As a legacy site of the National Writing Project (www.nwp.org), the New York City Writing Project is one of the oldest and most successful sites in a network of approximately 200 university-based professional development programs throughout the country. The NYCWP focuses the knowledge, expertise and leadership of New York City’s educators on sustained efforts to improve reading and writing for all learners across subject areas. In doing so, the NYCWP builds professional communities of teachers and school leaders to promote literacy education as a crucial means of instructional reform. To accomplish these goals, the NYCWP believes that teachers need:
- frequent and ongoing opportunities to write;
- to examine theory, research and practice together systematically;
- to develop, improve upon and share their practice in professional communities;
- deep trust in their own capacities as well as those of their students;
- a commitment to education as a source of equity, access and social justice.
Teachers from schools throughout the diverse neighborhoods of New York City take part in Project-sponsored seminars, workshops, graduate courses, and special summer institutes, as well as receive support in their schools from on-site NYCWP teacher-consultants. The NYCWP also works directly with students by offering three-week summer institutes for young writers.
The NYCWP’s professional development model derives from scholarship and practice around a number of related areas, including writing-across-the-curriculum, composition and rhetoric, professional development, teacher professional communities and school leadership.
The NYCWP’s approaches to literacy instruction take hold. In the majority of schools where the Writing Project has been a presence for a year or more, student performance on standardized tests improves. Data from yearly surveys and program evaluations further reveal that:
- 99% of participating teachers gain concrete teaching strategies to engage students more effectively in reading and writing for a variety of purposes, and 70% use a range of these strategies at least once a week;
- 96% of participating teachers report that the NYCWP helps them prepare their students for standardized exams;
- 99% of participating teachers attribute a growth in their own comfort with and enthusiasm for the teaching of writing to the support received from their NYCWP teacher-consultant.
In a recent independent study, students who had three or more teachers who worked with a WP consultant showed substantial improvement in six areas of their writing (content, structure, stance, fluency diction, conventions) over peers whose teachers had little or no contact with the Writing Project.
