National Writing Project
At a Glance
Focus area(s):
Description
The National Writing Project (NWP) is a nationwide network of educators working together to improve the teaching of writing in the nation’s schools and in other settings. NWP is the only literacy-focused national organization with the capacity to provide high-quality, locally defined and delivered professional development to improve writing on a national scale. NWP reaches teachers in a variety of disciplines and at all levels, from early childhood through university. Through its nearly 200 university-based sites serving all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the National Writing Project develops the leadership, programs, and research needed for teachers to help students become successful writers and learners.
Impact and Outcomes
What Major Funders Say
Matching Gift
Mission & Goals
Writing in its many forms is the signature means of communication in the 21st century. The National Writing Project (NWP) envisions a future where every person is an accomplished writer, engaged learner, and active participant in a digital, interconnected world. NWP focuses the knowledge, expertise, and leadership of our nation's educators on sustained efforts to improve writing and learning for all learners.
Unique in breadth and scale, the NWP is a national network of university-based sites serving teachers across disciplines and at all levels, early childhood through university. Co-directed by faculty from the local university and from K–12 schools, nearly 200 local sites serve all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Sites work in partnership with area school districts to offer high-quality professional development programs for educators and additional local youth and family programs focused on writing.
Program
The NWP has been developing strong, effective teacher-leaders in the teaching of writing since it began in 1974 with 25 teachers at a single, local Writing Project site. Writing Project sites work with school leaders to design programs that provide research-based strategies for teaching writing, utilizing the expertise of K-12 teacher-leaders in the local community.
Developing and maintaining the human capital to provide sustained, high-quality classroom instruction sits at the core of many current education reform strategies. NWP contributes to this process through a well-articulated program design, developed and refined through ongoing feedback, evaluation, and research studies. NWP Connect, NWP’s networked community of practice, provides a platform for rapid deployment of online supports for social learning that are consistent with the NWP model and capable of delivering a wide range of learning experiences.
The NWP model at each local Writing Project site includes three basic components: 1) developing local teacher leadership to address the teaching of writing in all its complexity; 2) using that leadership to conduct professional development programs and to provide leadership in local schools and districts; and 3) providing extensive face-to-face and online continuing education programs to teacher-leaders to enable them to address emerging needs and important innovations.
NWP’s core principles provide the basis for ongoing program development and innovation.
Impact
NWP teacher-leaders provide more than 7,000 professional development activities annually, reaching 100,000 educators and, through them, 1.4 million students in approximately 3,000 school districts. Additional youth, family, and community programs reach 50,000 participants.
NWP evaluation studies include both quasi-experimental studies and third-party quantitative outcome evaluations. Since the 2004-2005 school year, NWP and its local Writing Project sites have conducted 18 experimental and quasi-experimental studies of intensive in-service professional development. Of these, 17 focus on NWP’s work with teachers and schools serving concentrations of high-need students.
- Across 17 studies student results are consistent, strong, and favorable in those aspects of writing that the NWP is best known for, such as development of ideas and organization.
- Students in Writing Project classrooms gained more often than their peers in the area of conventions, suggesting that basic skills also benefit from the NWP approach to teaching writing (NWP, 2010).
- In studies with statistically significant results, effect sizes on gains in a holistic measure of student writing performance ranged from .32 to .81, which are considered moderate to large. Effect sizes represent a standardized measure that allows for quantitative comparison of effects across studies that use different measures of student or teacher impact. These effect sizes are also commensurate with those reported in Writing Next (Graham and Perin, 2007), a well-regarded meta-analysis of studies focused on writing instruction.
Collectively, these experimental and quasi-experimental studies, which were designed to support causal inferences, show that NWP’s programs have moderate evidence of effectiveness as defined by the U.S. Department of Education’s Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) program. They demonstrate the positive impact of NWP’s programs on student writing achievement in high-need schools from different geographic regions, at different grade levels, and in urban, rural, and suburban areas. These studies show that NWP is well-positioned to offer high-quality professional development to increase the quality of student writing.
NWP has made an ongoing commitment to studying the impact of its work with teachers and students. During 2012-13, SRI International is conducting an independent, multi-site cluster randomized trial to study intensive professional development focused on informational and argumentative writing in grades 3-5. This efficacy study involves 44 high-need elementary schools and 14 local Writing Project sites.
Growth Plan
Economic Model
The NWP provides a national improvement infrastructure (St. John & Stokes, 2008) for teacher professional learning and curriculum development. The NWP national office raises funds for the network of local sites and pursues new opportunity development. To ensure the sustainability of the national office, NWP is in the process of diversifying its revenue base in several ways. NWP is diversifying sources of funding, increasing contributed income, and creating new earned and contributed revenue models.
To sustain themselves, local Writing Project sites were designed to operate with a 1:1 funding match between federal funds and a variety of locally-secured funding sources. An average local Writing Project site budget is approximately $60,000 per year. Currently, local Writing Project sites are sustainable at this basic level. Despite NWP’s loss of designated federal funds in March 2011, Writing Project sites have stayed in business.
Going forward, there is a significant opportunity created by the widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for the NWP network to expand professional development in the teaching of writing to serve additional high-need schools and to increase the number of well-prepared local teacher-leaders to meet the challenge of these higher performance expectations.
Growth Plan
NWP seeks to continue to raise funds nationally to leverage local funding to develop new teacher-leaders, provide sustained professional development services in high-need schools, develop online learning opportunities and resources for teachers, and add new sites to the NWP network. To implement its growth plan, NWP requires $15 million annually to scale the work of the nearly 200 local Writing Project sites.
Expected outcomes for participating teachers and students are: 1) a broadly shared understanding and implementation of curriculum and instruction in writing aligned to challenging standards such as the Common Core State Standards for ELA; 2) improved teacher practice in the teaching of writing; and 3) improved student writing achievement in informational and argumentative writing.
Over a three-year period, NWP will work toward the following growth targets:
1. Increase the number of teacher-leaders prepared to improve the teaching of writing.
NWP will support the development of 3,000 locally-based expert K-12 teacher-leaders in the teaching of writing annually. As experienced teachers retire or accept leadership positions outside of the classroom, there is a constant need to develop expert K-12 teacher-leaders.
2. Increase sustained Writing Project professional development services to schools and districts serving high-need students.
NWP will increase sustained Writing Project professional development services to 100 new schools and districts serving concentrations of high-need students as defined by free-and-reduced lunch and Title I eligibility.These services, which involve at least 30 hours of professional development per school, focus on helping students meet challenging standards in writing for college- and career-readiness.
3. Increase Online Learning modules and Digital Literacy resources available to teachers nationwide.
NWP will assist teachers and schools in strengthening curricula and practice related to challenging standards for college- and career-readiness through the development of 20 learning modules annually to be accessed by teachers more broadly through NWP’s open-access online community of practice, NWP Connect.
4. Beginning in Fall 2015, NWP will add up to eight Writing Project Sites to the National Network annually.
There are currently 25 applicant universities who have expressed interest in becoming Writing Project sites. Additionally, NWP seeks to establish a Writing Project site within 50 miles of every teacher in America.
Location of Sites
To make a contribution to a program site:
- Click on the "Make a Contribution Now" button and include the name, city and state of the program you would like to support, in the "notes" text box on the organization's donation form, if available.
- If a "notes" or "designation" box is not available, write the city and state on your check in the "notes" section or call the national office to designate your contribution to a local program site.
Locations in the following states:
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Alabama
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California
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Colorado
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Iowa
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Indiana
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Louisiana
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Maine
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Missouri
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Mississippi
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Montana
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North Carolina
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North Dakota
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Nebraska
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New Hampshire
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New Jersey
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New Mexico
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Nevada
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New York
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Ohio
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Oklahoma
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Oregon
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Pennsylvania
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Puerto Rico
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Rhode Island
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South Carolina
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South Dakota
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Tennessee
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Texas
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Utah
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Virginia
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Virgin Islands
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Vermont
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Washington
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Wisconsin
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West Virginia
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Wyoming
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Financials
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Major Funders
The Robert Bowne Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
The College Board
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
National Science Foundation
U.S. Department of Education
The Wallace Foundation/New York Community Trust
