National Writing Project

College, Career, and Community Writers Program



About

The National Writing Project (NWP) designed the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) with teacher-leaders from across the country. The goal is to assure more teachers have the ability to teach college and career-ready writing—with a specific emphasis on writing arguments based on nonfiction texts; an important skill every young adult needs.

C3WP provides scaffolded teaching and formative assessment resources that support the development of students' argument writing and prepares youth for college, career, and community engagement.

Impact

The C3WP evaluation is one of the largest and most rigorous studies about teacher professional development to find evidence of impact:

  • An overwhelming number of teachers (76% across 22 districts) consistently participated in at least 45 hours of professional development. This significantly impacted:
    • the instruction students received; and,
    • the proficiency of students on complex writing tasks such as connecting evidence to an argument.
  • C3WP students outperformed students in control districts on four attributes of argument writing—content, structure, stance, and conventions.

An SRI International research brief can be found here .

Implementation

C3WP provides 45 hours of professional development each year through school or district-embedded institutes; classroom demonstrations, co-teaching, and coaching; and ongoing study of effective practices in academic writing instruction, current research, and professional literature.

The program features systematic formative assessment to inform next steps in instruction, including the Using Sources Tool, which supports teachers in analyzing how students make and support claims using evidence from sources.

C3WP's instructional resources focus on: reading and analyzing multiple perspectives on important issues, developing strong claims, and effectively using nonfiction texts as evidence. These resources are designed as models that teachers can adapt for and integrate into their curriculum.

From 2013–2016, with funding from a U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation validation grant and additional funding from the Rural School and Community Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NWP implemented C3WP focusing on teachers and students in rural middle and high schools. Twelve Writing Project sites in ten states partnered with 44 rural school districts to implement the program, which served over 400 teachers and 25,000 students. SRI's research design for the evaluation was to randomly assign the school districts to either the C3WP program or a delayed treatment group. The 22 districts in the delayed treatment group received the CRWP professional development at the conclusion of the two-year program evaluation.

Questions

For more information please contact CRWP@nwp.org

NOTE: below are the lists of sites with current 2017-18 C3WP grant awards.

Advanced Institute to Scale Up C3WP Grantees

Professional Development in a High-Need School Grantees

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