The authors describe the Rhode Island Writing Project’s Presenters’ Collaborative Network (PCN). Created to support teacher-consultants offering inservice work in schools, the PCN has turned out to be one of the site’s most effective continuity programs.
Groups of teachers meet on Saturdays to present, critique, ponder, revise, and adapt demonstration lessons and learn more about their own practice. The stated goal has been to refine the teachers’ presentations, but the effect has been to keep teachers working together, thinking like writing project teachers, supporting one another’s innovations, and sustaining the network that enables teachers to grow in the company of others.
The authors trace the evolution of the meetings’ format, describe in detail a number of the practices and structures used, and provide protocols and guides in the appendices.
The author chronicles the evolution of the site’s Friday professional development meetings for its on-site teacher-consultants (teachers serving full-time as mentor-consultants in schools).
In a safe, academically rigorous, and reflective professional community, these teacher-consultants develop their writing, teaching, and consulting skills, and collaboratively refine their work in the schools.
Osterman describes the meetings’ structures and processes, and the adaptations and additions made in response to the changing educational environment and the group’s increasing size. The appendix contains protocols, guidelines, sample forms and letters, and a bibliography with readings on professional development, language and literacy, and writing and reading.
Eileen Simmons, a veteran teacher-consultant from the Oklahoma State University Writing Project, describes collaboration among writing project teacher-consultants and site-based teachers to plan professional development before, during, and after a summer writing camp for students at their school. This model, which has been adapted in a variety of school settings, takes advantage of the summer months when teachers have time to interact, share ideas, plan together, and build a professional community.
Nancy Remington and Robert McGinty from the Great Basin Writing Project in Nevada, describe a long-term school partnership that gave teachers at Southside Elementary the opportunity to redesign curriculum and reshape the writing culture of their school. This inquiry-centered approach to professional development, designed and led by teachers-with support from the writing project site-could be a model for any school.
“Mention Vermont and most people immediately picture small villages with white church steeples tucked in the crooks and valleys of the rugged land. In truth, this image does exist, and although Vermont’s landscape is rapidly changing, it is still the most rural state in the nation.
Vermont has over 300 individual school districts. More than 200 schools have fewer than 150 students in grades K–6. Although each school has its own board of education clinging to local control, most schools belong to large, widespread supervisory unions containing several school districts. As a result of the distance between schools, however, each school retains its autonomy. When students leave grade six, most are thrust into a supervisory union high school with several hundred students. In spite of its rural nature, Vermont has placed itself on the national map with strong educational initiatives, notably the first-in-the-U.S. statewide Portfolio Assessment Program, which was implemented in 1991 and designed to encourage better teaching and give rich data on student performance.”
Seven years in the making, this university–school-district partnership has grown from an informal relationship to a funded, in-district staff development project with a mission statement and ongoing action plans. The partnership offers two-week summer institutes, advanced training to build local leadership, school-year sessions, and continuous evaluation—all implemented in the district by teacher-consultants.
This monograph offers an overview of successes and struggles while providing a model for school districts wanting to establish an outreach project affiliated with a National Writing Project site.
Authors Nancy Mellin McCracken and Anthony Manna, with Darla Wagner and Bonnie Molnar, describe the journey they undertook integrating the arts into the summer institute. Over a ten-year period, 1996–2006, they turned the arts into a vehicle for providing equity, supporting educational reform, and promoting the concept of the citizen-teacher.
The monograph describes three activities in detail: a writing wall, performance poetry, and process drama, showing how each addresses state academic content standards for writing while developing the participants’ capacity as citizen-teachers. Extensive appendices provide information on implementing these activities.
Tony Weaver, Jr. is a storyteller who creates diverse worlds where every reader can find their place. His debut graphic novel, Weirdo, sold out of its first printing in seven weeks of publication, received multiple starred reviews, and was named one of the best books of 2024 by School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, People Magazine, The New York Public Library, and the Children’s Book Review. He was the first comic writer ever selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30, selected as a Flying Start by Publishers Weekly, and has attracted coverage from ABC, NBC, and The Huffington Post. Tony’s writing prowess has not only garnered him institutional accolades, but has built him a loyal following of over 1 million followers across TikTok and Instagram.Tony is currently focusing on promoting his Nerds For Literacy initiative and as well as his award-winning graphic novel memoir, Weirdo,
Valeriana Boadu is an educator, author, and storyteller. She was born on the Caribbean Island of St. Lucia to a family of ten children. She has been in education for over twenty-five years, teaching Geography, Language Arts, and Multilingual Learners. She is a television presenter and a published author. Her very first novel was a romance novel, which placed her in the top ten for romance writing and earned her a nomination by Foreword Reviews for excellence in writing. Since then, Val has published 11 more books—multicultural short stories and Language Arts textbooks to support writing in elementary and secondary schools.
Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, business, the arts, and other subjects. He writes the BRANDED column for Fast Company and has contributed to The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, NewYorker.Com, Design Observer, The Organist, and many others. He is the author of The Art of Noticing (Knopf), and writes its spinoff newsletter of the same name. Walker is on the faculty of the Products of Design MFA program at the School of Visual Arts; he lives in New Orleans.
Kevin Hodgson teaches sixth grade in Southampton, Massachusetts, and is a teacher-consultant with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.
James Fester has worked for more than two decades as a classroom teacher, instructional coach, technology director, and curriculum specialist. His writing spans many different areas and includes Edutopia, ISTE, and National Geographic. His most recently published book titled The National Park Classroom which focuses on how classroom teachers can benefit from the educational resources and experts connected to our national parks.
Maggie Delgado-Chernick is an English teacher at Twinsburg High School in Twinsburg, Ohio. She has enjoyed working with members of NWP-KSU at Kent State University and rangers at Cuyahoga Valley National Park on Write Out programming since 2019. Write Out’s focus on place-based learning inspired Maggie to pursue additional research on student-led community-oriented projects and service learning. This research and the collaboration with Write Out colleagues led Maggie to create a course titled Writing for Civic Engagement at Twinsburg High School that focuses on getting students and their writing out of the classroom. In addition to other professional collaborations and cohorts, she contributed a chapter titled “Stories of Our Community: Podcasting for Place-Based Inquiry” for the 2024 text Place-Based Writing in Action: Opportunities for Authentic Writing in the World Beyond the Classroom, edited by Rob Montgomery and Amanda Montgomery.
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About Write Out
Write Out is a free two-week celebration in October where we step outside the doors of our classrooms, homes, and workplaces to write and create. Learn more at writeout.nwp.org.
About The Write Time
The Write Time is a special series of NWP Radio, a podcast of the National Writing Project (NWP), where writing teachers from across the NWP Network interview young-adult and children’s authors about their books, their composing processes, and writers’ craft. You can view the archive at https://teach.nwp.org/series/the-write-time/
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