SAN MARCOS —— Teachers who write make better writing teachers.That simple assumption drives the National Writing Project, afederally funded program founded in San Francisco in 1974 with alocal chapter in San Marcos.
“It would be difficult to teach someone how to drive a car ifyou didn’t know how drive yourself,” said Mary Ann Smith, directorof governmental relations and public affairs. Teaching writingwithout writing oneself is equally difficult, Smith said.
The National Writing Project offers teachers in every subjectand grade from kindergarten to college a network of writingcontacts, classes, ideas, resources and other supports, accordingto the project’s Web site, www.nwp.org.
One of the writing project’s key programs is the SummerInstitute. Each summer for the past 31 years, teachers haveconvened in small groups to write, think about how they write andshare ideas about writing.
The “thinking about writing” is an fundamental part of thewriting project, Smith said.
“In experiencing writing, you rethink what kinds of supportshelp you write well,” she said, “and therefore what kind ofinterventions will help your students write well.”
Locally, the San Marcos Writing Project, founded in 2000 byprofessor Laurie Stowell at Cal State San Marcos, is one of 189local chapters of that national program. Now in its fifth year, theSan Marcos Writing Project is coming of age, said Stowell.
“We’re just now getting people to take notice,” Stowell said,who in early July won the 2005 Wang Family Excellence Award,recognizing outstanding faculty in the California State Universitysystem.
“It’s taken us five years to build capacity,” she continued. “Wenow have a pool of 120 good teachers, and we’re paying closeattention to what teachers need.”
For the past three weeks, teachers from districts across NorthCounty have been meeting at the university from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.four days a week for the San Marcos Writing Project SummerInstitute. The 20 days of writing and presenting and learning overfive weeks earn each teacher-participant $1,000, paid by acombination of state and federal grants.
Each morning is given to presentations on some aspect ofteaching writing. Every participant must present on some writingtopic once during the five-week institute.
On Wednesday, Tom Spain, a teacher at Fallbrook High School anda former North County Times copy editor, shared ideas about how tocreate a student newspaper. Spain and his students have published amonthly school newspaper, now called the Tomahawk, for the past sixyears.
During his 90-minute presentation, Spain asked teachers to writea journalistic news account of a fairy tale. The room buzzed whilethe teams decided on a fairy tale and made plans, followed by aquiet few minutes of writing. Then these grown adults, teachersall, laughed aloud, shouted and whispered plot turns and dialogueas they tapped out their stories on laptops or scratched them outlonghand.
The afternoons are given to writing, and the teacher-writersguard that writing time ferociously, Stowell said. They work onprofessional writing such as articles for submission to teachingmagazines, journal writing, fiction and nonfiction stories, poetry—— any kind of writing is fair game. The idea, Stowell and Smithagree, is to experience the struggle, the uncertainty, thediscovery and joy that writing can bring.
“It sounded like a great way to feel more comfortable with mywriting so I could help my kids with writing,” said CindyHuffstutter, a sixth-grade teacher at Ashley Falls School in DelMar. Huffstutter was inspired by Stowell, who came to Ashley Fallsto talk about the six common traits of good writing instruction.The presentation got Huffstutter and fifth-grade colleague AndreaCannon curious about the Summer Institute.
“I want (my students) to be more excited about writing, to belifelong writers instead of just writing to an assignment,” Cannonsaid during a break in the sweltering fourth-floor universityclassroom Wednesday.
Both teachers will take the presentations they’ve seen and theideas they’ve collected back to their school to present to theircolleagues. The “teachers teaching teachers” idea is a core valueof the writing project, Stowell said.
“They’ve really grown in impact out in the schools,” said JayneMarlink of the California Writing Project, the state affiliate.”It’s common with a new site to invest so much in teachers thatthey forget that the goal is move that expertise out into schools.They’ve grown a number of new leadership teams in schools on thestate’s program improvement list.”
In addition to the Summer Institute, the San Marcos WritingProject has hosted several “Young Writer Camps” during the summermonths for local students from first to ninth grades.Teacher-participants of the past Summer Institutes gather severaltimes each year to share ideas, renew friendships and share theirwriting.
