In Washington, DC working for us

Hundreds of teacher-leaders from the National Writing Project (NWP) are gathering in DC tomorrow to urge Congress to restore funding for the highly successful program. The teachers' annual trip to Capitol Hill has taken on a whole new level of urgency this year, as the recently enacted stopgap spending bill eliminated all of NWP's federal funding.

"The budget bill signed by President Obama on March 2 represents a titanic shift in the nation's decades-long commitment to improving literacy," said Sharon J. Washington, NWP executive director. "In one fell swoop the federal government defunded our most important and effective writing, reading, and teacher improvement programs. This is bad for the country on so many levels." (from NWP's website)

Red River Valley Writing Project co-director Kelly Sassi and teacher consultants Karen Taylor and Alissa Helms are in Washington this moment, getting ready to talk with our legislators.

NWP E-Voice

Welcome to E-Voice, the National Writing Project's bi-monthly email newsletter that provides news updates, links to articles of interest to writing teachers, and other information about the NWP community.

There are myriad ways to connect with NWP online. The E-Voice is one of those many. To learn more about it, click the hyperlinked text above.

Keep on

Here are three ways you can help influence our federal government to restore funding for the National Writing Project (NWP) before the next continuing resolution on budget expires on April 8th, 2011. (from Cooperative Catalyst)

Please consider taking action.

Author and teen collaboration

In a heartwarming session, which had at least one audience member in tears, popular young adult novelist Walter Dean Myers and his now 17-year-old co-author Ross Workman described the process of writing a book together.

As a bit of background, Workman wrote a fan letter to Myers when he was 13. He received a staggering response: Myers suggested that the two collaborate on a novel. Four years and countless drafts over e-mail later, Kick was completed. (Liena Heitin at Teaching Now)

Do standardized tests measure student learning?

Teachers often explain how testing narrows the curriculum, limits the variety of student learning opportunities, emphasizes basic skills, and fails to measure higher level thinking such as creativity. Teachers feel that they help students learn so much more than what is reflected on test scores. The majority of teachers do not teach in subjects and grade levels that are tested.

The recent National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) Report, Student Learning, Student Achievement, adds to this "counts versus counted" dialogue by describing the differences between student achievement and student learning. (Patrick Ledesma at Leading from the Classroom)

Do follow the hyperlinked text above and read the whole piece about standardized tests and student learning.

Teaching elsewhere

Officials from countries like Finland and Singapore described how they have built a high-performing teaching profession by enabling all of their teachers to enter high-quality preparation programs, generally at the masters’ degree level, where they receive a salary while they prepare. There they learn research-based teaching strategies and train with experts in model schools attached to their universities. They enter a well-paid profession – in Singapore earning as much as beginning doctors -- where they are supported by mentor teachers and have 15 or more hours a week to work and learn together – engaging in shared planning, action research, lesson study, and observations in each other’s classrooms. And they work in schools that are equitably funded and well-resourced with the latest technology and materials. (Linda Darling-Hammond at the Washington Post)

The above comes from Darling-Hammond's piece on the recent International Summit on Teaching that was held in New York City.

More about NWP's many virtues

I think the following four points from“Understanding the Effectiveness of the National Writing Project” say it better than I could.

• Writng is essential to learning.
• The NWP is already shown to be effective, innovative, and cost—efficient at improving writing.
• The NWP is able to accomplish this because it has built up a national
  Infrastructure of linked sites that build
  leadership and deliver local services.
• Federal support is vitally important to the NWP’s ability to continue improving writing. (from Hi, I'm Steve Moore)
  

A reason to Tweet?

Kelly Gallagher is in da house. What? Kelly Gallagher is on Twitter. To follow him, click here.

Gallagher's website (not the his Twitter page) includes the sort of standard fare of an author, certainly worth looking at it. The site also includes links to the articles he's used for Article of the Week.

Blogging for NWP a success

I send heartfelt thanks to all of you championing the National Writing Project and its vital work in professional development and the lifting up of teacher and student voices.

Below you will find listed the posts submitted as part of #blog4nwp. Our big blogging push will be over the weekend of March 18th, 2011, but I will certainly also include #blog4nwp posts from earlier in the week, as well as those that follow thereafter.

The above comes from Chan Sansing's blog The Cooperative Catalyst. To check out the blog posts about the National Writing Project, click here.

Blogging to save NWP

On March 2nd, 2001, President Obama signed a spending bill to keep the federal government operating during budget season. The bill cut federal funding to the NWP as part of a Congressional effort to eliminate earmarks – federal funds legislated to support certain programs like the NWP. While pork-barrel projects are, perhaps, easy political targets for elected officials looking to make names for themselves as no-nonsense fiscal conservatives, the NWP is not a pork-barrel project and it makes no sense to eliminate funding to the NWP, a program with a proven track record in raising student achievement that provides teachers and students with authentic opportunities for communication, inquiry, and problem-solving – opportunities to practice those deservedly ballyhooed skills our students need to be college-, community-, and life-ready.

The NWP undoubtedly deserves to be saved. (from Cooperative Catalyst)

This, a rebroadcast of the first post of this blog, is RRVWP's contribution to blogging about the National Writing Project to save NWP. (The blogging project was initiated by Chad Sansing at Cooperative Catalyst.) The history of RRVWP is a testament to the power of the National Writing Project and how that power contributes to learning in a particular region of this country.

The Red River Valley Writing Project (RRVWP) is one of over 160 sites serving teachers from all geographical regions, at all grade levels, across all content areas. As site of the National Writing Project, the RRVWP receives federal grant funds which are then matched by funds from the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction, the University of North Dakota College of Arts and Sciences, and the University of North Dakota Department of Teaching & Learning within the College of Education and Human Development. The goals of this project are to create a network of teachers who can share their success in teaching writing, to develop a community of teachers who are also writers, to encourage professional growth in the teaching of writing, and to improve the writing of students across the curriculum at all levels.

RRVWP's beginning is not unlike that of the NWP...a few people coming together to try to improve the teaching of writing in schools. At the University of California at Berkeley, in 1974 Jim Gray and a handful of colleagues established the Bay Area Writing Project, a university-based program K-16.

In East Grand Forks, Minnesota, and Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 1999, a handful of colleagues established the Red River Valley Writing Project, a University of North Dakota-based program. UND English professor the late Dan Sheridan, his wife Judy, then an English teacher at East Grand Forks HIgh School, and Nancy Devine, a Grand Forks Public School English teacher, talked and met and talked and met some more. Ellen Brinkley and Carol Tateishi, representing NWP, came to the area to get these three teachers and a young writing project site up and running in 1999.

In just a little over 10 years, RRVWP has held summer invitational institutes, open institutes and advanced institutes, planned and implemented professional development, and sustained book clubs. But print hardly captures the relationships, laughs, sorrows, triumphs of our site, founded in 1999 by the late Dan Sheridan.

RRVWP is certainly about learning to be better teachers of writing as well as becoming better writers. But it's also about making it possible for teachers across content areas and grade levels (K-16) to connect so that they can do the essential, albeit difficult, work in our classrooms.

Digital is.....

My experiences with Twitter made me revisit important lessons as a writer and as a teacher of writing. What I learned through tweeting has applications for each writing teacher and writer. (from Keri Franklin's piece on Twitter at Digital Is)

Franklin is director of Ozark Writing Project at Missouri State University.

To check out Digital Is, click here.

Is standardization good for education?

When “collaboration” is really code for standardization, professional development becomes nothing more than control over actions.

Just like how mandated sentences strips judgement from judges, so too does standardization deny teachers the ability to teach. Maja Wilson puts it this way:

Mandating practices in the effort to improve teaching paradoxically creates the kind of environment that undermines good teaching. [Standardization] contributes to an environment that actually stunts teachers’ ability to make good decisions in the classroom and obscures bad teaching with its illusion of uniformity.

(all of the above come from The Cooperative Catalyst)

NCTE's call to action

Help Prevent Elimination of Funding for Striving Readers
and the National Writing Project

Please Contact Your Senators and Representative Now!

The Senate, House, and President have eliminated funding for Striving Readers and the National Writing Project (NWP).

As an NCTE member who supports solid reading and writing instruction and teacher professional development, please send messages to your Senators and Representative asking them

• to restore funding for Striving Readers and
• to restore funding for National Writing Project.

(from the website of the National Council of Teachers of English)

Keep working

Yes, this is a re-broadcast. But the need is still there.

To help NWP continue to make its case for federal funding, please tell Congress:"Don't Write Off the National Writing Project!"

• We encourage you to write letters to your senators and representatives letting them know about the important work and positive impact of NWP.
  
  
• Please also ask others—friends, family and colleagues—to send letters too.
  
  
• Volume—as many letters as possible—and as personalized as possible, is important to help NWP make its case.

You can learn more about contacting your legislators here.

More NCLB

More than three-quarters of the nation's public schools could soon be labeled "failing" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the Obama administration said Wednesday as it increased efforts to revamp the signature education initiative of President George W. Bush. (Nick Anderson at the Washington Post)

What next? Thoughts?

Sharing a story

It's as if we share a secret--my students and me--a secret that people who don't read can't understand. We know that books hold magic inside them. We know that books ease pain. We know that books rescue boring afternoons. We know that the best books sink into our skin and change who we are. This is my hope for my students--that they find a powerful book that becomes a part of them. The baggage of their lives should include a book or two. (Donalyn Miller at The Book Whisperer blog)

Very disappointing

Berkeley, CA, March 6, 2011 – On March 2, President Obama signed a bill eliminating direct federal funding for the National Writing Project (NWP), the nation's leading effort to improve writing and learning in the digital age.

This decision puts in grave jeopardy a nationwide network of 70,000 teachers who, through 200 university-based Writing Project sites, provide local leadership for innovation and deliver localized, high-quality professional development to other educators across the country in all states, across subjects and grades. In the last year alone, these leaders provided services to over 3,000 school districts to raise student achievement in writing.

This comes from Sharon J. Washington, executive director of the National Writing Project. To read the entire statement, click on the hyperlinked text above.

History in characters

The Washington Post is tweeting the Civil War. Here some information on the tweets.

The Post is tweeting the Civil War in the words of the people who lived it - from journals, letters, records and newspapers.

CivilWarwp Atty Gen Edwd Bates: "Pres Lincoln's 1st Cabinet Council--intended, I suppose 2 b formal & introductory only--in fact, uninteresting." about 16 hours ago via HootSuite

This would be a great way for students to learn about the Civil War. To learn more, click on the tweet above.

Author on reading

[Toni] Morrison began the talk with a childhood recollection of learning how to read, which she remembered as difficult “in the sense of having a hard time looking for meaning in and beyond the words.” The common first-grade phrase “Run, Spot, run” presented her with great difficulty, because it led her to the question of “why?” (Anastasia Lloyd-Damnjanovic at The Daily Princetonian)


The above comes from an interesting piece in which Morrison talks about what reading entails.

More to learn

By now you’ve likely heard that President Obama signed a short term bill to fund the government for the next two weeks that eliminated four billion dollars in education funding. The cuts eliminate virtually every literacy program funded by the Department of Education, including the National Writing Project, but also Teach for America, Reading Is Fundamental, and Arts in Education, to name a few of the better known programs. (from The Write Space: a blog for teachers and writers affiliated with the Connecticut Writing Project)

Do click the above hyperlinked text and read the entire blog post.

Working together

...Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), the nation's largest children's literacy nonprofit, and the National Writing Project (NWP) announced the release of The Curious Adventures of Sydney and Symon in: Water Wonders, an original chapter book for children ages 6-8.

The book is the second creative collaboration between the two organizations and FableVision, Inc., an educational media developer and K12 software publisher founded by New York Times best-selling author and illustrator Peter H. Reynolds and his twin brother Paul A. Reynolds. (from NWP's website)

Take action

Please call your senators immediately and urge them to maintain support for NWP in their FY 2011 budget for the Department of Education. The Senate announced that it will take up the continuing resolution for the current year’s budget (FY 2011) on March 1.

On February 19, the House of Representative passed a budget for FY 2011 that contains deep cuts in education, including elimination of the National Writing Project. Attention now moves to the Senate which will take up the budget discussion on March 1 when Congress returns from recess. To ensure that NWP is included in the budget, please tell Congress:

"Don't Write Off the National Writing Project!"

(from NWP Works!)

And....

In celebration of the National Education Association's Read Across America Day, March 2, NWP has gathered a collection of its resources to promote reading enthusiasm, strategies for teaching reading, and ways to foster reading-writing connections. (from NWP)

Click the hyperlinked text above to look at those resources.

Lonely voices

Is teaching like this? Enjoy the next bit from Good.

The cryptozoologist Oll Lewis speculates that the lonely whale might be "a deformed hybrid between two different species of whale," or even "the last surviving member of an unknown species." Gagliano points out that the whale's plight, though poignant, has a silver lining for scientists:

Because this one whale’s song is totally different than any other whale’s, it’s easy to track it and hear how its voice changes over time. So now we know, for instance, that a whale’s voice gets deeper as it ages.