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To whom much is given, much is required. This is the mandate for those of us who have

completed the Writing Project. Actually, the mandate gets personal for me because I have been inundated

with tools and information to build teachers and to raise student achievement levels. I have spent the

entire year of 2010-11 in professional development provided by the Arkansas Leadership Academy

(ALA)/Teacher Leader Institute and now the Little Rock Writing Project, so I cannot go back the same. I

will not be the same Instructional Facilitator I was last year. As a result of being given so much

knowledge through the workshop and the ALA professional development, I’ll be a better, more equipped

Instructional Facilitator. As the result of all the PD I’ve received this year, I have learned that as a

teacher-leader I have multiple responsibilities: to facilitate PLCs, professional development sessions, and

workshops to empower teachers; to fulfill a leadership role within the building and to work with students

to encourage them to increase their achievement levels. This is a massive amount of work to do, so to

narrow the work load down, my next steps will be to take what I have learned in both the ALA and the

Writing Project and make the central focus of improvement to that of working with teachers to create

student-centered classrooms, and working with students to have them writing to learn.

We are starting a ninth-grade learning community at my school this year, and one action

I plan to facilitate is conducting a book study of Because Writing Matters to acquaint the grade-

level teachers with the strategies in Chapter Two. Donald Graves is quoted in this chapter as

saying the following:

“Learning to Write” presents: “. . . it’s not effective to teach writing process in a

lock-step, rigid matter…if kids don’t write more than three days a week, they’re

dead, and it’s very hard to become a writer. If you provide frequent occasions for

writing, then the students start to think about writing, then the students start to

think about writing when they’re not doing it. I call it a state of constant

composition.”

With ninth grade being such a pivotal year for high school learners, the strategies will be

great for the teachers to incorporate in their curriculums. I am willing to test these strategies and

see how they work. Last year, I was asked whether the ninth graders should be writing essays.

The question floored me because I assumed that all ninth graders would and could write essays

by this time. I hope that once the teachers get on board with these strategies, we will be able to

collaborate and start early on to build a family culture among the students through their writing.

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My hope is that by using low- stakes writing, low-stakes assessments, and student voices, both

teachers and students will create safe learning environments in which they can grow

academically and socially. The overall objective of forming a community environment with the

ninth graders is to create a family culture so students will feel unthreatened in the room, raise test

scores, to increase the graduation rate, and to decrease discipline problems.

While at the Academy, the teachers formulated some action steps to put into place for the

next school year that I’m going to incorporate into this position paper. They are as follows:

What do you want your students to know and be able to do?

o I want my students to become high-achievers by knowing their content areas and

reaching mastery in them. I want my students to know that failure is NOT an

option. They can fail, but need to understand that they can get back up through

intervention. I want them to be able to think outside the box with their knowledge.

The low-stakes writing assignments and assessments I’ve learned about in the Writing Project

will be some first steps to implement to get the students and teachers on track to believe in their

abilities. Teachers will be encouraged to have their students keep learning logs about their

chapters in content areas. This activity will generate higher-order critical thinking skills. I would

also encourage teachers to imitate the activity the teachers did in the writer’s project: they could

have students take on the responsibility to bring quotes from their reading assignments for the

class to write and talk about during their bell ringer time. The writing and sharing will, I believe,

give the students a safe harbor to learn the joy of writing instead of fearing it.

What student achievement issues are urgent in your school?

o Graduation rate is currently 61.4%

o Not reaching AYP because of IEP students are passing with proficiency.

The low-stakes, culture-based writing assignments would be a great way to pull these lower level

students into writing in a non-threatening way. Using technology to encourage writing is another

low-stakes way to get this subpopulation into writing. For example, showing a You Tube video

and asking the students to write responses to it using sites like Today’s Meet, Twitter, or

Facebook, or other social networks encourages a safe way to write without fear of being judged.

After a comfort level is achieved, teachers could lead them into higher-stakes writing

assignments.

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How does this differ from what you are presently doing in your classroom in your

classroom in your school/district?

o The Teacher Leader Institute is different because it is focusing more on student

learning as opposed to teachers teaching. Most of the teachers on my campus

focus more on teaching whole-group lessons instead of allowing students to have

time to work in groups and collaborate to figure solutions themselves.

The Writing Project is different because it promotes a learning environment. One thing I will

take away from it as it applies to this issue is to encourage teachers to present the workshops

during PLCs and for PD. I hope teachers will adopt a feeling of ownership in their professional

development by being responsible for helping other teachers. I also hope that this responsibility

will empower them to feel comfortable while facilitating them in their classes.

The resources that would help me address the achievement issue are

o Instruments to incorporate more technology in the classroom.

o PLCs to empower and teach skills to teachers.

o Professional Development to train teachers to employ more student-learning

strategies such as Differentiated Instruction, increased creativity, and problem-

solving skills.

The workshops, common readings, and research in the articles that we’ve studied in the Writing

Project have given me both the fodder I need to enrich students’ writing skills and the skills base

needed to build a safe, low-stakes writing community to help them succeed. Some areas I want to

implement with teachers’ cooperation are the writing-to-learn concept, the “Where I’m From”

piece, portfolios and reflection writing, and the ‘What’s In A Name’ Posters’. All of the

workshops provided great writing venues, and all of the content-area teachers will see them in

our PLC/Professional Development sessions. Some that I will use for 9th

grade, with the

teachers’ approval, are “Listography”, “Multi-genre writing”, “What’s Your Story?’, “Flow”,

and “Dot Stories”. I hope these activities and workshops will turn the teachers’ focus to student

learning and using writing to help the students learn. The project has also armed me with plenty

of information to implement PLCs and staff development with relevant, motivating research-

based materials.

I will also continue to increase the use of technology in classrooms. One of the first steps

to get that started is to train teachers during PLCs. We will start with basic programs like Word

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documents and scaffold to sites on the web, such as Web 2.0, Edutopia, Prezi, and Livebinders to

name a few. I will also lead the way to start a Professional Learning Network so teachers can

connect to current trends on sites like getaflipchart.com or RSS and blog about them with one

another for 21rst century staff development.

In reference to bringing technology into the classrooms, I like what I read in Troy Hick’s

book, The Digital Writing Workshop. He speaks of teacher researchers like Donald Graves,

Donald Murray, and Lucy Calkins and their ideas that have implemented writing workshops;

then, he asks the question: “’What happens in the writing workshop when we introduce digital

writing tools and processes?’ The answer: By bringing a laptop into this writing workshop, it

creates new opportunities and challenges in the teaching of writing that the previous authors

discussing the writing workshop model or the use of particular technology tools have not fully

addressed” (Hicks 3). I agree with him. Allowing our digital natives to write in their element

would not only boost their confidence in their writing, but it would create student-led learning

opportunities for them. I would love to see them set up presentations using Prezi or Xtranormal.

In Xtranormal they have to write the scripts for the characters in the ‘movie’. That is a great

venue for low-stakes writing. They could deepen their writing ability by creating multimodal

essays and research papers. They could also create anthologies of their class assignments to show

their parents, school officials, or peers.

The Writing Project has been an empowering event for me this summer. Although I will

use what I’ve learned with my teachers this year, I will be campaigning to bring the Institute to

our school. I cannot wait to see the outcome.

Work Cited

Hicks, Troy. The Digital Writing Workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2009.

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