#CWPLeader May
The CWP Teacher Consultants we celebrate in May are teacher writers, teacher researchers, and leaders of writing, research, or inquiry groups for their local Writing Projects, schools, or districts.
If you have been reading the profiles of the Teacher Consultants we have been recognizing from October on, you may have noticed variations on a theme in response to this question: “How has your Local Writing Project impacted you as a writer?” What these Teacher Consultants share, along with the thousands of their colleagues who have been a part of over forty years of CWP Invitational Leadership Institutes in the Teaching of Writing, is the belief that their passion for writing was fired up or reignited in that all-important Leadership Institute. Founder Jim Gray, in The Essential Program, described the Leadership Institute “as a community of writers as well as a community of teachers.”
In a Scholastic chat for teachers, Donald Graves echoed the importance of the teacher-writer connection:
Q: If you had to choose one thing teachers should do when teaching writing, what would it be?
Donald: Write yourself. Invite children to do something you're already doing. If you're not doing it, Hey, the kids say, I can't wait to grow up and not have to write, like you. They know. And for the short term and the long term, you'll be doing yourself a favor by writing. All of us need it as a survival tool in a very complex world. The wonderful thing about writing is that it separates the meaningless and the trivial from what is really important. So we need it for ourselves and then we need to invite children to do what we're doing. You can't ask someone to sing a duet with you until you know the tune yourself. (full article)
The teacher-writers we honor this month not only understand this for themselves, they create teacher-writer communities for their educator colleagues: weekend writing groups; school year inquiry and teacher research groups; feedback, revision, and publication groups; collaborative case study or teaching stories projects; opportunities for teachers to read and go public with their writing. It is not surprising to hear CWP teacher-writers and Teacher Consultants say they learn the most about the teaching and learning of writing through their own writing and inquiry into its implications for their student writers.
Congratulations and thank you for all you do for students, your colleagues, and your Writing Project.
To learn more about each of these outstanding educators and Teacher Consultants, click on their pictures, which are the links to their profiles.
If you have been reading the profiles of the Teacher Consultants we have been recognizing from October on, you may have noticed variations on a theme in response to this question: “How has your Local Writing Project impacted you as a writer?” What these Teacher Consultants share, along with the thousands of their colleagues who have been a part of over forty years of CWP Invitational Leadership Institutes in the Teaching of Writing, is the belief that their passion for writing was fired up or reignited in that all-important Leadership Institute. Founder Jim Gray, in The Essential Program, described the Leadership Institute “as a community of writers as well as a community of teachers.”
In a Scholastic chat for teachers, Donald Graves echoed the importance of the teacher-writer connection:
Q: If you had to choose one thing teachers should do when teaching writing, what would it be?
Donald: Write yourself. Invite children to do something you're already doing. If you're not doing it, Hey, the kids say, I can't wait to grow up and not have to write, like you. They know. And for the short term and the long term, you'll be doing yourself a favor by writing. All of us need it as a survival tool in a very complex world. The wonderful thing about writing is that it separates the meaningless and the trivial from what is really important. So we need it for ourselves and then we need to invite children to do what we're doing. You can't ask someone to sing a duet with you until you know the tune yourself. (full article)
The teacher-writers we honor this month not only understand this for themselves, they create teacher-writer communities for their educator colleagues: weekend writing groups; school year inquiry and teacher research groups; feedback, revision, and publication groups; collaborative case study or teaching stories projects; opportunities for teachers to read and go public with their writing. It is not surprising to hear CWP teacher-writers and Teacher Consultants say they learn the most about the teaching and learning of writing through their own writing and inquiry into its implications for their student writers.
Congratulations and thank you for all you do for students, your colleagues, and your Writing Project.
To learn more about each of these outstanding educators and Teacher Consultants, click on their pictures, which are the links to their profiles.