Welcome to WriterCoach Connection
Thanks to WriterCoach Connection, high school and middle school students in Berkeley and Albany, California, are improving their critical thinking and writing skills.
What we do
WriterCoach Connection recruits, trains, and coordinates community volunteers as classroom writing coaches. The coaches work one on one in English classes, helping students write and revise their class assignments. Coaches provide immediate and personal feedback to students during the writing process to encourage critical thinking and proficient writing.
Who benefits
Every writer benefits from constructive feedback, so coaches work with all students in each English class. Coaches address all levels of ability and preparedness in the 7th, 8th, or 9th grades.
WriterCoach Connection volunteers support teachers, providing the individual attention that teachers long to give every student. Students, teachers, and coaches respond enthusiastically to the coaching experience—and to the results.
Impact on teachers and students
Teachers report that with coaching, more students are completing and revising their essays and the writing is of better quality. The program gets demonstrable results and helps address the achievement gap.
“Over and over, my students have told me how valuable the experience is for them, and I have seen firsthand how coaching has made them blossom as writers.”—Ian Murray, high school teacher
“Our kids are starved for a more personal relationship with their educators, and in a classroom of 35, that contact is very hard to achieve. The WriterCoach Connection helps fill this void in our educational system.”—Parnaz Foroutan, high school teacher
Who Volunteers
Volunteer coaches come from a wide variety of backgrounds and professions. They are parents, college students, retirees, and members of the community at large. With WriterCoach Connection, they are discovering a valuable role in their local schools. Every year, coaches return to the program, a measure of the satisfaction they derive from helping students improve their writing.
Coach Views
“If the kids get a fraction of the satisfaction from writer coaching that I do, we have a raging success on our hands.”—Becca Burns, high school career coordinator and writing coach
“I had a student who burst into tears over her essay about her injured horse, and by the end of our half hour, she was writing with such intensity, scope, and vision that it was enough to have me commit to this program for the rest of my life.”—Kevin Westbrooke, writing coach
Please support WriterCoach Connection with a tax-deductable contribution to Community Alliance for Learning.
