Much has changed since the National Writing Project was launched in the 1970s. But even as it changes itself, the NWP still emphasizes the power of teachers helping each other—to become better writers.
by Matt Freeman
In 1973, manufacturing accounted for one out of three jobs in the United States. A high school graduate could go to a steel mill or auto plant and earn enough to raise a family without ever having to write much more than the occasional shopping list.
But of course writing skill was vital for success in the academic and professional world. And administrators at the University of California, Berkeley, had become concerned enough about the quality of student writing there to invite 25 teachers of writing to participate in a summer institute on improving their teaching skills.
The next year, the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) Invitational Summer Institute was held. It was launched by Jim Gray, a writing teacher who believed that teachers who had devised successful strategies for teaching their students to write well should share those strategies with other teachers.
The BAWP held workshops in the area, garnering publicity, and in 1976 it received its first National Endowment for the Humanities grant. The need for such sharing of strategies was clear enough from the start. During those first few years, presenters would sometimes ask the teachers attending to raise their hands if they had ever been offered a university course in how to teach writing, or had ever been asked to demonstrate their best teaching practices for their colleagues. No hands ever went up. Clearly the need and enthusiasm were there, and by 1978, what was now called the National Writing Project (NWP) had expanded to 41 local sites.
Writing has always been one of the traditional three “Rs,” a foundational skill necessary to clarify and express one’s learning and thought. But the world has changed since the 1970s, and in today’s knowledge-based economy, the ability to convey information clearly is more and more a key life skill for everyone. Manufacturing now accounts for 1 job in 10—and today’s factory is far more technically demanding. Workplace literacy demands generally have risen sharply, and effective writing in particular is considered a key skill.
College professors and employers continually ask that young people get better training in writing. In 2003, the College Board’s National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges issued a report titled The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution. The report recommended much more emphasis on student writing, knowing as it did that in 2005, the SAT would begin to include a writing component.
“Writing has now become even more important than it was years ago,” says Richard Sterling, executive director of the NWP. Writing instruction should be part of every subject, Sterling says, it should be taught early on in one’s school career, and it should continue on throughout everyone’s education. Nothing helps you organize your thinking as well as writing, Sterling says; done well, it forces you to state things in a way that is coherent, cogent, and clear.
But he understands that teachers and administrators burdened with pressure to raise reading and math scores have enough work already. “It’s hard to get this message across,” Sterling says, “because teachers are overwhelmed.”
The good news is that today there are nearly 200 NWP local sites that generate summer workshops and other activities. Some 141,000 educators take part every year, from kindergarten to college level and in all the disciplines. Teachers attend summer institutes at their local writing project sites where they examine their classroom practice, conduct research, and develop their own writing skills. Then they take those skills back and share them during the year with other teachers in their buildings and districts.
Sterling says that the same technological change that makes writing more crucial for everyone also can help educators. Text messaging, the increasing ease of website creation, and the popularity of blogs and social networking sites like MySpace have vastly increased the number of young people writing for a real audience.
“Writing is now everywhere,” Sterling says. “There’s an explosion of writing.” And of course there’s an ongoing revolution in the ways writing is combined with sound and images. This gets kids motivated about writing for real, self-chosen purposes, and that is a boon for educators. But Sterling says one problem is that currently, the excitement and innovation is happening outside of school. The challenge, he says, is to make the school environment as challenging and engaging as the nonschool options for expression.
Sterling identifies three important principles that underlie reform in the teaching of writing:
Teachers of writing should write themselves. In the NWP approach, teachers are encouraged to build writing into their working day. At the workshops, teachers write and then share their work, putting principles they’re learning into practice.
Use a broad range of techniques. Sterling says NWP discourages the one-size-fits-all formula approach to teaching writing. The teachers involved with the NWP are encouraged to help individual students explore different processes and see what works for them.
Encourage students to write a lot. Effective writers write in many different formats and for many different reasons. Formal essays, stories, and letters are meant to be shared. Out-lines, notes, jottings usually aren’t—but all these types of writing and more have value, Sterling says, and can be important elements of the writer’s tool kit. Writers are collectors, saving bits and pieces for possible future use, and this approach helps students start their collection. “It’s that habit that we want to instill in young people,” he says.
Sterling says the NWP approach emphasizes sharing one’s work, keeping in mind its purpose and audience. The idea is to get teachers to think about how to provide a number of different audiences for young people. The most important audience for them, he says, is their peers. This requires careful management—teens can be less than tactful about each other’s work—but handled well they can create powerful critiquing groups. “It’s a very good strategy for young people to know,” Sterling says.
Sharing writing with other educators is powerful too: Sterling says teachers who engage in critiquing groups at NWP workshops sometimes find the practice so helpful for their own writing that the groups are voluntarily continued for many years. “This is a gift,” the teachers say—it puts them back in touch with the excitement about literature and creativity that brought them into the profession.
That core of sharing and learning together, face to face, is reflected even as NWP prepares to launch a revision of its website (www.writingproject.org) in June. Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, who is leading the website revision, says there will be information about how new digital tools are being used by students and how teachers can use them for their own professional development. And there will be more about current subjects of interest, like meeting the needs of English-language learners.
But Eidman-Aadahl says the main emphasis of the new site will be to put teachers in touch with the nearest local site, where they can take part in workshops and learn how to bring their new skills back to share with other educators. It’s the same message Jim Gray believed was worth trying more than 30 years ago.
According to Sterling, that message is winning more and more converts—not just in reading and English classes, but in sciences, social studies, and history. “It’s heartening seeing that recognition, even coming late as it does” he says. With writing growing in importance, though, it may be a case of better late than never.
Matt Freeman is a freelance writer and the former managing editor of Reading Today.
National Writing Project’s time-tested approach evolves and adapts to a new millennium. (June 2007). Reading Today, 24(6), 41.
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