Valdosta Middle School 8th graders post an 18 point increase in writing test scores

The 8^th grade students at Valdosta Middle School posted an 18 percentage point gain in pass rate over last year’s 8^th grade students on the Georgia Grade 8 Writing Assessment. Ms. Debbie Paine, the school’s academic coach stated, “Our 8^th graders move from 58.6% in the meets and exceeds category last year to 76.6% this year. We thank Writing to Win for support in this progress.” In the second year of Georgia’s new, more rigorous writing assessment, statewide Georgia’s 8^th graders posted a pass rate of 6 percentage points over Georgia 8^th graders in 2007.

In response to what principal Marty Roesch called unacceptably low writing scores in 2007, he retained the help of the Writing to Win management system. Mr. Roesch designated an extended learning time for writing in grades 6-8 and provided professional learning sessions to train all math, science, social studies and language arts teachers in the teaching of writing. “The best two things about Writing to Win are that it is teacher friendly and that it empowers students to self-assess every writing task,” reports Erin Roberts, a 6^th grade ELA teacher, “Writing to Win was a big relief from the training we had received earlier that was too teacher-intensive.”

“It’s really amazing,” added Ms. Paine, “Although Writing to Win is quite a structured program, it produces authentic student writing in both daily journal entries and weekly essay writing.” Writing to Win is the name of a framework for teaching writing founded in 1986 by Dr. Warren Combs of Athens, Georgia, former University of Georgia professor of language education. Currently in its third edition, it is correlated to the Georgia’s new curriculum, Georgia Performance Standards. Valdosta Middle School is one of 19 Georgia middle schools using the Writing to Win framework that out-performed the state in the second year of Georgia’s new Grade 8 Writing Assessment.

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Writing to Win is the name of a framework for teaching writing founded in 1986 by Dr. Warren Combs of Athens, former University of Georgia professor of language education. Currently in its third edition, Writing to Win correlates to the Georgia’s new curriculum, Georgia Performance Standards. Writing to Win is an outgrowth of a federally funded project in the Clarke County Schools, The Timothy Road Elementary School Writing Project, co-directed by the late Dr. Bruce McNair, principal and Dr. Combs. Currently the Writing to Win network of schools numbers over 200 schools in five states. For 2008, 79 Georgia schools and 35 schools outside of Georgia have been nominated as 2008 Exemplary Schools of Writing.

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 Attachment: 11 Writing to Win middle schools sites in districts permitted us to report their scores.

Reports of the percent of students meeting and exceeding the target of the Grade 8 Writing Assessment are coming in, and we are celebrating students’ progress in performance in 19 our client middle schools. We congratulate their teachers on trusting the Writing to Win routines and working them rigorously. We congratulate their administrators on supporting their teachers with tactful monitoring of these routines.