An Impossible Task

In 1990 after my third year as an elementary school classroom teacher, I attended a 4 week intensive "Invitation Summer Institute" led by Dr. Fran Simone of the WV Writing Project. I eventually became involved in the leadership of that group and in the National Writing Project. Along with 39 others, I was asked to write an essay about my NWP experience to celebrate the 40th summer of holding these summer programs, which started in Berkeley, CA and spread around the country. They published my essay today: http://our.nwp.org/ Here it is:

I (along with 39 others) was asked to contribute 500-1000 words summing up what NWP means to me. I’m not sure I could do it in a book length piece, though maybe I could do it in a haiku:

Young struggling teacher

Lifted by Summer Institute

Retired Director

No, doesn’t come close. Okay, who is my audience? Is it young teachers entering the profession, floundering as I once did? Feeling overwhelmed, small, under a microscope, everyone expecting that college and student teaching has created a professional who knows the answers, but finding that it’s not as easy as it looks, and that these eager or bored or angry or sad or hurting or confused faces cannot be fooled; they know when you are confident and when you are uncertain, and they crave your certainty, your control, they want you to have all the answers, to make it easy for them, and ultimately you learn you’re all in the same boat, learning together, but the lessons are painful and lead to sleepless nights.

What can I tell the young teacher attending a summer institute for the first time—that it’s never completely under control? To have ideals, but not hold yourself to them? To understand that if you’re doing the best you can, that’s good enough? To try to create community? To listen to students, especially the ones who are the most difficult? To give everyone a voice? To write, write, write, and share, share, share? To understand that there will always be far too many demands and expectations, objectives, and content standards, and that schoolwide, districtwide, nationwide goals will come and go and ultimately you should strive to make your classroom a place where learning takes place most of the time? It sounds somewhat defeatist; but it was my Truth. And every student I have met years later has smiled when she asked, Do you remember me? Yes, even the young man last week who was picking up the garbage can from my driveway.

Or am I speaking to the NWP veteran? The Director who has spent a career in the university setting and was asked to take on this extra project and found it taking over his life and career, guiding his research, pushing him toward leadership, management, budgeting, administrative roles he never envisioned. Or am I speaking to the classroom teacher who found a home in her local writing project with like minded teachers who supported each other as writers, who listened to and responded to each other’s stories of divorce, deaths, and illnesses, of births and embarrassing moments, of likes, dislikes, travel stories, fantasy, or poetry. Who got asked and answered, Yes, and found, as I did, it was not like at school where you learned that saying yes could lead you to doing other people’s jobs, to jealousies or politics, to uncomfortable positions making presentations of new strategies or curriculum that someone else decided was best for your school or district or was purchased from a textbook company and you were to follow the script and tell others to be true to the Program. Somehow the writing project was different; the teachers were working together, supporting each other, asking questions, exploring new methods that they truly believed in, and….what is it, what’s so different about this? Oh! They’re listening to ME! They think I have ideas worth listening to! These amazing teachers who have so much to teach me think I have value? I’ve never heard that before! Yes! I will present my classroom demonstration at that workshop; I will help write that grant; I will attend that national meeting. Oh my goodness, here are these amazingly smart people from all over the country, and they all listen to each other, they all work together, they all write, they all ask questions, none of them claims to have all the answers! Yes, I’ll serve on a national committee; are you kidding? You want me, an elementary school teacher to co-direct the Rural Sites Network? Yes, I’ll write an article, participate in a study. Just say yes became my rule of thumb when it came to NWP.

Only when I saw my local writing project in danger did I say no to NWP. No, I can’t right now, I have to lead at the local level. And that was truly the hardest work, at least for me. How can anyone ask busy teachers to do more? And how can an outsider really operate in a university? But those are simply questions, the answers are, in the end simple: It’s never completely under control.  Have ideals, but don’t hold yourself to them. Understand that if you’re doing the best you can, that’s good enough. Try to create community. Listen to the teachers, especially the ones who are the most difficult. Give everyone a voice. Write, write, write, and share, share, share. Understand that there will always be far too many demands and expectations. Oh, I left out one important ingredient…celebrate success! Congratulations on 40 years of changing the lives of teachers through holding Summer Institutes and improving teaching and learning throughout the world, NWP!

A Cut that Hurts

Recent cuts to the 2011 federal budget have ended funding for the National Writing Project (NWP), an organization I care about deeply (full disclosure: for several years it has provided me a part-time job, something most teachers need). NWP received $27 million in 2010 and distributed much of it to over 200 writing project sites around the country in operating grants of under $50,000.

When I was in my third year of teaching, I participated in the West Virginia Writing Project’s “Invitational Summer Institute,” an intense program of writing, of reading research and teachers’ stories of teaching writing, and of designing and presenting demonstration lessons. This experience, as it is for many of the thousands of teachers each year who participate in NWP programs around the country, was career changing. Life changing, in some ways.

Before that, in my education classes and in professional development offerings by my school and district, I had understood that someone else had the answers and becoming a teacher, a good teacher, was a matter of doing what I was told in ways that I was told research said would work. Unfortunately, research could be found that said just about anything would work. In practice, I, like most beginning teachers, found the actual classroom experience daunting, challenging, exhausting, and often filled with failure by students who seemed to lack the skills and motivation to achieve, especially when asked to set pencil to paper.

Dr. Fran Simone, who served as director of West Virginia Writing Project at that time, created an atmosphere in which each teacher felt valued as a member of a professional community searching for the best possible answers to the questions and challenges the classroom experience presented. We became better writers and created a caring community by sharing our stories, which were often personal in nature. Over a few weeks of full day workshops and evenings working on our own writing, we learned more from each other than from any article or book that we read, though we learned from them as well, especially the ones written by other classroom teachers whose writing was more accessible than university based researchers, and whose classroom experiences rang true. Through this transformative experience, I became a better teacher, a better person—one who began learning to nurture the voices of students, to encourage their self-expression and through that to impact their skills and their motivation to learn.

In the years that followed that experience, I implemented many of the practices and lessons I had observed—not all at once, but as I was ready and able. Eventually, I became a leader and innovator, and have been recognized by NWP and the College Board for the work I’ve done at Ruffner Elementary School. In a perfect world, the type of professional learning community created through the NWP model would be re-created in every school and district in the country. However, it rarely occurs in schools.

Perhaps it is too much to expect teachers to share their successes and failures, frustrations, their personal stories with those who evaluate them and pay their salaries. Perhaps only an outside player like NWP, a university/district collaboration, can fill that role.

During my twenty-four year teaching career, I have had the opportunity to do for others what Dr. Simone did for me: facilitate professional learning communities with teachers who come voluntarily during the summer to improve their classroom practice involving writing. Now this program may come to an end. It will not cause closures of schools or layoffs of large numbers of teachers. It will not immediately impact student achievement throughout the country. However, multiple studies have found that students of teachers who have been through NWP programs on average write significantly better than students of teachers who don’t.

In a time when the challenges teachers face and the expectations the public has for them continue to mount, we should be putting more funding into cost effective programs such as NWP, which leverages support at three dollars for each federal dollar.

Some argue that the role of the federal government should be limited to defense, enforcing laws, and providing (as little as possible) for the neediest among us. Education, they insist, is only a local concern. But it takes more than a village to raise a nation of children who will be able to compete in this global economy, and we should not be throwing out any effective programs that are improving their chances of doing so.