All English language arts educators are concerned about developing and improving students’ written language proficiencies. Wherever I travel in the United States and the world, teachers ask me these questions: How can we help students perform well on writing assessments? What is the relationship between our classroom instruction and writing assessments?  

My responses to these questions grow from my experience and commitment to professional development. Whether we are teaching writing to native or non-native speakers of English, professional development projects enable us to collaborate with colleagues within the field of English language arts and across the content areas. Professional development projects can also help us build bridges across grade levels--elementary through college.

In November 2014, I addressed these questions as the keynote speaker at the 23^rd International Symposium on English Teaching, sponsored by the English Teachers’ Association—Republic of China. This conference was held in Taipei, Taiwan, and attracted English language educators from many countries, including England, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Thailand, and Malaysia. In my presentation, I described my work with two professional development projects that connected instruction and writing assessment at the elementary and secondary levels.

The first of these was The Writing Instruction Now (WIN) Project (2007-2012). It focused on connecting classroom instruction with holistic assessment of sixth grade students’ narrative and descriptive writing. Elementary and secondary teachers, curriculum leaders, English teacher educators, and pre-service candidates shared:

• Best practices for teaching narrative and descriptive writing

• Created a holistic rubric for scoring this writing genre

• Developed a prompt for the students

• Scored students writing

As Project Director, I helped WIN educators learn revision strategies that helped students “read like a writer” and “write like a reader.” I also helped teachers conduct the assessment and analyze the data. We discovered that sixth grade students’ writing proficiency improved over the years as the WIN educators integrated best practices into their teaching of narrative and descriptive writing. In their written evaluations of this project, WIN educators reported they valued the collaborative discussions about formative and summative assessment, prewriting and revision strategies, and Common Core State Standards. WIN was a successful professional development project because educators increased their knowledge and expertise of writing pedagogy, which resulted in improvement in students’ writing proficiency.

To read more about effective revision strategies, I invite you to download my white paper “Teaching Meaningful Revision: Developing and Deepening Students’ Writing.” Also, look for my next post, where I address the connection between writing assessment and writing instruction.