Summary: As part of the Building New Pathways to Leadership Initiative, a team of NWP teacher leaders surfaced and refined the social practices that underlie NWP teacher leadership development programs.
The National Writing Project focuses the knowledge, expertise, and leadership of our nation’s educators on sustained efforts to improve writing and learning for all learners.
NWP believes that access to high-quality educational experiences is a basic right of all learners and a cornerstone of equity. We work in partnership with institutions, organizations, and communities to develop and sustain leadership for educational improvement.
This badging framework articulates the social practices that have developed over the more than 40 years that NWP has been in existence. These practices illustrate our fundamental belief in teachers’ potential to lead both in and outside of their classrooms. At the same time, they reflect the values that inform our work: that writing is a tool for learning and reflection, that teachers’ voices should be an integral part of educational reform, that teacher research can lead to significant and important shifts in classroom practice, that collaboration strengthens our work within the classroom, and that teacher leadership and advocacy can extend our reach beyond the classroom.
By providing examples of activities or tasks of the invitational summer institute as examples of how the social practices have traditionally been introduced, shared, and taken up, we offer one set of examples that represent a small portion of the number of ways new teacher consultants might learn and take up these practices. We invite site leaders to continue to invent new possibilities and practices in NWP leadership development.