I have spent decades in education as a teacher, principal, and leader in the New York City Department of Education. During this time, I’ve witnessed the transformative power of writing. Students realize tremendous benefits when we recognize that writing is a key, underutilized lever for creating coherence and equity in our schools. 

Barriers to Writing Instruction

Writing instruction is often fragmented, implemented inconsistently, and treated as an afterthought. Why is this?

• Insufficient Teacher Preparation. When teacher preparation programs embed strong foundations in writing instruction, educators enter classrooms with the tools and confidence to help students thrive as writers. Yet, many programs miss this opportunity.

• HQIM. High Quality Instructional Materials (HQIM) are a positive step for teachers and students, but many lack the scaffolding and guidance necessary for teachers to adequately support their students as writers.

• Competing priorities. Amid the demands that teachers face (high-stakes testing, lesson planning, grading…), writing often gets pushed to the margins. But when schools make space for collaboration, reflection, and alignment around writing instruction, it can move from the margins to the center of student learning.

The result of these barriers is that students face a wide variation in writing instruction – not just school to school, but even classroom to classroom.

As a principal, I remember shadowing a 10th-grade student for a day. In one class, the teacher used a mnemonic device of their own creation to teach the structure of an essay. In another class, the teacher had students analyze an exemplary essay written for a state exam to determine how to construct essays. Sitting in the back of the classroom, I remembered that when I taught the same class just a few years earlier, I had required my students to use yet another structure for their writing. Each was a strong, well-taught lesson, but the guidance conflicted.

This patchwork approach hinders student progress by forcing them to adapt to different writing methods from course to course. The cognitive load of understanding content and expressing understanding of it in writing is already significant; why are we adding to that load by having students learn so many different ways to write?

Addressing this long-standing issue inspired me to work with many talented colleagues to create the Writing Pathway – a tool that ensures that every student receives the high-quality and coherent writing instruction they deserve. With a start-up grant from the Gates Foundation and early support from Quill.org, the Pathway now calls Teaching Lab Studio (“Studio”) its home. The Studio is the innovation arm of Teaching Lab, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing exceptional professional learning and coaching to educators, particularly around the implementation of HQIM. 

What is the Writing Pathway?

The Writing Pathway is a platform that makes high-quality writing instruction accessible to all, blending a research-backed AND researched approach to teaching writing – with AI-powered tools that can diagnose students’ areas of growth and generate targeted, curriculum-aligned practice for students, across subjects and grades in seconds. (Read more about our research!)

A key feature of the Pathway is its ability to generate student-facing practice. Teachers can simply enter the text or topic they’re teaching, select a grade level, and instantly receive student-facing writing practice aligned to the content. The Pathway can also translate prompts into other languages to support multilingual learners.  

The Pathway saves teachers time but, most importantly, it provides students with a consistent, scaffolded approach to writing that they can carry across subjects and into their futures. With this goal, we were determined to make the Writing Pathway platform as easy- to-use and as available as possible – which is why we launched it as an entirely free platform. We, the Pathway and the Studio, firmly believe that high-quality writing instruction should be accessible to all students. Every teacher, regardless of budget, should have access to the support needed to help their students become confident, capable writers.

Fostering Teaching Collaboration

The Pathway is about more than improving test scores; it is also about strengthening collaboration among teachers. I’ve seen firsthand how collegiality drives real, sustainable change – for example, when my fellow teachers and I used the limited amount of unstructured time we had to plan instruction across disciplines. The result? Student engagement and learning accelerated. Later, when I was leading the Learning Partners Program at the NYC DOE, we focused on educator collaboration across schools to make meaningful progress to address systemic shortcomings. This is exactly what can happen with wide implementation of the Pathway; teachers can work together to create a unified, schoolwide approach to writing instruction. 

Chris, a middle school teacher who, alongside his colleagues, piloted the Pathway in his classroom was asked what was most valuable when implementing the Pathway: 

“The sharing! Being able to talk about writing, sharing examples, and working on writing curricula together is invaluable. Teaching writing is hard enough -- it's even harder trying to do it on your own. A true writing community can move mountains!”

A rigorous two-year study led by Steve Graham, our knowledgeable and generous advisor, demonstrated the Pathway’s effectiveness – you can hear directly from Dr. Graham here. Students in treatment classrooms using the Pathway showed significant growth in writing proficiency (effect size = .64), compared to their peers in control classrooms. In that study, teachers reported that the Pathway’s ability to create student-facing writing practice aligned to the content nearly instantly saved them time in lesson planning and increased their confidence in their ability to teach writing. This empowerment translates to student outcomes. Melody, a high school English teacher, said, “[My students] seem to take their writing more seriously and try harder than they did prior to our implementation of the Pathway.” 

Reimagining Writing Instruction 

The Writing Pathway represents more than a solution to a long-standing problem. It is a reimagining of what writing instruction can and should be. By centering equity and coherence, the Pathway ensures that every student has access to consistent, high-quality writing instruction that prepares them not just for exams, but for life. 

Driven by teachers, for teachers, the Pathway is a collaborative effort built on research, innovation, and a strong belief in the transformative power of writing for all students. Together, we can address the systemic failures that have marginalized writing for too long, and create the  pathway to success for every child.