The Morehead Writing Project was recently awarded a $20,000 Scale-up the College-Ready Writers Program Grant by the National Writing Project. The Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant is focused on the College, Community, and Career Writing Program (C3WP), an argument writing process proven to significantly impact student growth in writing and teacher practice.
Last year, the National Writing Project released the results of a nationwide controlled study of C3WP which found that the program had a positive impact on both teachers’ instructional practice and student writing. The students of teachers who received C3WP training outperformed their control peers on their use of content, structure (or organization), and stance (or tone), in their argument writing. The effect size for content was especially large, at about 0.2 standard deviations. (Learn more)
The grant was written by Site Director Deanna Mascle and Rowan County High School teacher Lindsay Johnson who will lead the Advanced Institute funded by the grant with Fleming County High School teacher Brandie Trent.
Johnson is a member of the MWP Leadership Team. She was the founding Writing Retreat Coordinator and is active in the Kentucky Writing Project Rural Schools Professional Development Initiative which is the predecessor of C3WP. Johnson has also served as a Returning Fellow for both the Invitational Summer Institute and the Online Summer Institute.
Trent is also a member of the MWP Leadership Team. She served several years as the Summer Institute Co-Director and currently coordinates MWP’s Teen Writers Day Out events. She also has extensive experience with NWP work participating in several Advanced Institutes covering topics from creating standards based units on informational reading and writing to closing the achievement gap.
The central goal of C3WP is to help students become skilled at writing arguments from nonfiction sources. The program includes scaffolded teaching and formative assessment resources created by a team of NWP teacher-leaders that support the development of students’ argument writing. C3WP’s teaching resources focus on reading and analyzing multiple perspectives on important issues, developing thoughtful and precise claims, and effectively using nonfiction texts as evidence. These resources are designed as models that teachers can adapt for and integrate into their curriculum. The program features systematic formative assessment to inform next steps in instruction, including the Using Sources Tool, which supports teachers in analyzing how students make and support claims using evidence from sources.
Johnson and Trent have already begun the process of recruiting MWP teacher-leaders to participate in the Advanced Institute.
MWP’s C3WP has been featured in the Morehead News and on WMKY.