Summary: Youth camps are a staple of National Writing Project sites across the country. This collection offers flyers that various Writing Projects have created to promote and market their youth writing opportunities. Included in the collection are examples from school-year one-day symposium/workshops, weekend programs, and week-long and multi-week summer writing...
Author: Nancy Mellin McCracken & Barbara Smith Summary: This article describes the National Writing Project at Kent State University’s journey into the development of a sustainable Professional Writing Retreat that not only supported teachers’ professional writing but also contributed to the development of new site leadership. The goals and priorities...
Author: Carla Gubitz Jankowski Summary: Integrating high school curricula isn’t easy, but it is worth the effort and produces powerful results for students and teachers. In this resource, a teacher describes her award-winning project to develop teaching teams that designed cross-curricular units in order to foster students’ personal and intellectual connections...
Summary: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Likewise, if a great professional development program is offered and no one shows up, was it great? Here is a collection of flyers that NWP sites have used to...
Author: Ellen Brinkley and Anne-Marie Hall Summary: Considering a leadership retreat? This article frames the experience of two site directors who used an NWP directors’ retreat as an opportunity to explore ways to invite new teacher leadership for the site. As they addressed site leader strengths, roles, and burnout, they...
Author: Molly Toussant Summary: Students often wonder why they have to write every day. In this piece, with her students as her audience, one teacher outlines and then elaborates the beliefs that guide her teaching of writing. Points of use for this article may be early in summer institutes or...
Summary: Many writing project sites raise funds by offering a series of one-day open workshops over the course of a school year. This list of workshops offered by the University of Mississippi Writing Project in 2013 may inspire teacher-leaders at other sites to think about how they could develop similar...
Author: Dina Sechio DeCristofaro Summary: What role does reading play in children’s development as writers? After surveying her fifth graders about where they get ideas for writing, the author of this piece examined the relationship between what students read and what they write. She identifies specific aspects of what her...
Author: Mark Overmeyer Summary: In this brief tip from his book, When Writing Workshop Isn’t Working, Mark Overmeyer describes a process of collaborative backward planning that provides a scope and sequence for the year that meets district curriculum requirements, allows for the study of genres connected to various disciplines and...
Summary: This coaching guide and protocol from the Southern Colorado Writing Project may be a useful resource for program leaders looking for ways to support teachers in presenting their work to colleagues. While the protocol lays out a schedule and rationale for meetings between presenting teachers and their mentors, the...