Reports from the Field: The Pleasures and Perils of Working in Under-Resourced Schools

Date: February 8, 2018

Summary: Join us as we discuss the twists and turns of doing intensive professional development in high-need schools with facilitators from Writing Project sites participating in NWP's College, Career, and Community Writers Program.

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Joe Ferro, middle school ELA teacher and San Diego Area Writing Project teacher-consultant on his favorite aspect of the C3WP curriculum:

I think one of the things that I like the best is the recursive nature of things. There are things that you learn when you start, when you lay out the cycles you want to teach, when you want to look at student work, that come back up again and again, but not in a way that feels like we're just giving students more of the same thing. It's not just about writing, it's about thinking, and students get a lot of practice with that throughout the units. Both in small bites, through developing claims and making them more nuanced and really workshopping that with their peers, to doing multiple paragraph, multi-draft writing pieces that show effort and time, but it's also done within a window that doesn't take nine weeks, so kids really enjoy that we can talk about a concept and wrestle with it and engage with it, and sit in that discomfort and learn the skills, but then we also get to move on...These units allow us to sometimes leave the content, the subject matter...behind and then move onto another concept, but teach the same skills. I think kids really appreciate that."

Guests

• Joe Ferro, middle school ELA teacher and San Diego Area Writing Project teacher-consultant
• Sarah Hunt-Barron, Upstate Writing Project teacher-consultant

More about the College, Career, and Community Writers Program...