What Is Your Site Reading for the 2014 Invitational Summer Institute?

Date: April 24, 2014

Summary: The inaugural NWP Radio show in 2010 focused on this question. Four years later, we again asked NWP sites to talk about what their sites are going to be reading together in Summer Institutes around the country. We also took up questions about what has changed and stayed the same as the Common Core Standards have come online and ever more content is available digitally.

Excerpt from Show

Ellen Shelton, director of the University of Mississippi Writing Project , on their use of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird during their Summer Institute:

One book that we come back to over and over is Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, because we have to develop teachers as writers. It's really interesting with the Common Core discussions, this is becoming incredibly relevant, because Common Core is so large that a lot of teachers feel intimidated by it. So we kind of use that analogy of taking it "bird-by-bird" for incorporating Common Core into the classroom. The text gives teachers permission to fail at writing, and even writing instruction, but they get the idea that they have to keep trying it over and over again."