The Writing Academy

Randi Whitney, a 25-year educator (Goose Creek ISD and Pasadena ISD), began her teaching career as a kindergarten teacher until she was asked to move to fifth grade to help students with writing. Taking on the challenge with a mindset that Language Arts should have manipulatives, too, Whitney began developing activities to teach the toughest and most abstract concepts within reading and writing. Before long, her students began loving to read with enthusiasm and write with VOICE. Upon unlocking these mysteries with Teach BIG methodology, Whitney became a much sought-after educator, speaker, author, and trainer. The last twenty years have been spent inspiring fellow teachers by keeping up with new brain-based techniques, writing over 50 books, obtaining multiple trademarks, and spreading her vision to Teach BIG – Believe In Greatness. Whitney knows the importance of marrying reading and writing in the classroom, and she is thrilled that they are finally going to be intertwined in the future testing in Texas. After digging deep and studying states which are currently combining the two powerhouse content areas, Whitney is delivering the in-service she has been wanting to share for years-Raising the B.A.R.R. Brief Answer Reading Response. Her countless years of in-depth research is saving busy teachers and supervisors precious time. Visit Whitney’s website, readingWRITE.org to see how this training adds to the extensive repertoire of services that Whitney’s company, The Writing Academy, has to offer for reading and writing such as: Vertically Aligned Teacher Campus Trainings, trainings at her Convention Center & Retreat in Kemah, TX, Student CAMPs, 4-Day Summer Institutes, Live Stream Classroom Lessons, Educator Online Courses, and Student Online Courses. Her unique delivery in encouraging teachers to "Teach BIG" while using her strategies to make their students successful has become her trademark across Texas. “Reading and Writing are always best when they use each other to accomplish a common goal.” – Randi Whitney

The Writing Academy (TWA) is a comprehensive, brain-compatible reading and writing process that serves kindergarten through high school. The Writing Academy was developed by classroom teacher, author, and owner, Randi Whitney, to meet the needs of her students. Our writing component addresses: organization, lexicon, idea development, and sustained focus, as well as, grammar, capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Our reading component addresses reading comprehension through: author’s purpose, drawings, textual evidence, literary devices, emotional change, inferencing, text features, summarizing, main idea, theme, and question and answer strategies. These concepts are implemented through the use of colors, small chunking, games, activities, and graphic organizers. This program eliminates the guesswork, which commonly comes along with teaching both reading and writing.

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At The Writing Academy, we believe that vertical alignment is essential for continued success within the learning process. Imagine the process of building a structure. There are many teams that are required to complete the task- inspectors, plumbers, framers, electricians, etc. Without one of these components, the structure would never reach its state of completion and full potential. In fact, if you remove a component of this project, it can be detrimental. The learning process mirrors this so eloquently. Each teacher, at every grade level, serves a purpose. Removing quality instruction at any level of a student’s educational journey can also be detrimental and leave learning gaps. When teachers are using the same teaching structure, terminology, and concepts at every grade level, students grow and develop at an accelerated rate. Imagine what it would be like to have students exposed year after year to the same vocabulary and experiencing the same concepts in a grade-level appropriate manner. By the time these students reached 4th grade, it would no longer be about teaching our students how to write, but about perfecting their existing skills. Vertical alignment helps to "cancel out" more traditional predictors of student achievement such as socioeconomic status, gender, race, and teacher effectiveness. In addition, teachers will learn to better communicate and collaborate with their peers, helping them understand how their instructional decisions contribute to students' overall learning. This would result in accomplishing our ultimate goal- expert, college-ready communicators. In the end, vertical alignment is not simply an option within education, it is essential to success.