WELCOME

The Vermont Writing Collaborative is a grassroots, non-profit organization founded by a group of public school teachers. Our mission is to help all students become powerful thinkers, readers, and writers. If you are new to Writing for Understanding, please check out Our Approach.

In 2008, we offered Writing for Understanding: Using Backward Design to Help All Students Write Effectively. Our new resource, Making it Work: A Handbook for Writing for Understanding Instruction, picks up where that earlier book left off.

This handbook comes at the request of teachers who have asked us over the years, “Couldn’t you write all of this down?” It is designed to provide new, step-by-step, practical guidance for creating content-based and standards-based writing instruction. You can download a free sample chapter here!

But wait, there’s more! We have created a new resource for schools or teams that want to use Making it Work as a professional learning opportunity. Called Teachers at Work, it is a chapter-by-teacher guide for PL sessions of about an hour. The guide is complete with all the materials needed for each session, plus explicit notes for the leader (and it’s FREE!) Click here to download Teachers at Work, the companion to Making it Work.