Do you want to empower all students to write academically, analytically, and engagingly? If yes, the California Writing Project invites you to join a statewide community of secondary teachers engaged in collaborative inquiry into improving students' academic writing and critical reading.

ISAW focuses on these goals:

• Demystifying the teaching and learning of analytic writing and critical reading
• Examining how teachers can make academic writing an integral component of a high school curriculum by focusing on student improvement
• Accelerating the academic writing improvement of all students—the college-bound, English learners, and struggling writers—and preparing more of these students for college-going
• Fostering collaboration among high school, community college, and four-year university teachers to move students along a pathway of academic preparation that leads to success in and beyond high school

The ISAW program includes, but is not limited to:

• Professional development programs tailored to school or district needs, offered during the school year and/or summer
• A wealth of instructional materials, curriculum resources, and assessment tools
• The ISAW embedded assessment program for use with students that helps them focus on improving their academic writing and documents their progress across seven dimensions of writing
• Professional learning communities to support using the CWP Improvement Rubric as a part of formative and summative assessment
• ISAW assessment results and data profiles for students, teachers, and schools
• Seminars and workshops for students—during the summer, after-school, or on Saturdays
• Coaching, mentoring, and demonstration teaching
• Invitations to CWP statewide ISAW conferences and seminars

The ISAW program addresses the following:

• Investigating through workshops, teacher writing and revision, discussions, inquiry, and assessment, the nature and purpose of analytic writing
• Learning to use the CWP Improvement Rubric to help students to recognize and document specific improvements in academic writing, demystify what to work on next, and write with an eye toward practice and improvement
• Exploring strategies that help students develop and organize their analytic essays—
  • Deconstructing and analyzing texts, non-fiction and fiction
  • Responding to and interacting with a text
  • Developing a claim
  • Building strong examples
  • Evaluating and selecting evidence
  • Structuring the essay
  • Creating coherence between parts of an essay
  • Revising and editing purposefully
  • Revising sentences for logic and completeness
  • Using subordination, coordination, and parallelism confidently
  • Writing effectively on-demand or in-depth
  • Experimenting with analytic forms, not formulas
• Enlarging the classroom base for reading: augmenting the reading of novels, stories, plays, poems, and textbooks required in the high school curriculum to include more of the analytical essays, academic articles, informational and journalistic pieces students will read in college
• Developing, with the support of school and grade-level colleagues, resources, assignments, and assignment sequences that help students understand the task and demands of issue-based writing
• Providing students a challenging, culturally responsive writing program along with specific support for the needs of individual writers
• Developing ways for school teams to share students’ achievement and progress as they transition to the next grade

For more information about ISAW, call or email the CWP Statewide Office or your local writing project. To find contact information for your local writing project, visit the Regional Sites page. To contact the CWP Statewide Office, email cwp@berkeley.edu or call: (510) 642-7877.

Downloadables:
What do ISAW teachers say? (download)
What does the research say? (download)
What does writing improvement look like? (download)
How is ISAW a learning community and not a one-time event? (download)

ISAW Summer 2008 and School-Year 2008-2009 Programs:
Area 3 Writing Project, UC Davis (download)
Northern California Writing Project, CSU Chico (coming)
UCLA Writing Project, UCLA (download reg form | 3-year program)
San Diego Area Writing Project, UC San Diego (download)

ISAW Summer 2008 Programs:
Central California Writing Project, UC Santa Cruz (download)
Great Valley Writing Project, CSU Turlock (download)
San Jose Area Writing Project, San Jose State (download)
San Marcos Writing Project, CSU San Marcos (download)