WRITE Center celebrates national launch with keynote, all-star panel of writing and language experts

The Writing Research to Improve Teaching & Evaluation (WRITE) Center celebrated its official launch on October 24 with a keynote lecture and all-star panel of writing and language experts.
 
Led by UCI School of Education Professor Carol Booth Olson, the WRITE Center seeks to provide national leadership and outreach activities to support the improvement of secondary writing research and practice. Funded by a $5 million grant from the Institute of Educational Sciences, the WRITE Center will also conduct a focused program of research on academic writing, placing a special emphasis on source-based argument writing in English Language Arts and History.

​“We’re hoping this Center will draw both researchers and practitioners, so that we can be a place where we all work together to improve the academic writing of our students,” Olson said to a crowd of more than 100 attendees, with hundreds more watching via livestream.

Participants in the WRITE Center's launch event on October 24, 2019.

Olson then introduced the night’s keynote speaker: Steve Graham, the Mary Emily Warner Professor of Education at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. A co-PI of the WRITE Center, Graham discussed research and policy related to writing instruction.

​The launch event concluded with a panel discussion featuring WRITE Center advisory board members. The board took questions from the audience and from online viewers.
 
To view a recording of the October 24 Launch Event, please click here.
 
For photos of the October 24 Launch Event, please click here.
 
To view an article on the WRITE Center in the School of Education’s fall 2019 magazine, please click here.
 
Since 1978, Olson has served as director of the UCI Writing Project, one of 200 sites of the National Writing Project. The UCI Writing Project has trained 1,000 teachers from 90 local school districts and 13 colleges and universities.
 
In 2018, Olson was awarded a $14.7 million Education, Innovation and Research grant from the U.S. Department of Education to expand the Pathway to Academic Success Project, which Olson created in 1996. The pathway project is a multiyear professional development program for teachers that promotes an instructional approach to enhance the thinking tools that students use to understand, interpret and write analytical essays to enhance academic outcomes for students from low-socioeconomic status, high-need schools with large populations of English learners. The project has already been implemented in 10 Southern California school districts, with plans to extend into Arizona, Illinois, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and Wisconsin. 
 
“Ultimately, our focus is on the thinking skills behind writing and those kinds of cognitive strategies will transfer to other disciplines,” Olson said of the WRITE Center. “At a time when it is more crucial than ever for adolescents to develop the necessary critical thinking and writing skills to become informed citizens who actively interrogate the arguments they see presented on a daily basis, we hope to contribute to the knowledge base regarding how best to cultivate these skills in secondary students and enhance their educational outcomes.”