The Red River Valley Writing Project at NDSU contributed to the National Writing Project’s recent evaluation of the College, Career and Community Writers Program, known as C3WP.
C3WP is an intensive professional development program that provides teachers with instructional resources and assessment tools for the teaching of evidence-based writing. The goal is to ensure more teachers have the ability to teach college and career-ready writing – with an emphasis on writing arguments based on nonfiction texts.
For the past three years, the Red River Writing Project has worked closely with a team of teachers at Dunseith and Belcourt, North Dakota. Teaching demonstrations, co-teaching experiences, professional development courses and formative assessment sessions were all central to making C3WP a sustainable program at the Turtle Mountain Reservation.
To evaluate the development of student writing and the success of C3WP at Turtle Mountain, teachers collected writing samples three times throughout the academic year. Data collected from the assessments became part of the nationwide evaluation of C3WP.
“Together, we used a formative assessment tool to identify argument writing skills that the students were taking up or not, and thus, what next steps for teaching might best target these skills and strengthen the students ability to make claims, use evidence and integrate sources,” said Ben Melby, NDSU senior lecturer of English and director of the local C3WP effort. “The assessments allowed teachers to have important conversations about their teaching and develop a shared language for what student writing is doing and what instructional decisions could help them grow.”
The local writing project was among 47 rural, high-need districts randomly selected for the national evaluation, which found C3WP has positive and statistically-significant effects on student achievement.
“Beyond its proven ability to improve critical thinking and argument writing, our work with C3WP has been an important opportunity to connect with each other as teachers,” Melby said. “C3WP has brought together teachers from across North Dakota to converse, coach, care for and generally support one another. It makes students better students and teachers better teachers.”
Since 2015, three independent national evaluations of C3WP have included 228 schools in 20 states, all of which have indicated program effectiveness in diverse contexts.
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