Case Study: Consolidated School District of New Britain

Elizabeth Crooks is the recently retired 6-12 Curriculum Coordinator in ELA, Social Studies, and Science Literacy for the Consolidated School District of New Britain, CT. She recently sat down with us to share her story and successes around implementing Writable into her school district.

Three years ago Liz began to unify and monitor writing proficiency across subjects and grade levels in her school district. New Britain is a large school district with over 10,000 students. New Britain, CT is also a high poverty district, but does not receive the state funding that larger cities in Connecticut receive. In fact, New Britain consistently has one of the lowest per pupil expenditures.

In part 1 of 3, Liz shares the problems she faced in her district, and how she turned to Writable as an affordable solution for her district with some surprising results!

In part 2 of 3, Liz shares her solutions to unify and increase writing proficiency across her district. Professional learning across disciplines with a focus on argument writing, as well as using Writable to unify assessments, were large parts of her strategy.

In part 3 of 3, Liz shares the results of the project, which is still underway today. Not only was student engagement and motivation immediately amplified, but students using Writable saw a 1.7x increase in writing growth compared to cohorts not using Writable. Liz also saw a 30% increase in scores for their district calibrated assessments.