For more information on Transforming Our Teaching Through Reading/Writing Connections, visit its companion website, http://www.regieroutman.com.  

After a decade of leading schoolwide residencies—and with more requests than she can fill—Regie Routman has developed Regie Routman in Residence, a DVD-based literacy project that brings her demonstration teaching into your school and anticipates your literacy professional development needs. In schools in Colorado, Tennessee, and Washington, Regie’s residencies have raised student achievement and boosted test scores, and now she can help your school or district do the same.

Transforming Our Teaching Through Writing for Audience and Purpose takes a whole school through a year of transformation. It leads to new, effective practices that raise students’ writing achievement by improving teachers’ confidence and their ability to teach writing in any genre, in any curriculum.

Research shows that high-level, on-site, and ongoing professional development is the surest route to school improvement in literacy, and Transforming Our Teaching Through Writing for Audience and Purpose delivers it directly to your teachers.

Transforming Our Teaching Through Writing for Audience and Purpose is based on four foundational ideas.

1. Change begins with defining common beliefs and setting high expectations about teaching and learning. For lasting, schoolwide change and high achievement, teachers across grade levels must develop common beliefs about what student writers are capable of, and which practices best advance children’s writing.

2. An Optimal Learning Model provides an effective, unified model for teaching and learning. Teachers can plan, teach, and assess with greater ease and effectiveness with an Optimal Learning Model, ensuring that teaching always nudges students toward independence.

3. Responsive teaching engages students and raises their achievement. Research indicates that when children write for authentic reasons, achievement goes up. Writing leads to success in reading, so we can raise achievement in both by asking students to write for real audiences and purposes.

4. Applying new ideas leads to lasting, significant change. This is true for students and for teachers. Transforming Our Teaching Through Writing for Audience and Purpose gives teachers consistent opportunities to discuss, analyze, and try out with their students what they’ve seen in each session. By applying what they learn, their teaching is transformed, and so is students’ learning.

This package includes 25 professional development notebooks. Packages with 20, 30, and 35 notebooks are also available, as are individual notebooks.