WriterCoach Connection

Coaches and students celebrate writer coaching at El Cerrito High

On January 5, students in Eric Jepson's Block 2 9th grade English class at El Cerrito High gathered with WCC site coordinator Maureen Dixon and her Thursday Block 2 coaching team to celebrate the semester of working together that is about to conclude. Coaches provided a festive batch of comestibles and the party was under way, outside on the Quad.

Some students provided hand-written expressions of thanks to their coaches. Here are  Maureen and student Philisha Knox, with Philisha's colorful blast of heartfelt artwork appropriate to the occasion:

The full panoply of students and coaches, with Maureen and Mr. Jepson, in a vibrant lineup on the Quad:

Below are the stars who make it happen for Mr. Jepson's Thursday Block 2 English class.

Front Row (l. to r.): Frank Kidner, Leslie Cohen, Bob Coates, Eric Jepson (teacher), Dave Weinstein, Kathy Roehl, Virginia Lim.

Back Row (l. or r.): Katie Yarnold, Nicole Morris, Paul Epstein, Maureen Dixon (WCC site coordinator), Ken Berniker, Renee Perry.

Leaders of the pack: Below, WCC El Cerrito High site co-coordinator Maureen Dixon and teacher Eric Jepson enjoy some class time in the sun. Mr. Jepson is a staunch supporter of WCC, one of the reasons the program just sings in its second year at ECHS.

If you sense a connection between student and writer coach leaping out of the picture below of Melany Puentes (l.) and coach Leslie Cohen, you aren't alone.

The best part about a gathering like this is the chance to hear the students talk about what it means to them to work with their coaches, to get this individual writing support from people who care so much about them. Student Kenyatta Marcelus remarked, "It's more than a connection. It's a relationship. When it's one on one with someone you know, you work harder, and you take feedback better." Here's Kenyatta with a three-word essay ("I love writing") that conveys a world of feeling:

How could anyone resist working with students who are so eager to get the help?

 

 Bob Menzimer

Give the gift of student writing support at year's end!

What better way to honor a loved one who cares about education than to make a gift to WriterCoach Connection in his or her name? As you plan your year-end giving with its related tax deductions, you can donate to WCC in honor of a friend or family member, write a personal note to that person, and we will make sure your gift recipient gets your message.

A gift in any amount helps keep our writer coaches sitting next to students in Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, and El Cerrito classrooms. Donating is easy and secure at our website, and here's an example of what you'll set in motion when you do it: community volunteers being trained as writer coaches earlier this month at Oakland School for the Arts.

Give a gift to WCC and warm the hearts of a lot of students and teachers as we head into 2012!

 

Bob Menzimer

 

 

Richmond Community Foundation helps light our way in West County

The Richmond Community Foundation has announced it is awarding a $5,000 capacity-building grant to Community Alliance for Learning, to help us recruit volunteers for our expanding WriterCoach Connection program in the West Contra Costa County Unified School District.

This year we have grown WCC at El Cerrito High School, to include every 9th grader as well as students in the English Language Development (ELD) Levels 3 and 4 classes we served last year. This expansion to 400 students makes El Cerrito High the largest among the dozen schools we serve in four East Bay districts.

Meantime, we are preparing to launch WCC at our second West County site, Portola Middle School, next month. The pilot program at Portola will serve a mainstream 7th grade class and one ELD class, with the hope of further expansion at the school for 2012-13.

We now have our sights set on Richmond, and the vision of continuing to serve students and teachers in El Cerrito and expanding north in the District would not be possible without the generous support of the Richmond Community Foundation. We thank them!

Bob Menzimer

WriterCoach Connection partners with Episcopal Charities

As part of our intiative to form expanded, broad-based strategic partnerships with our generous funders, we were pleased to help our friends at Episcopal Charities with their biggest fundraiser of the year, the Night of Lights, at Delancey Street on the San Francisco waterfront on a blustery and rain-swept night in early November. 

Here is Community Alliance for Learning Board Chair Kathy Kahn (r.), helping check guests in that night:

Since Episcopal Charities helps fund WriterCoach Connection, they requested that one of our coaches attend the event to talk about our program. WCC volunteer Janice Barbour, with her husband Steve, answered the call. Here they are (l. and center), in lively conversation about what writer coaching means to our students and teachers, and the satisfaction being a coach brings to our volunteers:

I was honored by the willingness of another person intimately acquainted with WCC to help out at the event: my wife Meg.

We were so happy to be a part of this warm and festive evening, which generated lots of donations for Episcopal Charities with a lively auction of fun prizes and activities.

Bob Menzimer

Honor your holiday gift recipients with writing support for students

If a toaster seems like a tired gift idea for your loved ones this holiday season, how about something packed with meaning for a public-school student and teacher? As social consciousness spreads in the face of a struggling economy, especially at this time of year, it seems more and more people are offering holiday gifts that truly touch hearts. A gift to WCC in the name of a loved one says something special about you and about the person in whose name you make your donation.

You can make that gift, in the amount you choose, via our website, and you can include a personal note that we will send to your gift recipient, so he or she will know exactly how big your heart is. 

Here's how generous hearts engage to support WCC. Below, a dozen pair of helping hands last week helped to send out our year-end fundraising appeal, with the latest edition of our newsletter.

 

Your dontion helps writing support get rolling, with the training of community volunteers as coaches. For the first time this year, we are training high-performing high-school 12th graders at Oakland School for the Arts to join us in coaching the school's 9th graders. Below, OSA seniors Domine Ezechukwu (l.) and Alex Harris soak up the training, preparing to coach their 9th-grade classmates.

 

And finally, of course, the rubber meets the road, as coaches sit down with students and guide them to more effective writing and critical thinking. Here's the end result of your holiday gift in the name of a loved one, coach-student pairs at work in the library at El Cerrito High School.

Donate to WCC in the name of a loved one, compose a note to your gift recipient, and we will make sure he or she gets the message. You'll warm a lot of hearts this holiday season!

Bob Menzimer

Picture yourself here

Are you thinking about becoming a writer coach? Your first stop is coach training, as it was for these volunteers last week at Oakland School for the Arts.

For the first time, we are training high-achieving 12th graders as writer coaches. Above, Domine Ezechukwu (l.) and Alex Harris hope to be working with 9th graders when coaching at OSA begins in January.

Husband and wife team Jean Rains and Steve Zimmerman try their hand at practice writer coaching.

Mia DeBono (l.) and Teresa Godfrey are into it!

Jennifer Duff in active discussion with two trainee colleagues.

There's still time to register for coach training sessions in December and January!

 

Bob Menzimer

 

A new coach learns to draw a student out

I think we are coaching our students not because they are unable to come up with answers but because faced with an assignment and a blank piece of paper they find it hard to come up with questions. 

So my MO has simply become to ask them questions - to give me three reasons why such and such should be happening.  When they give me answers I just say Write that down.  Then give me an example for each one of the three to provide color, movement and texture.  Write that down.  These are the middle three paragraphs.  Then ask the student whether he/she thinks all this is a good thing or a bad thing.  Write that down; this is paragraph 5.  Now, what is this all about?  Write that down; this is paragraph 1.

I notice that when I say Write that down it takes them a few moments to adjust to the idea that what they have just said is in fact worth writing down.

Peter Geraghty, first-year coach

WriterCoach Connection in the business community

In October, we joined a group of fellow nonprofit organizations at an employee outreach event sponsored by Dreyer's Ice Cream, in association with the Dreyer's parent company Nestle, U.S.A., for the corporation's Community CARE Campaign.

The event offered an opportunity present information about WCC to Dreyer's corporate employees, who are invited to donate to a selected nonprofit program a day's pay and then become eligible for a 50% match from the Nestle Foundation.

On hand to present WCC to Dreyer's employees were  WCC Oakland Site and Volunteer Coordinator Karen Larson (second from right, below) and Community Alliance for Learning board member Shelli Fried (right, below). The lunch-hour event was overcast and drippy, but enthusiasm among Dreyer's employees was sunny and bright!

Bob Menzimer

The spirit of WriterCoach Connection personified

The magic of WriterCoach Connection is in the people who go to such extraordinary lengths to make it happen. Those people include not only the 400+ community volunteers who serve as our writer coaches but also our dedicated site coordinators, who make the program happen at each school, and the generous donors who make it possible for us to do our work with teachers and students. One such site coordinator is Peg Healy, who keeps things humming at Albany Middle School, and Peg's friend Cheryl (Casey) Casebeer, who began responding to Peg's outreach to friends for WCC support some time ago from her home in the mountains away from the Bay Area and has continued ever since.

Recently, Casey heard about the dire straits of the Albany Middle School budget, and the resulting decrease in funds to support WCC in its work with AMS 8th graders. Casey got wind that the wondrous AMS PTA was pledging to help fill the budget gap by increasing its original commitment for WCC funding. In response, Casey pledged to match the additional PTA funding dollar for dollar. The PTA pledged to increase it's funding from $2,000 to $4,000, and Casey was as good as her word. In the photo below, Peg is holding a check for WCC from Casey in the amount of $2,500! Peg's cat Henry looks on in disbelief.

We'd have trouble believing such generosity ourselves, were it not for the fact that Casey has offered it so consistently in the past. And she's not alone. She and Peg are perfect examples of why WriterCoach Connection continues to grow, even in the face of a challenging economy that has brought so many worthy nonprofit programs to their knees. We're managing to stick at our existing sites and have doubled our number of new sites in the past two years. Casey, Peg, and the AMS PTA are some of the reasons why.

Bob Menzimer 

New volunteers pour into WriterCoach Connection

Since August, more than 200 community volunteers have completed our coach training and have joined more than 200 returning coaches as our work in East Bay classrooms picks up steam for the 2011-12 school year.

This year, those 450+ coaches will work with more than 1,600 students at a dozen schools in the Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, and West Country school districts. We've more than doubled our number of school sites in the past two years, with expansion of WCC planned this spring at Oakland School for the Arts and at Portola Middle School in El Cerrito.

We'll be training more volunteers in January and February, so check our website for details!

 

Bob Menzimer