Northern Virginia Writing Project Newsletters

George and I hanging out at Gunston Hall

Summer Newsletter July, 2024

To see the summer sky is poetry.

Emily Dickinson

Happy summer, everyone! I hope you are enjoying some relaxation and rejuvenation in these quick-moving days. I have been nursing a broken wrist (my dominant hand, of course) and just getting to the point where I can do some typing with two hands. Which is a good thing, because I have lots of NVWP information to tell you.

I’ll start with the past year and sum up the events we hosted.

· Monthly writing workshops on Zoom

· Holiday cookie swap, sharing of writing (and cookies)

· Two teacher professional development workshops

· Establishment of both an NVWP page and a Virginia sites page on NWP’s Write Now Teacher Studio.

· Monthly zoom meetings with leaders of Virginia sites

· Continued use of the Disinformation, Misinformation, and Truth Deep Dive, also on the Write Now Teacher Studio

· Continued zoom book club meetings on the Teacher Studio, hosted by Jonathan Marine, and focusing on the work of James Moffett.

We have also participated in the 50th Anniversary celebration of the National Writing Project, and in John Dutton’s Scribblecon 2024.

Time for a commercial break:

Participants in a Summer Institute

(circa 1980)

I am pretty close to this vintage TC look (1984). But I wanted to inspire your help in spreading the news that we will be hosting a Teacher Writer Institute (hybrid, six-module program) based on the important teaching tools I learned in the Summer Institute and continue to use today. We will offer one in the fall of ‘24 and one in the spring of ’25. I will post an announcement on the NVWP website, but please tell your colleagues about this opportunity

I’ve probably missed some events, so please feel free to add. Some of these events will continue in the ’24-’25 school year. We’ve done some preliminary planning, which includes:

· A workshop that focuses on teachers’ personal writing, including forming writing groups, navigating the publication world and possibilities, preparing a manuscript for publication, and more. We hope to get this together by ate September.

· Connected to this idea, we will have a table at Fall for the Book (GMU literary festival) just for published TC’s; as soon as I hear the arrangements. I’ll pass it on to you. Fall for the Book takes place in mid-October.

· We are hoping to have a writing instruction workshop that can shed more light on expectations for the new SOL’s and how to prepare students to write meaningfully for these standards. We are looking towards January for this, to give us some time to get some school-directed PD and to let the dust settle

· We will continue to offer monthly writing workshops on Zoom, generally on Wednesdays. We’ll post a list of ideas and invite you to add to the list, both your ideas and your interest in hosting one of these workshops.

· I’ve been playing around with this idea since I moved into this position and hope we can at least begin to put it into some tangible form. We have been talking about offering a Saturday morning workshop that will include: coaching you in presenting your PD lesson you developed as a part of your. Work for the Institute; creating a blurb describing the lesson, taping a quick video of you introducing the lesson (and you), and, if at all possible, putting the descriptions and videos online to form a kind of catalog for Professional Development in writing instruction that schools can access. This kind of experience was important to serving as a TC back in the day, so that teachers could take a step towards confident leadership and be paid something for their efforts.

Please think about this idea and consider participating. Schools will need good PD in writing instruction, now that the. state has decided to value it once again.

· We have also been hoping we could arrange a gathering for TCs from different years and different forms of participation in NVWP’s work to celebrate NWP’s 50th. If you are going to NCTE (and I hope you are), there will be a big celebration on the Thursday of the conference and I believe a Sunday brunch. But I would like us to have our own time together to talk about our experiences. If anyone has ideas how and where this might happen, please share.

· I urge every TC and anyone interested in NWP to use the Write Now Teacher Studio. There is so much offered on this communication platform: workshops, lesson plans, discussions, book clubs, writing groups, deep dives, communication with any and all sites. You can jump on and set up a group focus that interests you.

Clearly I haven’t had much conversation this summer,

so I will cut myself off. My greatest hope for this year is that we can expand participation in NVWP events and different leadership roles to handle the logistics and activities for these events. I don’t know about you, but the end of the school year left me feeling depressed and exhausted, and I found the only way to escape this was to just keep moving. I got a little word bead bracelet from Peloton with “Just F---ing Do It” and while crude in expression, I found the message a reminder I needed. All of this is to say, think about what you’d love to do as part of the Writing Project and let us know how we can help.

I wish you all the best for the rest of the summer, as we gird our loins for what promises to be a crazy fall, on so many fronts. Save a piece of the summer vibe for the fall.

Sincerely,

Leslie