The College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) is an intensive professional development program from the National Writing Project that provides teachers with instructional resources and formative assessment tools for the teaching of evidence-based argument writing. C3WP works by integrating curricular resources, formative assessment, professional reading, and professional conversations. Teachers in C3WP typically participate in 45 hours of professional development per year for two years, experiencing instructional materials of the highest quality, learning to analyze student work carefully to determine instructional next steps, and leading their students towards active participation in their communities through argument writing.
Learn more about C3WP
A study administered by SRI Education identified statistically significant positive gains for students at schools who participated in C3WP. For the study, half of the 47 selected schools were randomly assigned to C3WP training and half received “business-as-usual” training for one year. To measure the impact on students, SRI administered a student writing assessment for all students, which showed that C3WP had a positive and significant impact on all four attributes of writing measured by the Analytic Writing Continuum for Source-Based Argument Writing (AWC-SBA): content, structure, stance, and convention.
Since 2015, three rigorous, independent evaluations of C3WP have spanned 228 diverse schools in 20 states, all of which have pointed to program effectiveness in diverse contexts. The full SRI report can be found here.
Dr. Laura Love - Director of Secondary Education in Middleton Cross Plains Area School District
Thanks to the work of the tremendous staff at the Greater Madison Writing Project (GMWP) and our secondary instructional coach, we had a fabulous experience with the C3WP in 2018-19! Rolling it out in one school across two grade levels allowed us to be nimble and intentional in the first year. The collaboration between our teachers and coach and the GMWP Staff transformed the teaching and learning in our 7th- and 8th-grade social studies classrooms. In the first year, students moved to holding peace talks across classrooms! We are so excited to add the next cohort of teachers to this team in 2019-20 to build a systems-approach toward more engaged and empowered learning in the Middleton-Cross Plains Area Schools.
Jess White, Middle School English - Language Arts, Gresham School District
I implemented C3WP in Gresham Middle School, a small, rural school for grades k-12. My experience with this program was a positive one that had lasting effects on me, my students, and my school community. First off, my students have become better thinkers. By that I mean, before implementing C3WP, it seemed as if my students would write what they thought I wanted to hear without actually using their own voices to share their own ideas. This program has shown them the value of their own voices, and now they have the tools to make a judgement with effective reasoning. Secondly, this program has changed the way I teach writing. In the past, I relied heavily on summative assessments in my writing curriculum and with C3WP I have switched to a formative assessment approach to student learning. Students are constantly learning new skills based on what they need. None of this could have been possible without my participation in the C3WP professional learning community. I have attended numerous professional development trainings in the past and tried to implement new programs in my classroom, but none had the kind of impact as the C3WP program. The on-going professional development inside and outside the classroom helped to make the implementation more meaningful to me and to my students.
Cody Stuckey, High School History and English, Pecatonica High School
C3WP was a great experience from start to finish for the students in my class and for the staff within our department. The students benefited from reading and responding to relevant articles about topics that they cared about. Over the course of the C3WP program, students had multiple opportunities to develop claims and root them in evidence, improving their writing in the process. For me as a teacher, the C3WP program provided a framework to give additional feedback on student work and to gather additional data about students' progress. I believe that the C3WP program provides students with writing skills that will benefit them throughout their educational experience and as members of their community.
I enjoyed the flexibility provided by the C3WP framework. Since participating in the C3WP program, I have been able to include articles about current events and integrate them into my curriculum while providing students with the guidelines from the program to structure their discussion. The program has supported me in creating a classroom environment where students are able to participate in a constructive discourse about issues and decisions that are important to them.
Lindsay Harmon - Middle School ELL Teacher, Kromrey Middle School
At Kromrey Middle School in Middleton, WI, we have over 80 English Learners across grades 5-8. One of the most impactful practices that we have incorporated has been C3WP in the 7th grade Social Studies class I support. C3WP gave my students a voice in Social Studies! My English Learners developed confidence in speaking and writing, and were able to discuss their ideas and write like historians. They were able to carry the skills they learned to the other classes, and those skills transferred seamlessly. Students are writing argumentative essays in literacy, where similar academic language is used. Students are using the CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) process in science, where similar academic language is used. This process allowed for consistent language to be used across multiple content areas, and our English Learners thrived because of that! The group of educators that came together to work on this process realized the importance of representing multiple perspectives in history, which was an incredible benefit for all students. As a Bilingual Resource Teacher, my number one priority is advocating for the students and families I support. The C3WP implementation in grades 7 and 8 has made such a difference, and I am advocating for it to be implemented in grades 5 and 6 as well. I tell every educator I can about how amazing this experience has been, and how much ownership our English Learners had in their learning. I am excited to see how this work will continue to impact our students in the future!