AUTHOR: Tom Fox
FROM THE BLOG: With the thriving matsutake mushroom as a metaphor, Tom Fox reflects on the process of scaling up programs without imposing uniform ideas, and the risks and changes to take and make in the process.
FROM THE BLOG: We invite interested educators and NWP teacher leaders to comment on any of the priorities that spark your interest and may benefit from your knowledge, experience, or viewpoint. Open comment periods are a great mechanism for citizen advocacy and allow the Department to take into account public support and/or concern before implementing regulations.
AUTHOR: Steve Fulton
FROM THE BLOG: The results of student civic action projects are inspiring and exciting, but the presentation of these often final products obscures difficulties, false starts, and frustrations. Steve Fulton digs into the messy, uncomfortable learning that makes authentic projects so meaningful.
AUTHOR: Zac Chase
FROM THE BLOG: Teacher Zac Chase examines traditional “get to know you” writing assignments to tease out their primary goals, and explores how we could reimagine those assignments to better meet those goals, incorporating collaboration, student inquiry, and transparency.
AUTHOR: Debbie Bell
FROM THE BLOG: When teachers hear the term “professional development,” they often think of long mandatory days of listening to speakers and administrators talk about issues that do not pertain to their teaching. I speak flippantly about these “workshops” because I endured them for over sixteen years as a middle school teacher before teaching on the university level. However, the more I work with teachers, especially through the writing project on campus, the more I realize that teachers truly want professional time to learn how to employ new pedagogical strategies to help their students. How do we, writing project sites, meet the needs of these teachers?
AUTHOR: Tom Fox
FROM THE BLOG: As a college teacher of writing, I was always uncomfortable with high school teachers asking me what they should do to prepare their students for postsecondary writing. After years of giving vague and unhelpful answers, I finally landed on a less vague, but still unhelpful answer: Don’t prepare students. Teach great high school writing and then when they get to college, I’ll teach college writing. For this reason, and to represent the expansive goals of the program, the College-Ready Writers Program is now College, Career, and Community Writers Program, or C3WP.
AUTHOR: Elyse Eidman-Aadahl
FROM THE BLOG: We celebrate the completion of Phase 1 of the NWP Archives, preserving over 40 years of NWP history for the scholars of today and tomorrow, and display some of that history in the prestigious Roswell Cases.
AUTHOR: Tanya Baker
FROM THE BLOG: As site leaders prepare for upcoming summer institutes, we wanted to share the newest titles on the NWP bookshelves related to writing: both teaching writing and supporting teacher-writers. We encourage you to think about these titles for your summer institute, for a book club, or for your writing group.
AUTHOR: Shirley McPhillips
FROM THE BLOG: It’s National Poetry Month! For inspiration, we have invited Shirley McPhillips, poet and NWP Writers Council member, to share some thinking about WHY poetry matters and HOW, as teachers and writers, we might jump into it.
AUTHOR: Jessica Early
FROM THE BLOG: When I think about my work with the Central Arizona Writing Project, Tracey Flores comes to mind. She came to my office after our first invitational summer institute in 2008 telling me, “Jessica, I have a good idea and I want to work with you and the Writing Project to make it happen.”