Facilitators from the Philadelphia Writing Project will work with up to 30 ELA, history, and science teachers in the Kutztown Area School District to provide intensive job-embedded professional development to support classroom instruction in the teaching of argument writing.
Each teacher will engage in four half-day sessions during the school year. Teachers will be introduced to a year-long arc of intentionally sequenced instructional resources that support students’ developing skills in:
College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) instructional resources include text sets that are ready for classroom use and that can serve as models for creating new text sets that address the content needs of a particular course.
Additionally, teachers in content areas will focus on how C3WP resources can help them support students in engaging in discipline-specific practices and literacies.
Teachers across content areas will learn to use a variety of assessment tools including the C3WP Using Sources Tool to help teachers determine what their students can do and where to focus next instructional steps.
Graff, Birkenstein and Durst’s (2009) They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing and Harris’ (2006) Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts will serve as key texts and will provide both theoretical and practical framing for professional development and classroom application of C3WP.
The central goal of C3WP is to help teachers develop students’ capacities to write arguments from non-fiction sources. The C3WP professional development emphasizes support for classroom enactment of the program via instructional resources, co-designing learning tasks, looking at student work, and co-planning with colleagues.
C3WP will organize teacher learning around instructional and formative assessment resources. These resources are divided into three categories that make up the continuum of practice in teaching argument writing: (1) Routine Argument Writing, (2) Mini-Units, and (3) Extended Research Arguments.
Teachers will teach at least two cycles of argument writing and use the Using Sources Tool at least twice to look at student work. A cycle of instruction includes professional development, formative assessment, and the teaching of argument writing. In a cycle of instruction, both teachers and students learn. Student writing will show growth over time using rubrics and the NWP Using Sources Tool (and score definitions) as an assessment tool and notice the following:
Shirley Brown (shirl.brown@comcast.net) is currently a co-director of the Philadelphia Writing Project, a position that has a particular emphasis on art and literacy and teacher inquiry. She was an English teacher in the School District of Philadelphia for over twenty-five years and the Coordinator of Comprehensive Services for School Age Parents from 1994-1996. In addition, she was a Program Associate for the National Writing Project from 2000-2011. Presently, in addition to her work with the Philadelphia Writing Project’s College, Career, & CommunityWriters Program (C3WP), she coordinates field placements for Penn GSE’s RWL program and is a guide at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and leads book discusses at a variety of venues. Her interest in gender is reflected in her book Gender in Urban Education, coauthored with Alice Ginsburg and Joan Poliner Shapiro.
Eli Goldblatt (eli.goldblatt@temple.edu) is a Professor Emeritus at Temple University. He completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990. He served as University Writing Director, co-director of New City Writing, an institute focused on community literacy in North Philadelphia, and served in 2009-10 as the founding director of a university-wide initiative called Community Learning Network. Goldblatt is a composition/literacy researcher. His first research book, Round My Way: Authority and Double Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), focused on the individual writer and institutional sponsorship. His essay “Alinsky’s Reveille: A Community -Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects” won the 2005 Ohmann Award in College English and his book Because We Live Here: Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum (Hampton Press, 2007) won the National Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Best Book Award in 2008. His most recent book published in 2012 is Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography.
Amy Hodgdon (ashodg19@gmail.com) is an educator, specializing in writing instruction and playwriting-based literacy instruction for elementary, middle, and high school students. She has teaching experience guiding college students and college-bound high school students to acquire the tools they need to succeed as academic writers, especially as writers of argument. Amy holds a Ph.D. in Reading, Writing and Literacy from Penn’s Graduate School of Education. For 17 years she served as Education Director of Philadelphia Young Playwrights, an organization devoted to helping students express themselves though playwriting as a means to strengthen their writing skills. She received an M.A. in Theater from Villanova University. She has taught a variety of theater courses at area colleges. Amy has a keen interest in collaborating with teachers to design and implement curriculum and instruction that help students to strengthen their academic writing
Natalie Hiller (nhiller1129@gmail.com) is a Philadelphia Writing Project Teacher Consultant. She recently served as a K-12 science curriculum coordinator and 8th grade assistant principal in the Haverford Township School District. Before her position in the Haverford district, Natalie taught physics and chemistry in the School District of Philadelphia. She has worked locally and nationally to design professional development for teachers focused on standards-based instruction, curriculum resource analysis and authentic instruction and assessment practices. Her extensive involvement in the science field includes experience as a West Ed National Academy for Science and Mathematics Education Leadership Fellow, an NSF Math/Science Fellow, and participation on the Project 2061, National Professional Development Leadership Team.
Trey Smith (jf.trey.smith@gmail.com) is chemistry and environmental science teacher at Boys’ Latin of Philadelphia Charter School. Trey served as a 2014-15 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The following year, the Library of Congress selected Trey to be its first-ever Science Teacher-in-Residence. In his role at the Library he explored teaching and learning with historical primary sources in science and engineering classrooms. Trey has been a teacher consultant with the Philadelphia Writing Project since 2009 and teaches secondary science methods in the Independent School Teaching Residency program at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.
Mike Mannix (mmanni@upenn.edu) is a fourth year doctoral student in the Reading/Writing/Literacy program at UPenn. In his first two years, he worked as the Philadelphia Writing Project to facilitate professional development programs for teachers and design writing programs for students. In the last two years, he has served as research/writing coach for the Mid-Career Educational Leadership doctoral program. In his research, he is interested in the use of humor writing in the classroom to support teachers in reaching the goals of literacy standards. Prior to his work at Penn GSE, Mike worked as a middle school teacher in Philadelphia, most recently teaching 7th Grade English Language Arts at Norwood-Fontbonne Academy for four years.
Diane Waff (dwaff@gse.upenn.edu) is currently a Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of the Philadelphia Writing Project. She has extensive experience as a high school teacher, district and building administrator, K-12 teaching and learning coordinator, and teacher researcher. For over two decades, she has worked with teacher research communities as a convener and facilitator of the National Writing Project, the Bread Loaf Teacher Network and Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity (SEED) Project.