Teaching Reading, Teaching Writing, and the Hochman Expository Writing Method

My program's getting changed again.  It's the way things go.

Anyway, I've been learning about Judith Hochman and her Teaching Basic Writing Skills, along with the method that goes with it.  It's expository writing broken down to the sentence level in a way that makes a tremendous amount of sense.  So often - particularly given the NYC focus on Common Core Writing Standard #1 - we've got students writing arguments of one kind or another, going through revision processes, talking big talk, but without an understanding of what a sentence is.

That seems unbelievable, but stodgy old grammarians have been griping about it for years with a bit of sympathy from me.  Teaching students to correct - much less avoid - fragments and run-on sentences is a nightmare if they don't have words like dependent clause or even noun and verb in their active lexicons.

I'm not a disciple or anything - just doing some PD when I can - but it seems like Hochman's method for teaching writing lines up with my method of teaching students to break down and annotate texts for comprehension while reading.  The link between sentence-by-sentence comprehension of a text has always seemed glaringly related to the process of expository writing, which is how I got cover fire in the early days of the Common Core pre-rollout, using the writing standard #2 and the reading for information standard #2, which basically ask students to explain what a text means and how it conveys that meaning - lots of things about author's craft and rhetorical work.  It was good stuff before the hammer came down and everything was around the focus on a position (which used to be a claim, which used to be a thesis) . . .

So hopefully this is relevant and I can do something with it.  If any of you bare few out there reading this have any input or thoughts, it's been too long since I've heard from some of you.