Overview / Writing Workshops / Mission, principles / Teacher Coaches / Results

Powerful Writers offers the only in-class professional development program for writing instruction in the region. We place experienced teacher coaches alongside teachers to model writing workshop managment and routines, and to demonstrate effective writing instruction and student conferring.  In this way, students and teachers learn side-by-side in the real-life context of the classroom.

Once a week, in eight to ten week genre cycles, Powerful Writers' teacher coaches go into classrooms to facilitate writers' workshop and teach demonstration lessons. As important members of school writing communities, they model their own writing in front of students and think aloud through their writing process--a key instructional strategy of Powerful Writers. Students witness, firsthand, the decisions that writers make and learn to see writing as a process of shaping and reshaping, "more like working in clay than carving in stone."  (Lucy Calkins)

At the end of each coaching day, teacher coaches meet with grade-band teams to debrief around the week’s instruction and review, together, the follow-up lessons the teachers will teach to continue moving students through the writing process.  Teachers bring student work to the table and talk about what’s working—and what’s not—in their own instruction.  They ask questions, share strategies, brainstorm.  This dialogue among teachers, and the collective wisdom that emerges, is critical to sustaining the writing work in schools.  It is further strengthened and supported by in-service workshops, tailored to teachers' instructional needs and facilitated by Powerful Writers' teacher coaches.