analyzing an error. As in, “Jackie’s answer is incorrect because…” And when the student goes to science, they’ll be prompted with, “Rainforests are important, because…” In history, they’ll be prompted with, “The New Deal was significant, because…” The student will see that same strategy, and the teachers are all speaking the same common language.

Unfortunately, many schools lack consistency in how writing is taught across classrooms. The revolutionary piece is when you go to our partner schools and see everyone on the same page, using the same strategies, class to class, grade to grade.

Aldeman: Before we go deeper, do you have any tips for parents or teachers who might recognize something in their own child’s writing about why they might need this sort of intervention? We’re already mentioned short, declarative statements rather than full sentences, but is there anything else that people should be looking out for?

Vroom: A few years back, Dr. Zoleo, Dr. Hochman, and I wrote an article in the American Educator about this, about what parents can do to help their child be a better writer. And of course, many of those lessons would apply to teachers as well.

To be clear, this is not the fault of their teachers. The vast majority of teachers across the United States do not learn in their teacher prep programs how to teach writing, so they’re kind of flung into the classroom and expected to do it.

Parents may recognize issues, even before writing, in their child’s speech. So how many times does your child come home from school and you ask the age-old question, “How was school today?” and you get that one-word response, “good.”

There’s a relationship between oral language and spoken and if we could do things to boost students’ oral language and get them to elaborate on their responses and say more, that’s actually going to help them in both their writing and their speaking. There are some strategies that parents can use at home, whether it’s at the dinner table or when they’re sitting in traffic. So, “how was school today?” “Good.” “School was good today, because…” “School was good today, but…” “School was good today, so…”

Parents and teachers alike may notice students sometimes just staring at a blank page. They don’t know how to start. We speak a lot about the sentence-level work, but parents and teachers could be supporting children with how to make a plan before they write. Teach them to use an outline so that writing becomes less of a daunting task. It’s so overwhelming for a child to think about, “where do I begin?” “How do I support that idea?” “What order do I put my ideas in?” “How do I wrap this up?” that they shut down. Showing students how to plan can go a long way in overcoming that initial burden.

Aldeman: One thing I could see is some teachers saying is, “Well, this seems kind of formulaic, and I want kids to be more free-flowing writers, and we don’t need to give them these sentence stems, because it will constrain them.” How would you respond to people who might make those arguments?

Zoleo: Oh, yes, we’ve heard that argument. But if students do not have the tools to express themselves clearly and coherently in writing, then their message is muddled or lost.

We hear a lot about creativity. We’re all for it! But before students can write a piece that engages a reader and is creative, they need foundational skills. You really do need to show them how to generate a solid sentence and teach them the rules. Then they can break those rules, but they need to know them first.

Some people see formulas as a bad thing and restricting, but we actually think that formulas can set students free. Because once they master the basics, then they can start to develop their own voice, and take liberties. But in the beginning, when you’re dealing with novice or struggling writers, those basics are really important.

Aldeman: We’ve talked a lot about sentences and sentence stems, but anything else that you want to make sure people understand about The Writing Revolution’s approach?

Zoleo: It’s a suite of sentence strategies, and several strategies help move students from oral language to written language.

For example, appositives appear in written text all the time, but we don’t tend to speak with appositives. So that curtain has to be pulled back for students. If a student doesn’t know how appositives work in written language, they may struggle when they come across a phrase like, “Mansa Musa, a strategic leader of the Mali Empire...” in written text. If the student knows how to add appositives into their writing, it’s going to help them express themselves and demonstrate their knowledge. And, when they come across one in written text, they tend to understand it better because they have used them themselves.

We start at the sentence level, but we don’t stay there. We also do a lot of work at the outline level. Outlines help by giving students a roadmap. Having a structure with a beginning, middle, and end will help them thrive as writers.

Vroom: These are strategies that students can take with them past grade 12. How do you take notes? So often students are told to “take note of x,” but they don’t know what to write. They don’t have a system for taking notes. Then they get to college, university, or even in the workplace, and they don’t know how to do so.

We also teach them how to write a summary. Students are told all the time, “summarize this.” They don’t quite know what that means, or how to go about doing it, so there are important study skills in this method, too.

This is a method for expository writing. There are other forms of writing, and that’s not to say that one is better or more valuable than the other, but the type of writing that students are expected to most often in school, and the type of writing that we are expected to do as adults most often is writing to explain and inform. So that’s where we spend the bulk of our instructional time.

Aldeman: Where are is The Writing Revolution working? And what results have you seen so far?

Zoleo: Writing is a universal need, so all teachers can take our course, but our deepest work is with our partner schools and districts in underserved communities. One of our biggest proof points is Monroe, Louisiana.

Louisiana as a state embedded The Writing Revolution in their curriculum, known as Guidebooks. The state recognized that students could benefit from having explicit instruction in writing.

The state learned that through Monroe City Schools. Monroe is a high needs district with 19 schools in northern Louisiana. They implemented Writing Revolution strategies K-12, and they saw that when students transitioned into middle school or high school, students with multiple years of the Hochman method had stronger writing skills and higher state test scores. When we first worked with Monroe, it was a “D” district and now they’re a “B” as of October 2025. They credit a lot of that growth to prioritizing explicit writing instruction across all grades and subjects.

Monroe City Schools has become a powerful example of what’s possible when districts make writing instruction a priority, and the implementation chain is in full effect, where you have the superintendent, the district leaders, the principals, and the teachers all in alignment. They started this work in 2018 and they’re still doing it in 2026 because they’re seeing ongoing benefits.

We’re starting to get more traction in places that also are very big believers in the science of reading, especially states like Ohio and Arkansas.

Aldeman: You have a new AI-enabled instructional tool named after The Writing Revolution’s founder Dr. Judith Hochman. What is the “Judy” tool and how does it work?

Vroom: The Judy tool is a generative AI tool that is both an activity generator and an instructional coach. Because this is a method and not a curriculum, we don’t just hand someone a script and say, “This is how you teach it.” It works best when teachers take the strategies and make them their own, with their own students and curriculum in mind.

But teachers need support. It takes teachers time to create the activities, and there’s a learning curve in implementing the strategies. Often, teachers are sent to a professional development and they’re expected to go back to the classroom, and magically, everything is going to be perfect.

Before we had access to AI, our team was doing this on the ground. We had a team of faculty members that worked with partner schools, sat side-by-side with the teacher, looked at the curriculum with them, and helped them find strategies that work best with what they were teaching. This was happening human-to-human, and it was very effective, but you could only do that for a small handful of teachers.

Enter AI. We said, “Finally, there is something available to us where we could give that level of support in terms of helping teachers with their planning, answering some of their instructional questions in the moment, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.” We knew that teachers needed support, not only in making the activities, but also when they have questions once they start implementing it. So, our team decided to try to create a tool, and we worked for months on making a prototype.

We connected with the most incredible technology partner at the forefront of AI, NIIT, and they met our team and saw immediately what it was that we were trying to do. I think they fell in love with our writing method just as much as we love it, and they dove right in. Because in order to create any tech solution, you have to really understand what the problem is, understand who the end user is. We spent a lot of time together understanding the method and how we could apply AI to it.

We now have access to data that we never would have had in the past. We have 1000s of teachers using Judy every day. They’re creating hundreds of 1000s of activities, and we could see the trends in how they’re using it. What are they asking for? What are their pain points? We could use that information to make the AI better, but we could also infuse it into our training, into the tools that we create for teachers, giving us a constant information loop.

Aldeman: Could you give me a concrete sense of what this might look like from a beginning teacher who uses Judy for the first time, all the way up to a veteran teacher who’s using it in more sophisticated ways?

Vroom: What we are seeing is that, some teachers, when they first use Judy, they use it for things like, let me make an activity that I could print out and put in front of my students. But what starts to happen for the teacher over time is they start using Judy as an instructional thought partner. She’s not replacing the teacher. She is sitting alongside the teacher, bouncing ideas off, iterating on the process, and they’re using it more in a coaching capacity, which is exactly what our goal was for this tool.

Zoleo: Another thing that we’re very proud of is seeing principals using Judy for coaching. They might observe a teacher, go into Judy to see what kind of feedback they could give. We love that teachers are using it, but we also know that when principals, admins, and coaches are using it to speak the same common language, the better the outcomes for kids.

Vroom: There’s this feeling that AI is going to replace teachers and replace their thinking. If anything, this gives them more time to think deeply about their students and what their instructional goals are. If a teacher is going into a lesson laser-focused on the students and what the desired outcomes are, you can imagine that not only is the writing activity going to be more successful, but the entire lesson will be more thoughtful, and you’re going to get better outcomes.

What sets this tool apart is that it is informed by decades of implementation of this method in real world classrooms. Anyone could go into ChatGPT and try to create something that looks like The Writing Revolution, but this tool is designed to help you walk away with something that you could put in front of students that’s instructionally sound. It’s not going to just try to appease you and tell you what it is that you want to hear. We can put our head on the pillow at night knowing that we have the teacher in the loop in this too, to ensure that the guidance that Judy is giving is faithful to the method, and always has kids at the forefront.