365 words

The reasons are numerous as to why one would want to spend four weeks of a summer vacation in the Denver Writing Project, which is ironically in a classroom but without the typical constraints. The atmosphere is real and authentic. There is movement, manipulation, and discourse, the kinds of activities teachers strive to create in their own classrooms; after all, learning is social. There is food, laughter, and small, relaxed conversations about teaching, writing, reading, and literature. Most importantly, the teacher and the writer merge and become one in the same person, experiencing subtle understandings of the profession and the craft.

Each teacher-writer willingly shares instructional strategies and best practices which are actually utilized in the classroom. A history teacher demonstrates how his best practices include interdisciplinary writing, social studies and language arts. In addition, a science teacher exhibits his method of eliciting technical writing from his students while an English teacher explains how struggling readers and writers can write creatively by utilizing writing prompts, and a math teacher demonstrates how she elicits student writing about solving mathematical problems. Furthermore, professional writers presented writing strategies for the teacher as a writer, plays, short stories, and poetry.

The plethora of demonstrations were various and beneficial in that they were practical.

Teacher-writers offered up their creations for sacrifice, poetry, travel essays, essays about motherhood and sisterhood which eventually led to constructive conversations grounded in criticism. Other discourse covered topics as diverse as Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria; moral responsibility in writing; write-like –grammatical structures, and writing the blues. A worthwhile writer would not be able to do anything but absorb this atmosphere and relish such learning and sharing and then respond as both teacher and writer.

The result of participating in the DWP will definitely leave teachers contemplating and utilizing, wherever applicable, those best practices in their own classrooms. What better actions can a teacher-writer engage in after such an enriching experience? More importantly, the teacher as a writer leaves the Project with a commitment to write each day, with a commitment to set and reach writing goals, and with a gift of a new value, the importance of sharing and belonging to a common community, a writing-teaching community.