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The Writing Network hosting The Writing Revolution’s Toni-Ann Vroom & Dina Zoleo

Network Connect session Term 1

Featuring The Writing Revolution's Toni-Ann Vroom & Dina Zoleo

We are thrilled to welcome The Writing Revolution's Toni-Ann Vroom & Dina Zoleo at our first Network event for 2022. Come one! Come all!

A key goal of the Think Forward Writing Network is to open a conversation about writing in the classroom, using research, trialled techniques, assessment and data collection.

About our presenters

Dr. Toni-Ann Vroom is the Co-Executive Director and founding member of The Writing Revolution. Previously, she was a lead social studies teacher and school-wide writing coordinator at New Dorp High School in Staten Island, New York. At New Dorp, she was responsible for supporting the implementation of the Hochman Method across all content areas. Dr. Vroom received a Ph.D. in Literacy from St. John’s University.

Dr. Dina Zoleo is the Co-Executive Director and founding member of The Writing Revolution. Previously, she was the Assistant Principal of Social Studies at New Dorp High School in Staten Island, NY, where she co-led the effort to bring the Hochman Writing Method to New Dorp by seeding and developing it in her department, and then supporting its adoption school-wide. Dr. Zoleo received a Ph.D. in Literacy from St. John’s University.

Drs. Vroom and Zoleo have developed content for textbooks and materials for The Writing Revolution and have presented at The Aspen Institute, South by Southwest, and The College Board Foundation, as well as many other venues, on the topic of writing. 


Collaborate

This is a growing space to increase your knowledge, bridge the gap between research and practice, and hear the narratives of other educators achieving great things in the teaching of writing.

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Join the movement of schools interested to improve their writing instructional practice and assessment.



Catch the recording here

 

Read the latest blog post from convenors Jeanette Breen and Nathaniel Swain and continue the discussion after the session!

Blog
Writing Assessment is Hard! How should we report assessments to parents?
Writing Network
Writing Assessment is Hard! How should we report assessments to parents?
Writing Network

What is the best way of reporting assessment information to students & parents? This is a question I hear all the time, and it isn’t easy to answer. What we all want is an assessment system that is (a) accurate, (b) easy to understand, (c) not too time-consuming for staff, and (d) motivating for students. But these principles are all in conflict with each other.

Writing Network
Curiosities from writing practitioners: What works best from whole school to classroom?
Writing Network, Blog
Curiosities from writing practitioners: What works best from whole school to classroom?
Writing Network, Blog
Writing Network, Blog
The Writing Revolution in an Australian context
Writing Network
The Writing Revolution in an Australian context
Writing Network

As a new year begins, with it is the promise and hope of uninterrupted learning in 2022. One of the findings from lockdown that has brought so much clarity to our writing instruction, is the understanding of what explicit teaching can actually achieve. Despite two years in and out of online learning we have made some important discoveries about the building blocks that boost learning in writing and the tools to measure it.

Writing Network
Providing explicit feedback on Writing – What could this look like?
Blog, Writing Network
Providing explicit feedback on Writing – What could this look like?
Blog, Writing Network
Blog, Writing Network
A Question of Genre
Blog, Writing Network
A Question of Genre
Blog, Writing Network

One of the questions we have had from members of the TFE Writing Network has been related to genre teaching. Teaching writing in the context of genres is a common practice in Australia particularly due to our curriculum progressions that specify across several year levels: an expectation that students will be able to produce ‘imaginative, informative and persuasive’ texts. In Victoria this is first mentioned in Year 1.

This was highlighted when a friend recently called me during one of our lockdowns, frustrated at watching her Year 2 daughter cry during an online writing lesson where she was required to come up with a problem, solution and list of characters. Why was this so hard for her and why was I not surprised having seen this many times in an early years classroom? An understanding of genres is important. We know it makes a difference and students need to be able to write about different topics and create specific compositions. So perhaps the problem lies in the way we teach it.

Blog, Writing Network
From “Assigning” to Teaching — How research can reshape writing instruction
Blog, Writing Network
From “Assigning” to Teaching — How research can reshape writing instruction
Blog, Writing Network

I once had a student who loved rhinos. After all, what's not to love? During ‘free choice’ writing sessions (the opportunity for students to engage and communicate across genres of their choice), this student continued to write about rhinos in several formats. There was the narrative on rhinos, the persuasive, the poem – both Acrostic and Haiku.

His writing was engaging, passionate, showed an awareness of purpose and audience, but what niggled at me was that I wasn’t teaching him anything.

Actually, what I found was that my competent writers avoided authorial risks. They wrote texts where the topic was the focus, while writers who found writing challenging, continued to find it so. The struggle to engage was confronting.

Blog, Writing Network

We want to offer educators the opportunity to explore the science behind all the threads that bind together to create a rich writing framework. We want to provide you with practice that will set your students up to be successful writers and creators of quality text.

We look forward to sharing a space for collegiality, curiosity and quality writing practice.

 

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