Teachers taking time out of an already shortened summer to learn how to get better at teaching. Sounds like it should be a headline, doesn’t it? Every year thousands of teachers from all levels, content areas, and backgrounds come together in the National Writing Project’s Summer Institute.  Sites across the country seek nominations of worthy applicants, hold interviews, and select the very best of our profession to become Fellows for the summer. Last week was the beginning for our group and what a week it was.

We start off every day by writing for half an hour.  What a gift to be able to sit and write unencumbered by lesson plans, small children, or buzzing cell phones.  Our start coincided with the writing camp for teachers started by Kate Messner called Teachers Write http://www.katemessner.com/blog/ so some of us use that as our starting point. As I look around the room I see some writing furiously, anxious to get the words down before they are lost.  Others are gazing, thinking, wondering.  All are quiet, gathering thoughts and words.

Each of the Fellows must give a presentation of a lesson that worked for them that might be adapted for other teachers to use.  They are very nervous in front of their peers, though all are exemplary teachers. It’s different with kids they’ll tell you and these teachers want so much to be good, to have the others gains some knowledge or skills from their sharing. So far, they’ve been wonderful. We’ve learned about creating visual journals, making online magazines (e-zines), and using mentor texts to extend our students’ writing. Each presentation has added to our tool kit for the fall. We are getting ready.

Some afternoons we meet in Writing Groups so we know what it feels like to share our work with others and receive feedback.  Gradually, we learn to trust each other and to be honest yet kind.  Our goal is to make the writing better.  Through our discussions, we do. We are learning to write about what matters, to write about the thing we need to write about, to write the stories only we can tell.  We laugh, we cry, we learn what community feels like.  It feels really, really good.  We want our kids to feel this, too.  We want to learn how to make this happen in our classrooms.

We read articles about reading and writing and discuss them like grownups.  We agree, we disagree, and through our discussions, we determine what kind of teachers we are and what kind of teachers we want to become.  We love teaching, every one of us.  We are willing and ready to do the work it takes to become the kind of teachers our students deserve.

It’s an honor to be part of this process.  That sounds like a headline, too.