Throughout the year, teachers in both the lower school and upper school have participated in workshops by The Writing Revolution (TWR), where they’ve delved into the Hochman Method, an evidence-based approach to writing instruction that stresses explicit, step-by-step construction of prose from the word and sentence level up to full compositions. Most recently, upper school STEM teacher, Shira Teich, completed the Advancing Thinking Through Writing STEM (Grades 3-12) course. She received a Fund for Excellence in Education grant from Community Foundations of the Hudson Valley to fully fund her registration and training. Read Shira’s reflection on her experience below:

“The Writing Revolution workshop was helpful in giving me the same language to talk about writing as my colleagues throughout the school. I am able to reference techniques and activities across disciplines and grade bands when speaking to my students about their writing. The workshop also provided exercises to target specifics in writing. For example, identifying sentence fragments and learning to expand sentences.

I enjoyed learning about writing, especially because this workshop was specifically for math and science courses. Every example they used was in STEM course content. It helped me to think about writing not just for communication, but also for content comprehension and organization of thought. The workshop was thorough and gave great examples of content driven writing activities to strengthen student writing and analysis of writing. It was a great experience and I am excited to learn more!”
– Shira Teich, Upper School Advisor and STEM Teacher