The National Writing Project is a network of local sites located in universities across 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Each site conducts an annual summer institute and sponsors professional development workshops during the school year. Sites also design programs that address local issues and the particular needs of schools, teachers, and students in their communities. The NWP adds new sites each year, with the goal of placing a writing project site within reach of every teacher in America to help all students become successful writers and learners.
What is the National Writing Project?
National Studies confirm significant gains for students of teachers who have participated in NWP programs.
In research conducted during the 2004-2005 and 2005-2006 school years, studies with comparison groups show statistically significant gains in writing performance for students of writing project teachers. In every comparison, results favor students in the classes of teachers participating in NWP programs.
Independent national scorings of student writing show that NWP students’ improvement outpaces that of students in carefully constructed comparison groups. Consistently favorable results are particularly noteworthy for the quality of students’ ideas, organization, voice, and use of conventions in their writing.
How do we know the writing project is making a difference?
Impact on Students
Teachers consistently give high marks to the quality of NWP’s professional development summer institutes.
Results of an independent evaluation show that more that 97 percent of teachers who participated in NWP’s 2005 Summer Invitational Institutes found value in the program and found it useful.
And overwhelming majority of teachers report that in the school year following their participation in an NWP summer institute, they increased their use of teaching practices that support students’ writing development. These teachers say the summer institute made them better teachers of writing.
A majority of NWP teachers report that they now use techniques in their classrooms that have been statistically correlated to higher achievement levels on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Impact on Teachers
“The writing project kept me in teaching, and it made me a very different administrator. now our Oakland high schools focus on literacy strategies for every subject.”
-Bay Area Writing Project Educator
“The immediate applicable ideas I’ve gathered from colleagues, especially under the philosophical umbrella of ‘teachers as writers,’ has strengthened my teaching of writing”
-Washington State Writing Project Educator
“Because of the writing project, I stayed in teaching.”
-California Writing Project Educator
“Combining K-12 teachers was a wonderful experience! I’m a 6th grade teacher using techniques learned from elementary and high school teachers. Truly a wonderful tool for any teacher.”
-Kentucky Writing Project Educator
“Because of my writing project experiences, I changed the way that I assign and assess writing. As a result, my students have posted the best writing standardized test scores in South Carolina for each of the past four years.”
-South Carolina Writing Project Educator
“I have not has so much intellectual stimulation in years.”
-Pennsylvania Writing Project Educator
“The writing project helped me be a better teacher, better scholar, broader thinker, better person!”
-California Writing Project Educator
“The writing project has become my professional home. The friends I have made there have changed my life. The theory and methods I have learned there have changed my practice.”
-Bay Area Writing Project Educator
In 1974, a group of 25 teachers came together with university faculty on the University of California, Berkeley campus for the first invitational institute, where they experienced the invaluable support of colleagues, the opportunity to learn from each other and from research, the time to write, and the anticipation of how positively students would respond to new classroom approaches to writing. The idea of “teachers teaching teachers” was both revolutionary and commonsensical. Immediately, universities and school districts around the country began to ask about the projects, and the idea of a national network was born.
How did the project start?
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