Martha Joseph Watts

Dr. Martha Marcella Joseph Watts, affectionately called "Aunty Marcella", is an English teacher, teacher trainer, and an educational consultant. She is best known for her Writing to Respond (WTR) process—an approach for guiding students in writing beyond summarizing, and for providing support to students for improving their performance in reading and writing. She has published several educational resources to support implementation of the WTR process. These resources include books, workbooks, classroom charts, student and educator wheels.

The process, which has been in use in classrooms, schools, and a few districts since 2010, has helped schools and students realize 8-15 percentile gains over a three-semester period. The best successes have been in schools that reinforce skills from the process consistently across disciplines over a three-year period. Percentile gains were steady and school scores rose by 33 percentile scores over a tree-year period.

The major skills students develop during the process include reading in disciplines, vocabulary development, summarizing, analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, analytical writing, problem solving, and research.

Dr. Watts'doctoral studies in teacher leadership with Walden university helped stir her passion for supporting students and schools in disadvantaged settings.

Dr. Watts’ newest work for children is fiction. The Adventures of Iyani, by Aunty Marcella, is a series set in the United Sates Virgin Islands where she studied, resided for 15 years, and earned the Heath Humanities Award for excellence in teaching the humanities. She is a native of the Commonwealth of Dominica, but resides in Florida.

The second book in the series "The Incredible Beginning " will be on Amazon and in bookstores this spring.