Proven Growth
24-percentile points
Students made 24-percentile points of growth in one year (e.g. a student starting at the 50% percentile would move to the 74% percentile)
3 years
3 years designing and rigorously studying the Pathway before its public launch
~1K students
~ 1,000 middle schoolers using the Pathway made more growth in their persuasive writing than a control group in the 2023 and 2024 school years
Professional Learning to Support a Coherent Approach to Writing, Schoolwide
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Our Tools are Easy to Use, But Schoolwide Change Is Hard: The Pathway’s tools are simple and intuitive—teachers can use them right away! That frees our professional learning to focus on what actually drives improvement: schoolwide instructional alignment. Even with strong HQIM, writing often gets shortchanged or neglected. Our implementation support helps schools tackle that head-on, with a shared focus on better student thinking through better student writing.
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Best-in-Class Professional Learning Provider: As part of Teaching Lab, the Writing Pathway offers a comprehensive suite of research-based and job-embedded professional learning and coaching -with a laser focus on results.
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Instructional Coherence through Horizontal & Vertical Alignment: We typically work with middle and high school teams across ELA, science, and social studies to make writing a daily habit—not an afterthought. Teachers get more deliberate with their curriculum, more consistent withformative assessment, and more aligned with one another. Our support builds real communities of practice, while still responsive to the distinct demands of each discipline.
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Cost-Effective & Flexible: Our implementation support is reasonably priced and highly flexible. We can provide coaching cycles, PLCs, full-day sessions, mini–PLs, virtual workshops, as well as support for leaders and capacity-building—we work with you to determine the support that best meets your team’s needs.
Why It Works
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Built on Research, and Tested: Our approach is grounded in decades of research on effective writing instruction, with guidance from Dr. Steve Graham, one of the world’s leading experts in the field. In a two-year pilot with 911 students, our model showed significant growth in student writing, validated by external assessment.
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Designed for Real Classrooms: Co-created with educators, Writing Pathway activities are fast to generate, easy to use, and take just minutes to integrate into existing lessons—and they work with any curriculum.
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More Writing, More Learning: With more frequent, purposeful writing across the disciplines, students get more at-bats—and teachers get more insight into what students know and can do.
Yes, We’ll Help Your Students Pass the Test. But That’s Just the Floor.
Our work helps students succeed on state assessments—not just in ELA, but across subjects. When students write regularly in every class, they don’t just improve their writing—they learn more deeply, retain more, and perform better on the tasks that tests measure: reading closely, thinking clearly, and explaining their reasoning. More and more states are recognizing that assessments need to do a better job of measuring writing and critical thinking (we see you, Texas!). That’s a good step—but we know tests are just the beginning.
We aim higher.
At the Writing Pathway, our goal is to prepare students for the real demands of college, careers, and civic life. That means helping them build the capacity to reason through complexity, write with clarity, and speak with voice and agency. We believe those outcomes are only possible once students have mastered the foundations—and we focus on helping teachers get them there, and beyond when they are ready.