NWP Highlights
Dorothy Gray
Reenvisioning Site Leadership: Thursday Morning
Session
Fox Valley Writing Project & Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project
This workshop
description immediately caught my eye since I have announced my retirement
from ASWC: When change and transition are on
the horizon for writing project sites, leaders can use the opportunity to
reenvision site leadership. Two sites facing director transitions embraced
change and strengthened their leadership. The presenting sites framed
their stories of change and shared the strategies, practices, and resources
they found helpful in rethinking and reshaping site leadership. The
participants were invited to write and share tensions at their own sites
to help begin to develop strategies for addressing these tensions and to
name next steps for negotiating change, reenvisioning site leadership, and
moving ahead.
A great deal of the workshop was basically common sense tips like giving
the organization an extended amount of time to develop an action plan including
the new director’s transition time, but there were some other great
tips that could be used for other ASWC events.
This web link contains all of the session’s slides and handouts: http://kmhs.typepad.com/memoir
But here is a recap of the ideas I thought would be particularly appropriate:
Mini site planning plan:
- Reflect upon your experience in your first summer institute. Take a few moments to write about what stood out for you. What would you want to hold on from that first SI? What would you want to rethink, refine, revise? Why? Camaraderie, fun, feeling like a real writer, learning new strategies, sharing writing in response groups, meeting and connecting with new friends, having a sense of a learning community, Lynn Fry (my TC), having evening socials, being chosen by my district to go and being paid by the district, empowerment; strengthen fall follow up
- Small group share
- Reflect again. Make a wish list. Think about our site’s needs and some plans or programs you might like to see initiated and/or improved. Encourage more teachers to attend SI; add more continuity programs; find a new director and develop a transition plan; increase district memberships; continue to strengthen university connections; develop more board duties and responsibilities;
Contacting state humanities foundation for project funding: The presenters suggested that in these tight economic times, writing project sites search for as many other funding sources as possible. For example, one site director got a $250,000 grant from her state’s Humanities Forum to publish books.
Inquiry into Leadership Development: This
was another reflective idea that would work well for ASWC meetings and/or
workshops:
Step 1: Make a timeline of your history as a teacher
leader. Share in small groups, then large group.
Step 2: When was the turning point in your career
where you really felt yourself become a TC? Share in small groups,
look for commonalities, and share with whole group.
Step 3: Look for commonalities in whole group and
use the findings to help develop and refine the work of the writing project.
Joining the National Conversation on Writing: Friday
Afternoon Session
This session highlighted a program I had never heard about, the National
Conversation on Writing (NCoW) which people nationwide are interviewed about
writing and their responses are published at www.ncow.org This
group aims to make public the varied uses of writing with an interactive
website.
If you are a classroom teacher, I think this site might be
of great interest to your students because it’s an opportunity for them to reflect
upon what they write, why they write, when, and how they write. They
encourage responders to tell about the impact writing has had on their lives
via stories told via print, images, video, sound- however the responder wishes
to tell them.
They showed some very creative responses by students across the US who took
advantage of all the electronic formats currently available and ones that
today’s students are so adept at using.
Check out their website for more: www.ncow.org