The Writing Pathway

The Writing Pathway gives educators a free, research-based set of steps to take to teach writing, with AI tools that help them overlay those steps onto their content–whatever that content is.

Why is writing so hard to teach?

The ability to write well strengthens student agency and critical thinking, two of the most important goals of education. Every student should leave high school able to communicate effectively and persuasively, in a variety of contexts and for a variety of purposes. 

Gaps in data about how writing is typically taught have inhibited the development of responsive guidance for the field. Unlike in mathematics, where there are evidence-based sequences for effective teaching and a common language, there has not been a coherent, widely-used roadmap of writing skills or a common language for talking about writing. Students go from one subject to another, one year to another, and often must learn a new way to write in each setting. Teachers know the value of teaching writing, but they’re given little to no guidance how to teach it and they fear more time for writing means less time for content learning. Finally, the assessments students take—on which schools' and teachers’ evaluations are based—reward correct answers to multiple-choice questions and essays that regurgitate as much information as possible.

Teaching writing is hard, and teachers do not have the guidance or resources they need.

How does the Writing Pathway make it easier to teach writing well?

The goal of the Writing Pathway Innovation Lab, part of Teaching Lab’s Innovation Studio, is to bring coherence to writing instruction by providing a logical progression of writing skills—a writing pathway—that educators across the country can use in their classrooms. This pathway can be used as an overlay onto any content or curriculum from grades 3 to 10. Importantly, the Pathway and its supporting resources are free and open-source so that educators everywhere can use them to support their students.

The Pathway is organized into 10 topics, such as sentence construction and argumentative paragraphs. Each topic contains somewhere between 7 and 45 “skills” or lessons that carefully build students’ capacity with the writing skills that research has found to be the highest leverage for improving students’ writing (and thinking and reading).

To create the Pathway, we first worked with leading researchers in the writing instruction field—in particular with Dr. Steve Graham at Arizona State University—to collect data to better understand business-as-usual writing instruction in schools nationwide. We then worked closely with classroom teachers to develop the Pathway, and then again to test the Pathway during the 2022-2023 school year. In the summer of 2023, we published a revision to the Pathway and its supporting resources to a website (check it out here!).

During the 2023-2024 year, we are conducting another round of testing and improvement with teachers from 8 partner schools nationwide—we hope to publish the results by early 2025 (along with the results of our previous research). Teachers continue to use the Pathway and provide feedback, and our team continues to improve the Pathway and its website. In particular, we are hard at work expanding the AI tools on the Pathway, which create materials for teachers in the content they teach.

How is the Writing Pathway using AI to save teachers time and make it easier to teach writing well?

In 2023, we launched AI-powered tools that enables teachers to instantly create student-facing activities (worksheets and answer keys) for a particular pathway skill—in whatever content they’re teaching!

You can see the AI in action here—click the “Create Content-Specific Materials” tab (note: you must create a free account first, but it’s quick and easy!). These tools are currently available for the sentence construction and grammar topics in the Pathway, and this content-generation tool will soon be available for all topics in the Pathway.