WMWP Online Newsletter

One suggestion that came forth to the WMWP Executive Board from the members of Project Outreach is the idea of everyone on the leadership board reading a shared book so that the site would begin to have a shared language of education and diversity and social justice/awareness.

The leadership team decided on a book called From Outrageous to Inspired: How to Build a Community of Leaders in Our Schools by David Hagstrom. The book investigates ways in which a school can become an integral part of a community and how community can become an integral part of a school.

Here are some key points:

• To find the shared vision among your group members, ask this question: “What do you want for the people you love?”
• It’s not so important to determine what you as a leader want as it is to ask:
  “Who are these people you’re with? What are they calling for?”
• Find out what your community is truly passionate about. Then, pour it on!
• Lose yourself in the work of the people. Then find yourself again, energizing them.
• In order to create a sense of community, help the people know they’ve found their home.

For more information on the book, you can go to David Hagstrom’s website.

If you have read the book or are part of the WMWP leadership team, please use the comment section here to post your thoughts, reactions and reflections on Hagstrom’s work as it relates to your school or the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.

The WMWP writing-and-response group meets once each month, on a Saturday, in Bartlett 256 at the University of Massachusetts. It is open to all K-13 teachers in western Massachusetts. All teachers are welcome. This month’s meeting is this Saturday, January 12.

The group meets from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., over coffee, tea, and bagels. Typically the group begins with 90 minutes or so of writing time, followed by some reading aloud and response from peers. Any and all genres are welcome, from the memorandum to the poem.

Dates:
January 12, 2008
February 9, 2008
March 8, 2008
April 12, 2008
May 10, 2008
June 7, 2008
July 12, 2008
August 9, 2008

The Western Massachusetts Writing Project has been fortunate to have forged a partnership with the largest daily newspaper in the Pioneer Valley — The Springfield Republican – that allows us to feature our WMWP teachers and their students every month. We are now in our third year of partnerships.

The newspaper has just launched its own Newspaper in Education Weblog through MassLive that deserves a look. Not only does it have our WMWP teachers and students on its pages, it is a wealth of information written by students and journalists alike that focus on education.

You can find the articles written by Tina Browne, Mary Cowhey, and Molly Snyder at the web site. You can also access some of the archives from past years through the older NIE site.

You can head to the Republican/NIE Weblog through this link.

The Western Massachusetts Writing Project is now in its third year of partnership with the major newspaper in our region — The Springfield Republican — and the first two features of the year have already rolled off the presses and hit the streets.

Tina Browne, of Amherst, was featured for a project around student narrative writing:

And then Mary Cowhey, of Northampton, shone a light on the work she does with younger students on deep topics:

Eventually, the features will be showcased on Masslive.com (the online home to the newspaper), but until then, if you want the PDF version of these articles, they are available for download here:

• Tina’s piece
• Mary’s piece

If you want to be profiled in this feature, please leave us a comment to this post and we will contact you.

More than a dozen representatives from the Western Massachusetts Writing Project site were at the annual convention of the National Writing Project in New York City this month, presenting on a wide range of topics and learning more about ways to improve our work in the classroom and at our site.

Here, Diana, Joann, Charlotte and Kevin await the keynote speech by NWP Executive Director Richard Sterling, who is stepping down from his post after this year. The room was packed with about 1,000 NWP teachers. Those who attended the annual meeting will be writing reports about their experiences and we will share some of those here to spread the learning with our network.

If you want to listen to Richard Sterling’s speech, you can do that here (the levels are a bit low).

Listen to Richard Sterling.

WMWP Technology Liaison Kevin Hodgson delivered a keynote address to the Hudson Valley Writing Project around the topic of using the tools of the Web 2.0 world in the classroom. He was invited as part of a continuing collaborative partnership between the two sites (which worked together this summer during the Summer Institute, too).

You can view the slideshow presentation here.

And you can listen to the podcast of the keynote address, too.

What would you like to learn more about? You can leave a comment here for Kevin and he will provide some guidance forward.

The beautiful New England autumn weather brought fifty-five educators together at the WMWP 2007 Best Practices conference on Saturday, October 13, 2007. Presenters included Kevin Hodgson, Heather Putnam, Kerry Bean, Francis Ortiz, Lorraine Malone, Astrid Lindstrom, Molly Snyder, Karen Sumaryono, Susan Biggs, Momodou Sarr and Sherrill Willis. I had the pleasure of attending Molly Snyder’s presentation on ‘Screenwriting for You and Your Students.’ This was the second time I attended her presentation. Molly’s presentation reflected her training from the Summer Writing Institute 2007. Her passion to extend her knowledge through discussion, lecture and hands-on activities provided the audience with a well-balanced and informative presentation. She captured the audience’s attention as participants shared their own interests that led to basic screenwriting techniques.

In a podcasting workshop, participants recorded and posted an audio podcast that captured their Week in a Sentence. Take a listen.

Anne Herrington, WMWP’s new Site Director, celebrated lunch with attendees. She presented the Pat Hunter Award to Charlotte Lak. You can read more about the award, and about Charlotte, as well as read the wonderfully touching poem she wrote in memory of her colleague and mentor, Pat Hunter.

WMWP members were on-site and provided information on-going activities:

Stump Sprouts Writing Retreat – December 7-9, 2007. Registration deadline: November 10, 2007.

Creative Journeys – Begins: January 11, 2008. Contact Pamela Howes at pamhowes@ren.com for more information.

WMWP Invitational Summer Institute 2008 – see the WMWP for more information.

After lunch, participants attended the WMWP Summer Institute and Writing Retreat reunions or attended Leslea Newman writing workshop. Leslea is a local writer with national acclaim for her fifteen picture books. She has also written “A Letter to Harvey Milk”, “JailBait”, and “Write from the Heart.”

– written and reported by Joann Pellechia, the online newsletter editor

A group of more than a dozen teachers affiliated with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project took part in a professional writing retreat on the coast of Connecticut, enjoying the ocean breezes and the long stretches of opportunity to write, reflect and respond to various pieces of writing about the teaching practice.

The topics under development ranged from examining personal beliefs about teaching, ways for administrators and teachers to share leadership opportunities, the ecology of a classroom and the impact on student motivation, and the use of technology to inform student writing skills.

Some participants at the retreat also recorded some thoughts as part of a podcast for this news site.

Listen to the podcast

We hope YOU will take part in future writing retreats!

The Project Outreach traveling team of Momodou, Sherill, Dawn and Karen spent five days in Sante Fe, New Mexico, with the National Writing Project team during a retreat. The WMWP team spent days reading through and discussing the vast amounts of data that have come forth during the past year, and then they began to use that data to begin to create an Action Plan for Western Massachusetts Writing Project that will focus in on new teacher training in Springfield, Holyoke and Athol school districts.

Momodou sat down to talk about the trip in this special podcast.

Listen to the podcast interview

And be sure to support the efforts of Project Outreach in the coming year. And be sure to take a look at their new Weblog site, too.

This summer, the Western Massachusetts Writing Project has partnered up with Smith Vocational Agricultural High School to offer a Claymation Animation Movie Camp for middle school students.

WMWP Technology Liaison Kevin Hodgson and Smith Voke Curriculum Coordinator Leslie Skantz-Hodgson are teaching two, four-day sessions in which students are investigating various software tools for creating animation movies.

Here are a few of the movies created by students in the first session:

Download Video: Posted by E=2>dogtrax at TeacherTube.com.

Download Video: Posted by E=2>dogtrax at TeacherTube.com.

Are you interested in learning more about the teaching of the camp?

Head here to see Kevin’s notes on each day, including mini-lesson ideas.