Lucy Calkins is the Founding Director of both The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower (formerly the Reading and Writing Project) and of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP). She’s been on the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University for over four decades, as both the co-director of the Literacy Specialist Program and the Richard Robinson Professor of Children’s Literature.
Lucy has written over fifty books, including the widely adopted Units of Study curriculum. Pathways to the Common Core was a New York Times Best Seller, and The Art of Teaching Writing is generally regarded as a foundational book in the teaching of writing. Recently, Lucy has edited a series of decodable books for children (Jump Rope Readers) and been the lead author for new editions of Units of Study for both reading and writing.
Lucy began her career as a teacher for elementary, middle, and high school students, then joined Don Graves as a researcher on the National Institute of Education’s first major study of children as writers. That research has been credited with transforming the teaching of writing, bringing writing workshops, which were once the province of college classrooms, into K-8 classrooms. For decades since then, Dr. Calkins has devoted most of her time to leading organizations that aim to support best practices in the teaching of reading and writing. Lucy says, “It has been my greatest honor to work alongside the talented staff developers, teachers, and the school leaders who have helped develop, pilot, learn from, and teach reading and writing workshops, K-8.”
