Welcome to WriterCoach Connection
Thanks to WriterCoach Connection, high school and middle school students in Berkeley, Albany, and Oakland, California, are improving their critical thinking and writing skills.
Thanks so much for this opportunity. I love coaching and I say with utmost sincerity that it has changed my life for the better.—Berkeley middle school coach
"At the beginning of the coaching session, I told [my student] that I had made a donation to the Read-and-Write-a-Thon in his honor. He was delighted to learn this." from the WCC blog.
Read-and-Write-a-thon donations continue to mount
As of June 13, emails and/or phone calls to family and friends in support of last Saturday’s Read-and-Write-a-Thon have pushed the total amount raised to support WriterCoach Connection for next year to a spectacular $26,7137(!), with $24,535 from the RWAT page alone (check it out here) and the rest from personal RWAT fundraising pages set up by individuals (for example, see Mark Pasley’s here).
Listen to a March 13, 2009 broadcast about WriterCoach Connection on KPFA here.
Read the March 2009 Newsletter
What we do
WriterCoach Connection recruits, trains, and coordinates community volunteers as classroom writing coaches. The coaches work one on one in English classes, helping students write and revise their class assignments. Coaches provide immediate and personal feedback to students during the writing process to encourage critical thinking and proficient writing.
Who benefits
Every writer benefits from constructive feedback, so coaches work with all students in each English class. Coaches address all levels of ability and preparedness in grades 7 through 10.
WriterCoach Connection volunteers support teachers, providing the individual attention that teachers long to give every student. Students, teachers, and coaches respond enthusiastically to the coaching experience—and to the results.
Impact on teachers and students
Teachers report that with coaching, more students are completing and revising their essays and the writing is of better quality. The program gets demonstrable results and helps address the achievement gap.
“Let me tell you what WriterCoach Connection is like for me. It's like a miracle!”—Mary Paterson , teacher, Longfellow Middle School
“WCC has brought a shot of enthusiasm about writing to my freshman class. The students feel supported and confident in their writing process and look forward to many more sessions with their coaches.”—Susannah Bell, teacher, Berkeley High School
Who Volunteers
Volunteer coaches come from a wide variety of backgrounds and professions. They are parents, college students, retirees, and members of the community at large. Through WriterCoach Connection, they are discovering they play a valuable role in their local schools. Most coaches return year after year, a measure of the satisfaction they derive from helping students improve their writing.
Coach Views
“If the kids get a fraction of the satisfaction from writer coaching that I do, we have a raging success on our hands.”—Becca Burns, high school career coordinator and writing coach
“I had a student who burst into tears over her essay about her injured horse, and by the end of our half hour, she was writing with such intensity, scope, and vision that it was enough to have me commit to this program for the rest of my life.”—Kevin Westbrooke, writing coach
Posted March 11: Teaching Every Student How to Write, One by One
Successful high school mentoring program expands into Oakland school. The tardy bell at East Oakland's Media Academy had just rung, its scream echoing down the pale yellow halls and bouncing off broken orange lockers. Outside the door to classroom 1205, a dozen professional men and women hovered awkwardly. In this small corner of the city's beleaguered school district, they were piloting something unprecedented: one-on-one writing coaches for every tenth grader in the school.—As seen in the East Bay Express
Please support WriterCoach Connection with a tax-deductible contribution to Community Alliance for Learning.