Teachers, Tribes, and Perspectives
I have just arrived home from WWP week. We departed last Sunday for Gillette, Wyoming, where we worked with twelve teachers. We shared practical writing instruction ideas and research and had much needed time to discuss our own practice and our own questions and conundrums. The conclusion: Teaching and assessing writing is messy and we need more collaboration and more time to do it well. Our feedback after our professional development time was similar to what we've received in the past. We were told it was great to spend time together talking about teaching, that there's never enough time to do that, and that they'd like us to come back during the school year and continue the support. So many teachers feel unsupported and unsure about the teaching and assessing of writing from the earliest elementary levels to senior levels in high school. There are so many things we could do if we could find the magic mix of funding and relationship with...