I sent slightly different versions of this letter to my legislators this afternoon. (I didn’t ask my senators to sign on to a House letter, for example. Nothing substantive.) If you support the National Writing Project, I hope you have done, or will do, the same. I would have written sooner – but this all happened as I was getting acquainted with Quinn. This is one of the first times I’ve been able to put fingers to keys in order to compose more than a few tweets. (Again – the iPhone is NOT the right long form writing device.)
Speaking of tweets, I should talk a bit about my latest gentle request for information from @EDPressSec, the official Twitter account for the U.S. Department of Education’s Press Office. It’s now been more than a week since I started asking why the ED had decided to eliminate the National Writing Project’s funding. I still don’t have an answer. As Zac has accurately pointed out, the press office stated in their 2011 press release on the appropriations proposal that programs removed were done so either because they “duplicate local or state programs or have not had a significant measurable impact.”
I don’t get it, and I have requested that @EDPressSec provide me with the data that they used to make the determination that a national network could be duplicated at the local or state level, or that the NWP has had no “significant measurable impact.” I’m hopeful that they’ll provide me with that information. Soon. But, if not, I’m asking my legislators to help me get that data. Seems like the right question to be asking. Thanks to those of you who are asking it along with me. The question should be easy enough to answer, and my fingers are crossed that this is certainly some big misunderstanding.
(If you’d like to see the entire conversation between myself and @EDPressSec, I’ve created a Twitter account and favorited the exchange. Start at the bottom and read up. I’ll keep updating as the conversation continues. I hope it’ll be productive. I really do respect that the press office is on Twitter, and I hope they work to create more opportunities for teachers and policymakers to actively be in meaningful conversation.)
________________
Dear Rep. Markey, Sen. Bennet, and Sen. Udall:
I have grave concerns regarding the proposed elimination of the National Writing Project’s federal funding from the current Education Appropriation Bill. I cannot tell you of a program that I believe is more essential to good teaching, learning and thinking in our schools today.
In light of that opening, I am writing today to seek your assistance with two items:
I would like for you to show your support for the National Writing Project by signing on to Rep. George Miller’s Dear Colleague letter of support for 2011 funding for the NWP.
I have asked the press office, via Twitter, of the Education Department for information regarding why they removed funding for the National Writing Project from their appropriations request. I need your assistance in obtaining that information, as they don’t seem able to provide it to me. I was hoping your office might help me navigate the issue.
I work as an instructional technologist for the St. Vrain Valley School District. Prior to my transition to providing professional development to teachers in a district support role, I was a classroom language arts teacher for five years with the same school district. I am certain that I have experienced no better model of professional development than that of the National Writing Project. Since I first learned of and participated in a local project at Colorado State University, my students have benefited from my exposure to the NWP, as have the hundreds of thousands of teachers and millions of students similarly impacted by their programs.
Writing remains essential to student and societal success. The National Writing Project, through its network of local affiliates spread out across the country, makes a substantial difference for students everyday. We would be foolish not to support them.
In Colorado, three NWP-affiliated local writing project sites work to promote the same ideals of teachers teaching teachers. Each of those programs would be in jeopardy if not for the support of the national network and their matching funds.
I would be happy to speak further with you about the National Writing Project. I’d also love the opportunity to invite you and/or your staff to a NWP or CSUWP event in the near future. There’s always room for more writers. We’d love to see you.
I look forward to discussing navigating the Department of Education’s decision process soon.
Sincerely,
Bud Hunt
Instructional Technologist
St. Vrain Valley School District
Teacher Consultant
Colorado State University Writing Project
I’ve assigned many research projects in my time as a teacher. Perhaps you have, too. Research, the process of looking and re-looking at the way an issue or idea has been explored, is a vital part of learning.
Perhaps you, like me, have assigned research projects that required that students cite their sources, and perhaps you, like me, wanted to make sure your students went deeper than a quick Google search and the top five hits for whatever search term or terms they happened to type in the first time they went looking.
So maybe you, like me, made a requirement of the project that students had to include one or more “print sources,” materials that couldn’t be downloaded from the Web.
If so, maybe you have this question, too:
What does “print resource” mean anymore? Has it become a meaningless term?
Let’s consider for a moment what used to count. An article from a newspaper was, in my classroom, considered a print resource. How about now? I’m more likely to read my local paper online than I am to read the print edition. Is an article from the newspaper still a print resource?
How about a magazine article? When I was in middle and high school, one of the great resources at the local library was a collection of magazine articles on CD-ROM databases. Even then, a magazine article wasn’t a print source, but it counted as one. Maybe because I was required to turn in a printout of the article with the final draft of my papers.
Encyclopedias? By high school, encyclopedias shouldn’t be cited by anyone, much less count as sources. But they did, and often do.
So might I humbly suggest a small change to any assignment that requires students to provide a “print” resource? Ask them for a primary source instead.
The print/electronic binary is over. Dead. (And I do so dislike saying that something’s “dead.” But the difference between print and electronic is a meaningless difference, at least when we’re talking research. ) The transmission medium that delivered the message might not be the most important consideration in student research. And print stuff still matters – but not if it’s included solely because it’s on a piece of paper.
Ask students to think, instead, about primary and secondary sources. And later, after you’ve mastered that, ask them to think about the difference between citationality and attribution, and why that might matter in their research. And yours.
Today is the National Day on Writing, which is the reason for this podcast, recorded as I headed home thinking about the writing I’ve been up to today. I’m so grateful for this time to think about writing and its place in my life. What a wonderful expression of the power of language and words and composition. How and when and where and how do you write and celebrate writing, both yours and others?
My guess? Not much. It slips away, lost in the collection of tweets that came before and after. But before it does, it steals the little bit of exigence that, over time, builds up and becomes a blog post.
Or maybe not – but it seems to happen that way to me – tweets discharge the writing mojo that builds up into pushes to publish posts. There’s value in the short form – but I think there’s more value in long form, in writing that pushes the writer. The tweets need to go somewhere, to lead to something. So I’m going to try a couple of things in my own practice over the next few weeks and see where they take me.
First, whenever it’s practical, I’m going to try to come to a blog and write whenever I feel the urge to tweet. Might mean some short posts, might mean slightly longer ones. Might shut me up completely for a while. We’ll see. If I do find myself tweeting in spite of my little push, and I expect I will – Twitter’s an exceptionally useful piece of my workflow, even as I find some destructiveness in it, I’m going to try to take a moment once a week and pull out some short statements that could use a bit of explanation or elaboration. Really, I’m hoping to let my tweets become writing reminders or prompts for me here on the blog. I’ll be using Twitter Tools to push a weekly digest of tweets to the blog, making my utterances in one place fodder for more utterance in another. Looking at that digest will also give me a way to review my Twitter behavior on a regular basis – which probably isn’t a bad idea. I’ve seen Dan do this on our district Help Desk blog, and I think that might be useful, at least for me. If it gets in your way, let me know.
Not sure if any changes to my writing habits will develop, but I’d like for them to. Like I said, we’ll see. But I know I need to mix things up a bit to push myself. Too much Twitter means not enough depth.
In today’s podcast, I talk about a little collaborative writing experiment that I began last week, what I think worked, what perhaps didn’t, and share some of my thinking about why such things might be important. Certainly a first draft thinking podcast. Here’s the original EtherPad document, still available for editing and revision, as well as a PDF copy of the text as it exists at the time of this post. I’d be curious as to your thinking about the value of tools like these and how we might use them to create and converse. I like that Stephen expands the idea of writing as creation very much. He’s right, of course.
Note – This post was mostly composed months ago; it’s almost a year old. I’m posting it now because I’m in the middle of revisiting lots of drafts of posts. This one seemed done. Not sure why I never published it. – Bud
____
Setting the scene: It’s just after dinner tonight, and I am in our play room, a converted office full of kids’ toys, assorted vehicles, and a large table stocked full of art supplies. Teagan’s there, too. In fact, she’s the reason I’m there. She discovered four discarded crayons, a leftover project of Ani’s, under the table. She’s only fourteen months old, but she’s been watching Ani, so she knows what those crayons can do.
She carefully lowers herself to the floor, leaning over to a collection of index cards and Curious George notepad pages, another discarded project. (Man, we really need to clean the play room.) She makes a tentative scribble on an index card, exploring the jagged red line she’s producing, her tongue hanging slightly out of her mouth with the effort. A smile and perhaps a bit of toddler drool appears on her lips as she continues to mark, alternating the crayons in her right hand, pressing each onto the card. I watch her watching herself discovering the way that crayons allow her to make marks on paper, the secret excitement only one fellow writer has for another building in my head and heart. Discovering the act of creation is, at any age, a big deal.
Her favorite, she decides between exchanges and random markings on the card, is the blue crayon, and I am able to sneak the others out of sight and mind before she decides to do any furniture or wall scribbling.
But the blue crayon must stay in her hand. The index card, too.
I tell her it’s time for bed and stand up to leave the room. She rises, too, clutching the blue crayon in one hand, the index card in the other. I watch her waddle her toddler waddle to the stairs and realize that she’s taking her tools with her to bed. And up the stairs, which she’s only beginning to climb on her own. I manage to get her to leave the card with me, motioning to her that she can have the card at the top of the stairs. But the blue crayon stays in her hand for the long climb, me one step behind, as she slowly ascends, reaching out the entire time for the card that I’m waving a few inches past her reach.
Her card returned, we begin the bed time ritual. I try to take her tools away to put on her PJs – but she will have none of that, shrill cries telling me just what she thinks of my idea. Until she realizes that I cannot remove her shirt unless she puts them down. Still, she cries and cries as I remove her clothes and change a diaper, only ceasing when, fresh and clean and pajama-ed, I return her crayon and index card to her still waiting fingers.
A few minutes later, she’s ready for sleep, and I place the card and crayon on her dresser. We say night night to them before going to bed.
So when John Tweeted “Community building is the new professional development” it really resonated, because it suggests that unlike most so-called pd that schools offer, getting our heads and our practice around this is a process, not an event. It’s learning, not training. (I cringed a couple of weeks ago when a principal said “Wow, our teachers are going to need a lot more ‘training.’” Ugh.) It’s not something we can “deliver” in a four-hour PowerPoint-like session. As Linda Darling-Hammond suggests, “…teachers need to learn the way other professionals do—continually, collaboratively, and on the job.” If that’s not a description of what I see most of us doing in these spaces I don’t know what is.
The thing about trying to argue that network/community building should be the goal of 21st Century professional development is that there’s an assumption in that argument that community building as a piece of professional development is a new way of doing things, that that building community is a 21st Century idea. And, perhaps with the technology, there are some “new” things there – but there might also be some “good” things there that are done in new ways. (I don’t think that John and Will make that assumption, for what it’s worth.)
“New” and “good” are not synonymous. Neither are “new” and “bad” or “old” and “bad.” Or “old” and “good.” Plenty of new things are bad, plenty of old things are good and so on. I would like it very much if people working on teaching and learning projects, people studying and thinking about and implementing tools and practices, would separate the age of something from its value and attempt to make decisions based on that thing or idea or tool or practice’s value, rather than its age.
I understand why the “21st Century” whatever label gets put onto things. It’s sexy. It sizzles. It’s “new” and shiny. And yet – good professional development has always been about community building. Professional organizations in the 19th and 20th Centuries were about community and conversation and collaboration. And they and we should be in the 21st Century, too.
Yes, we are in community when we blog and tweet and share and read and write and learn together. This is how I learn and sometimes how I teach. Of course the technology changes (some of) the nature and the speed of those interactions. The power of collaborative technologies is certainly “new” and, often, “good.” (Not always, though. Plenty of “bad.”) But the networking itself, social or professional or otherwise, isn’t the new bit. It’s the good bit. Rich. Rewarding. Powerful. Sustaining. Rooted in professional conversation. Really, really good.
