Chad, this is a really helpful interview. When my oldest arrived in 8th grade and was preparing his seventh or eighth memoir I wrote to his middle school AP and noted that Joan Didion was (then) 78 and had written two. At least the assistant principal was literate enough to laugh.
The Writing Revolution techniques deserve widespread adoption. But they also will benefit from an aligned ecosystem of coherent, content-rich curriculum AND aligned professional development that supports teachers who own prep was probably not that solid.
Love this interview! We just published a piece on the need for structured writing instruction, and TWR is featured as one of the most-used supplements across schools using knowledge-building curricula.
We also collected a lot of the key points of evidence for connecting reading and writing:
It troubles me that this implies, through the post's title and one anecdote, that schools don't already do what is recommended here. So I asked AI.
"Writing in Illinois public elementary schools is taught through explicit, process-based instruction, focusing on building foundational sentence-level skills in early grades (K-2) and moving to complex, genre-specific writing (narrative, informational, persuasive) in grades 3-5. Schools follow the writing process—prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing—and are legally required to teach cursive handwriting by the end of grade 5."
Language is the basis of everything. As a speech therapist, I worked with children to expand their utterances, to add more detail and complexity, to respond to a variety of social and language situations and to initiate a variety of communicative intents. Similarly, teachers can model and facilitate written language expression through some of the simple examples you provided as part of their regular instruction. I think teachers modeling verbal responses to questions then shaping that into a written response and having discussions with students can be a great way to support them in the writing practice regardless of what subject is being taught. Loved this quote "...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".
Chad, this is a really helpful interview. When my oldest arrived in 8th grade and was preparing his seventh or eighth memoir I wrote to his middle school AP and noted that Joan Didion was (then) 78 and had written two. At least the assistant principal was literate enough to laugh.
The Writing Revolution techniques deserve widespread adoption. But they also will benefit from an aligned ecosystem of coherent, content-rich curriculum AND aligned professional development that supports teachers who own prep was probably not that solid.
Thanks for sharing this, Chad. TWR has been a great help in supporting my ELLs.
Love this interview! We just published a piece on the need for structured writing instruction, and TWR is featured as one of the most-used supplements across schools using knowledge-building curricula.
We also collected a lot of the key points of evidence for connecting reading and writing:
https://open.substack.com/pub/curriculuminsightproject/p/what-about-writing-curriculum?r=wsgsa&utm_medium=ios
It troubles me that this implies, through the post's title and one anecdote, that schools don't already do what is recommended here. So I asked AI.
"Writing in Illinois public elementary schools is taught through explicit, process-based instruction, focusing on building foundational sentence-level skills in early grades (K-2) and moving to complex, genre-specific writing (narrative, informational, persuasive) in grades 3-5. Schools follow the writing process—prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing—and are legally required to teach cursive handwriting by the end of grade 5."
Does cursive writing play a role in this method? It should.
Language is the basis of everything. As a speech therapist, I worked with children to expand their utterances, to add more detail and complexity, to respond to a variety of social and language situations and to initiate a variety of communicative intents. Similarly, teachers can model and facilitate written language expression through some of the simple examples you provided as part of their regular instruction. I think teachers modeling verbal responses to questions then shaping that into a written response and having discussions with students can be a great way to support them in the writing practice regardless of what subject is being taught. Loved this quote "...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".