Connecting with NWP

The following is a guest post by Jessica Beck, from the Heart of Texas Writing Project.

When I first began teaching, I did it alone. I was working at a charter school and had no certificate, no experience with children outside of babysitting and some tutoring. I’d gotten a degree in creative writing and had worked with grown-ups when I taught refresher courses in college, but I had no idea how to work with teenagers. I had to make my own community, a mishmash of smart colleagues, supportive friends, and some experienced teachers I already knew.

Five years later, I was living in Austin, finally certified and working at a middle school. I was experimenting with this thing called notebook writing. The previous year, I’d walked into a co-worker’s classroom in May, weeks after the standardized test, and saw kids completely engrossed in their writing. The room was silent as kids scribbled furiously, some of them propping those notebooks on their knees, some flipping through pages. I didn’t know what she was doing, but I couldn’t shake that magical feeling all summer—kids writing with fervor, like someone had broken the dam.

I wanted that in my own classroom. I knew intuitively that writing looked this way, having identified as a writer for my entire life. But it wasn’t what I taught, because it wasn’t what was tested. Empowering children and teaching them to make decisions not just about craft, but about what stories to tell about their lives—these things weren’t measured, and so I never learned to teach them.

Some of my friends were consultants with the Heart of Texas Writing Project, and I knew they worked with notebooks too. I knew they did this workshop thing, and they knew all of these other teachers. And I knew they wrote, too, just as furiously as the kids. I was trying out notebooks in my own classroom, trying to mesh what I knew about teaching writing with what I wanted to know—but it wasn’t enough, and I was doing it alone.

So, in 2009, I participated in the Summer Institute. It changed not only my career, but my life.

The National Writing Project opened a door for me to connect with other teachers throughout my region and continue a dialogue that began long before I knew it existed, one that considers the ways that writing can be transformative, empowering, and accessible to all children. I am part of a conversation between other educators—not simply listening to it or purchasing it for my classroom. We share our concerns, discuss practices, make decisions, and stand up for children and for our classrooms when necessary. Before the Institute, I did not know that there was room for me at the table for this dialogue. But NWP is honoring teachers by creating a space for them to listen and talk to each other.

And really, why shouldn’t it work that way? Why shouldn’t educators be the experts of their fields?

When I went back to my classroom, everything changed. I made an effort to turn the expertise over to my kids—because they are the experts of themselves. And I quickly realized how terrifying that is in the face of standardized testing and data collection, so I began to collect my own kind of data. I began to write down when students started writing poetry on their own, when they told me, “I’ve read more books this year than I ever have in my life!” I noted the times students told me they weren’t good writers because they spoke Spanish. For the more squeamish workers in the education field, I made notes about the kids who started getting commended scores when, previously, they had failed the standardized writing test. Caught up in the enthusiasm, I began writing again too, having drifted away from a notebook in the post-college haze of scantron tests and classroom management.

That isn’t to say everything was sunshine and roses. There is enormous pressure, now more than ever, for teachers to meet dubious standards of performance. But under all of this pressure, I have felt tremendous support from NWP’s vast network of like-minded educators. As part of NWP, we are noticing children, not numbers. We are using a common language to talk about literacy and the work of our classrooms.

And we are not alone.

Funding for NWP means that we continue to build community around children and literacy, that we value our learning and our future. It means that we can build a bridge to colleagues who speak our language about education. In a political climate that is increasingly hostile toward educators and classrooms, it is vital that we continue to nurture our community.

As I continue to lead a writing and reading workshop in my classroom, I find that I don’t want to do it alone. I value learning, and I want politicians to value my learning, too. I don’t want a textbook corporation or a “learning company” to do education for me, because they don’t know me or my students. NWP acknowledges my expertise as a teacher in my classroom and allows me to connect with other experts in their own classrooms.

And while I could still manage to value literacy on my own, I don’t want to. I don’t think it will make me—or my students—smarter people.