by Mark Scruby

Looking back over the past few years, one truth stands out clearly: the growth has been huge. Not flashy-huge, but meaningful-huge—the kind of growth that sneaks up on you and suddenly changes what feels possible for students.

I work at Ballarat Clarendon College in regional Victoria, a private, co-educational, day and boarding school about ninety minutes from Melbourne. We are not a selective school with exam gates and glossy scholarships for the top percentile. We are a community school with boarders from farming families, a place that should not—if you buy conventional wisdom—be topping state results. Yet in four of the last five years, our graduating cohort has done exactly that. It was not magic. It was not a fad. It was curriculum and instruction, made coherent and consistent, and relentlessly improved over time.

A big part of that story is The Writing Revolution (TWR).

What Writing Used to Look Like—and Why We Had to Stop

In my early career in London and then here, writing instruction was product-first: plan the big moments, add some “wow words,” sprinkle in metaphors, and hope the rest of the structure appears. For a handful of students who “catch” writing by simply being in the room, it was fine. For everyone else, it was demoralizing. The glitter only made the gaps more obvious. We told ourselves that if students could read, they could write. And while that was true for some, it was not true for most—unless we teach them how.

Many classrooms also relied heavily on surface-level “engagement” tricks—posters of exciting vocabulary, prompts to “be creative,” and a focus on writing as performance rather than skill development and an opportunity to build content knowledge. Students could sometimes produce flashes of brilliance, but there was little scaffolding to help them understand how to shape a clear sentence or build a logical paragraph. Those who struggled were often labeled “lower performing” early, a judgment that too often became self-fulfilling. Without an explicit path forward, they disengaged, and the gap between confident writers and everyone else widened year after year.

What we needed was a clear, teachable roadmap for writing itself—not just encouragement, prompts and hope. That is what The Writing Revolution provided. Its approach gave us a common professional language and a sequence that built skills step by step: sentences before paragraphs, paragraphs before essays; coherence before flourish. Most importantly, it gave students visible progress—a deeply motivating loop. It gave them entry points and a way to feel successful with their writing. When they could do something today that they could not do yesterday, school began to feel like a place where growth was expected and achievable.

Why Writing—and Why It Changed Reading First

Before TWR, our grammar and punctuation results were strong. Reading was excellent. Writing, however, lagged. Not disastrously—just stubbornly. We mined Graham and Perin’s Writing Next and Graham and Hebert’s Writing to Read, and while we could see the general concepts and outline of what we needed to build, we struggled to systematize it across year levels. A strategy might flourish in Year 6 and then evaporate in Year 7 because the through-line was not tight enough.

Then we stumbled on an article titled “One Sentence at a Time” that would become Chapter 1 of The Writing Revolution. We ordered the book for the entire department the day it came out. With just the book (we added training in later), we gave it what Australians call “a red-hot crack.” Even with our clumsy first attempts, the difference was immediate: a shared language, a sequence, and routines that could survive timetable changes and teacher turnover.

Interestingly, the first uplift we saw was in reading. That might sound odd for a “writing” focus, but it makes perfect sense. Ask a student to craft a sharp appositive for a character, and you are asking them to read closely, distill essence, and make meaning concise. Ask them to introduce text-based evidence with the transition phrase “in particular…” or “as a result…” and you are cultivating causal reasoning and inference. Writing is the articulation of thought; reading fuels the thought. We stopped trying to pry them apart.

Writing scores did move—but not instantly. There was the rumble before the rocket. As we scaled routines and reduced cognitive load with outlining strategies, clarity of expression improved; incidental gains popped up in spelling and mechanics because students had more working memory for accuracy. When a system starts removing friction, the whole machine runs cleaner.

What We Changed About Teaching

The biggest shift was not a trick; it was a stance. We stopped treating “teacher autonomy” as an unqualified good. Autonomy is wonderful when it is about responsive delivery to students in front of you. It is not wonderful when it means opting out of best practice. Surgeons do not wake up and decide to try a 1960s technique because it is more “them.” Teaching is a profession. Best practice matters.

We built a shared curriculum—lesson sequences where 80–90% of the heavy planning was done in advance, so teachers could focus on how they teach. Early on, we made the classic mistake of over-reaching. We tried to scale the Hochman Method to all subjects, all at once, and it was too much of a good thing at once. We pulled back and started again in a way that could scale within our schools. We wanted to get it right in English classes first and then expand deliberately to subjects where students must articulate understanding through writing.

We built a first cross-year unit on the Renaissance (thanks to Hirsch’s Core Knowledge for the content spine), then embedded the TWR strategy sequences. Every English teacher taught the unit at once, across Years 6–8. That choice mattered: the collective win was palpable. Teachers saw progress with their own eyes, which fuels the flywheel better than any pep talk.

Phase one—writing every lesson—took five years. Phase two is continuous improvement with tight feedback loops. In planning meetings, we bring micro-assessments (appositives for four characters, say). If Class 5B nailed the assignment better than the rest of the classes, the 5B teacher re-teaches lesson to the team, and we interrogate their moves: Why did you phrase it that way? What example unlocked it? We then amend the shared plan. Tiny changes, relentlessly, make for radical change over time.

From Lone Voices to a Chorus

When we first leaned into evidence-informed writing instruction in Australia, it felt lonely. As an independent school, anything we said could be waved away as “that is private-school stuff.” We invited local schools to visit and worked with TWR to offer bursaries so teachers from schools in lower-SES communities could complete the training we had benefited from but—at the beginning—very few took us up on it. That has changed. In the last year alone, more than fifty schools have come to watch lessons, talk to teachers, and see what a knowledge-rich curriculum paired with explicit writing instruction actually looks like. We tailor observation days so visitors can see lessons in action and then sit with us to ask the unglamorous, vital questions: How do you plan this? How do you assess it? What did you stop doing to make space?

The appetite is real, and it is widening. Catholic dioceses are moving toward evidence-informed practice. Curriculum writers are being hired to create shared sequences. And in the Northern Territory—Australia’s most under-resourced jurisdiction, with vast, remote communities—we are collaborating with Schools of the Air and with primary schools who are using curriculum materials we have developed to support their students’ learning. Two Clarendon teachers have even packed their bags to work up there, originally on sabbatical but both fell so deeply in love with the work, they stayed.

Advice for Getting Started

Do the training. The book is excellent, but the modeling, exemplars, and pacing from the course are essential.

Find your people. If you are the lone voice in a high-autonomy culture, connect with interested teachers in your school or with other schools. Observe lessons. Share artifacts. Borrow what works.

Sequence before spread. Nail routines in one subject, across classes and year levels, before you roll out more widely.

Measure the right things. Use fine-grain checks (a sentence-level activity, a transition choice, an outline) to detect where instruction is landing—and where it is not. Fix the plan, not the students.

Match writing to knowledge. Content drives rigor. A knowledge-rich curriculum gives students something worth writing about; TWR gives them the means to say it well.

Gratitude—and What Comes Next

None of this happens in isolation. The TWR team—Kathleen Maloney and colleagues—have been extraordinary partners: flexible with scheduling training times, generous with discounts, unwaveringly focused on what helps students learn. The broader Australian shift toward evidence-informed writing instruction is gathering speed, and it has been a privilege to contribute shoulder-to-shoulder with educators from city classrooms to the remotest corners of the country.

If there is a single lesson from our journey, it is this: improvement is not about heroic teachers doing idiosyncratic things. It is about professional communities agreeing on best practice, codifying it, and getting a little better together, forever. When we do that, the results—yes, scores, but more importantly students’ sense of power over their own learning—follow. And that is the kind of huge I will chase for the rest of my career.