Learning Experiences from NWP and NCTE Day 1

This year, I've been fortunate enough to attend the National Writing Project meeting and the National Council for Teachers of English conference in St. Louis, Missouri. I was sad to hear that this would be the last NWP meeting at NCTE for the foreseeable future, due to financial constraints. However, the meetings have been a meaningful experience to me each year I have attended, so I was happy to hear that NCTE is still going to have NWP as a part of the conference in the form of NWP sessions.

My Thursday morning at the National Writing Project started bright and early, as my colleagues and I presented at the first "About Writing" roundtable. Dr. Jennifer Dail and Mary Ann Stillerman have been talking for a long time about how to best utilize social media for the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project. At our last KMWP Advisory Council meeting in August, we discussed this concept in more depth.  I had ideas to contribute in part because of my social media and website work that I did as the Red Clay Scholar at the UGA Writing Project site for three years. Therefore, Jen and Mary Ann were gracious enough to ask me if I wanted to participate in their NWP meeting roundtable. After getting permission from my school, I accepted the invitation. Using this handout that Jen created, in part from the inspiration of a brainstorming meeting that Mary Ann and I had in October, we participated in the "About Writing" roundtable session. We shared and received many wonderful ideas about how to better use social media not only to promote Writing Project events, but also to encourage the exchange writing and pedagogy ideas amid educators. It's a conversation I'm eager to continue over time.

For the second half of the "About Writing" roundtable session, I went to a wonderful discussion of women in leadership and how female Writing Project leaders rejuvenate themselves through a writing group. They use writing prompts to encourage this community and shared some of these prompts with us, while asking us to add resources to the googledoc that might be helpful.  The prompts, along with the discussion we had, prove to be helpful for thinking about what a writing community might look like, both inside and outside of classroom settings.

After the lunch and keynote, I went to the roundtable session called "Teachers as Writers." Representatives from the Alaska Writing Project gave us wonderful ideas about how to engage the community with writing projects:

Their #reverbwriting idea is one that I can see trying in my own classroom and/or in a Writing Project setting. In the second part of the "Teachers as Writers" workshop, a representative from The Virgin Islands Writing Project talked to us about the work she has teachers do throughout the year to create a professionally published anthology. I received a copy of Voices From Behind the Scenes: Teachers' Experiences in the Classroom Expressed through Poetry and Prose (Ed. Valerie Knowles Combie), which is available online for purchase.

The last roundtable session, "Teacher Inquiry" was my favorite one of the day. The Boston Writing Project/University of Massachusetts Writing Project taught us an amazing questioning technique based on inquiry principles, of which this is literally only a snapshot:

They also taught us about the impressive work their Invitational Summer Institute does surrounding issues of race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Their inquiry questions are truly conducive to having productive conversations about tough issues. One of the TC's who spoke also described project-based learning activities she does at her K12 school utilizing some of these same inquiry and questioning techniques, which benefitted me as a middle school teacher.

Lastly, The Lake Michigan Writing Project shared this link with us, which has some incredible activities surrounding Ekphrastic writing based on Stanford Design Thinking principles. I was excited about this session because the suggestions were very pragmatic for my seventh grade writing course at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School. Additionally, their design thinking principles apply specifically to my school setting.

My day ended with me attended the #whymiddlematters 25th Anniversary Celebration of the journal Voices from the Middle. Dr. Sara Kajder, an important mentor to me, is one of the editors of this journal, and I'm thrilled to see how much it continues to influence the field. I just renewed my membership to NCTE, which now includes a regular subscription to this amazing journal. One of my current writing goals is to eventually publish an article in Voices from the Middle or a similar journal based on project-based learning work I am doing in the middle school classroom. The anniversary party included several well-known literacy educators: Bob Probst, Donalyn Miller, and Kylene Beers, among others. This gathering was a tribute to middle school teaching, in addition to being a celebration of the journal's success.

I'm still processing Day 2 of my NCTE experience, but my upcoming blog posts will include my next adventures in St. Louis: Hearing Dr. Jimmy Santiago Baca speak for the first time in a decade, now as a more seasoned teacher; Angie Thomas's talk at the CEE luncheon; meeting and hearing favorite authors of children's and YA literature; sessions I and my colleagues attended related to digital literacy, inquiry, and discussions around fake news; and my second presentation on Saturday, which we've been planning since January 2017. Until then, my friends and colleagues, Happy Thanksgiving season.