What is Structured Writing?

 Structured Literacy (SL) is an effective teaching approach that is explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multisensory and targets both foundational skills (phonemic awareness, decoding, spelling) as well as essential oral language abilities such as vocabulary, sentence, and text level elements of language (Spear-Swirling, 2018).

A Structured Literacy approach for Writing (SL-W) incorporates teaching these linguistic aspects as well as organizational aspects of writing at the word, sentence, and text levels. At each level, the structured writing approach shares explicit strategies for building skills that children immediately use for content-based writing activities.

The Writing in the Schools

Exchange (WISE) Project

The Writing in the Schools Exchange Project (WISE) is a research-to-practice initiative designed to leverage implementation science to support evidence-based practices for teaching structured writing (SL-W) in schools.

The WISE partners engage in professional development, coaching, progress monitoring and collaborating to implement structured writing strategies in K-8 classrooms. From a research standpoint, we are interested in teacher input, sustainability and student outcomes.

Our School Partners

  • Hanover Public Schools

    Hanover, Massachusetts

  • Curtis Guild Elementary School

    East Boston, Massachusetts

  • Mendon-Upton Regional School District

    Mendon, Masschusetts

Interested in joining us?

The broad goal of the Writing in the Schools Exchange (WISE) project is to build mutually beneficial long-term partnerships that work to solve shared problems of practice in writing instruction. We are interested in partnering with schools that seek strategies for teaching writing at Tier 1, II, and III levels.