Carl Anderson

Carl Anderson is one of the nation’s leading experts on teaching writing to students in grades K-12.

Carl was first an elementary and then a middle school teacher. He taught students of diverse backgrounds in city, rural, and suburban schools in New York City, Bardstown, Kentucky, and Northbrook, Illinois.

In 1994, Carl joined the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, which was founded and is directed by Lucy Calkins. As a Project staff developer for eight years, Carl worked side-by-side with teachers in elementary and middle school classrooms in New York City and in its surrounding suburbs, showing them how to establish writing workshops for their students.

While at the Project, Carl began an intensive study of writing conferences. This study led to his first book, How's It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers (2000), and later to his second book, Assessing Writers (2004) and his series Strategic Writing Conferences: Smart Conversations that Move Young Writers Forward Grades 3-6 (2009).

Today, Carl works as a consultant in schools across the United States. He continues to spend most of his days in classrooms with teachers and students, where he concentrates on helping teachers learn to have effective writing conferences that change students’ lives as writers.