The WNY Young Writers’ Studio Celebration of Writing is a free event that is open to the public. Join us on June 5th as our fellows lead informal sessions on writing strategies, ideas, and technology tools. A few highlights from the draft of the day’s events:

• Teachers from Alden, Lockport, and Depew will be leading sessions on the use of writer’s notebooks in the classrooms, service-learning and research projects, portfolio assessment, and connective writing.
• A team of elementary teachers and students from Clarence will be demonstrating how they’ve used blogging to enrich their exploration of text this spring.
• Two young men from our program will be hosting a tech playground, demonstrating how they’ve created their own technologies (including something that reminds me of a Surface Table) and how certain tools support their work as writers.
• One of our interns will be facilitating a digital storytelling lab classroom. Participants will get to see our elementary writers at work with her as they finish up their projects, generate questions, and engage in conversation with other professionals about the practice.
• Elementary fellows will be demonstrating how they use the Flip video camera to generate better ideas during pre-writing, strategies for expanding their sentences and adding detail to their work, how to create a Time Management Challenge for writers, and courageous journal writing.
• Middle and High School fellows will be demonstrating feedback protocols, sharing favorite books that have inspired their writing, exploring great web-based communities and writing contests for young writers, sharing their experiences as NeXt correspondents, and discussing how to use travel to fuel writing projects.
• An open-mic will be available throughout the day, and a number of our writers will be sharing from their own works in progress.

The more the merrier! For more information about how you or those you know might participate, hop over here.

We’re grateful to Studio fellow Dr. Heather Lyon and everyone Pinnacle Charter School for their generous hospitality!!!!

Here’s a little treat to reward your efforts. I know many Amy VanDerwater fans. Did you know that she is blogging? Take a peek at how she is celebrating National Poetry Month. Beautiful stuff here!

My big take away from this entire experience took shape during a conversation with a parent, who mentioned that her son (who dislikes writing very much) was loving this project.

“He gets to move around,” she marveled, excited to see the boy (who is all boy, by the way) enjoying himself and learning at the same time.

Writing doesn’t have to be about sitting still and quiet and putting pen to paper. In fact, for many people, it often isn’t. My hunch is that the more we embrace this notion, the better we might be able to engage the writers we assumed were “reluctant.”

Want to learn more about digital storytelling? You can begin by perusing some of these fabulous resources:

• Jennifer Dorman shares an impressive set of digital storytelling resources (and much more) on her wiki, Grazing for Digital Natives.
• Wesley Fryer published these exemplars from his own work with writers.
• Silvia Tolisano has recently gifted all of us with this free resource. Click on that link! You will be glad that you did.
• Jon Orech fueled my learning and provided us some support at the start of our process earlier this year.
• And some of that learning was enriched by these resources, compiled by Dr. Alec Couros at the Open Thinking Wiki.

The WNY Young Writers’ Studio celebrates its third anniversary this summer! Thinking about joining us but haven’t just yet? Well this year, we’re opening up greater opportunities for you to do so.

Studio is not a camp. It isn’t a workshop or an institute either. It is a learning community comprised of teachers and students who have been writing and learning together over time. Many of our fellows have been a part of our program since we opened our doors in 2008, but we have new members joining us at nearly every session throughout the year.

At Studio, all young writers are our teachers, and all of the teachers learn from them as well as from each other.  We also identify young people who are eager to become teachers of writing and provide them internship opportunities as well as professional development. Our vision, our strategic planning, and the work that we produce happens collectively, collaboratively, and far more powerfully than anything I could have ever done alone.

Those who join our program, regardless of their age or title, assess their needs and set unique learning goals which they pursue throughout their fellowship. These goals are aligned to our greater vision, which we achieve collaboratively over time. As we attend to the growth of our Dispositions as well as writer’s process and craft, we strive to achieve a common purpose as well: to use our words in ways that will serve others.

The WNY Young Writers’ Studio is a product of my own learning and growth. I began my career as a teacher who longed for more than event-based professional learning opportunities. I  evolved into a staff developer who was eager to provide them. Joining Communities for Learning: Leading Lasting Change helped me understand that if we are to establish communities that last, we must commit to tapping and leveraging our internal expertise rather than delivering our vision or our wisdom to others. This requires us to    reconsider everything we assumed or overlooked about alignment, representation, culture, and sustainability. We must also reconsider what we thought we knew about leadership.

As you can tell, I’m more than a little bit excited about what we’ve accomplished together and where we’re headed.

Wanna come along?

We’d love to have you.

Some ideas:

• Bud Hunt is publishing a photograph a day on his blog as a means of prompting poets, and if you haven’t visited the comments section to see what has transpired as a result, I highly recommend.
• The New York Times invites readers to celebrate poetry with them in 11 different ways.
• New and timid poets often begin by mimicking the work of their favorite poets or by using provided forms. They might enjoy playing with Instant Poetry.
• Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, where Americans read and speak about the poems that mean the most to them.
• You can keep up with 30 different poets (one a day!) this April at GottaBook.
• And Alden, NY teacher Rob Currin recently launched the Global Poetry Project ning, a place where writers ages 13 and up can share their work and seek validation.

Calkins and Culham never suggest that conferences are scripted events, and they certainly don’t suggest that teachers limit their work with writers to the prompts and the practices they share. They simply illuminate pathways that can open us to more meaningful and focused conversations with writers. Their work has provided welcome direction and a level of relief to many of the wary writing teachers that I know.

Last summer, I worked with a variety of young writers to generate this list of prompts, which can be used at different phases of the writer’s process. While I share them with teachers, it’s more important to know that they can be shared with young people too. In my experience, the best writer talk happens within communities where everyone is empowered to ask purposeful and powerful questions.

To that end, teachers of writing might consider using Ning or another social network to create opportunities for such conversation. A number of people that I’m working with this year have studied the effect of shifting conversations from face-to-face to online spaces. In every instance, writers who were less comfortable engaging in writer talk within the classroom were willing to take greater risks online. Many of them were willing to share their work, request support, and give and provide quality feedback. This has enabled some of them to gain the experience and courage necessary to speak up in class as well.

Our WNY Young Writers’ Studio ning features a peer review group, where participants may post work and request feedback from others within our community. The protocols that we use are adapted from those I was introduced to through my fellowship with Communities for Learning. Peer review remains one of the most meaningful forms of writer talk that we participate in, as it engages both the writer and the review in critical thought, reflection, and discourse. You can access different versions of our protocol below. Initially, writers may need to refer to these guidelines often as they move through the peer review, but over time, we’ve found that it  becomes the way that feedback is provided in even the most informal settings.

• Elementary Version
• Secondary Version

A couple of weeks ago, I conducted a classroom visitation.

The teacher leading the lesson had gone out of her way to engage the students in an exploration of voice in writing. At one point, her students were asked to use the strategies we modeled together to shape a voice of their own. When she invited them to begin writing, one of them (sporting a single ear bud and an iPod tucked not-so-discretely beneath his sweatshirt) asked if he could write music. As I glanced around the room, I counted five kids who were quietly engaged in some form of learning that was all about their iPods or cell phones (which were  not allowed in class, as per the rules of the school).

Later, when the teacher and I sat down to discuss the “apathy issue” that the learners in her class and her in building as a whole are struggling with, I thought of those sneaky rule-breakers again. They reminded me a bit of Mr. W. They reminded me of all of the potential we’re overlooking. Perspective is everything. Maybe this is where the shift begins.

• VocabGrabber enables users to see how words are used in context.
• Confusing Words highlights the biggies that so many of us misuse.
• Save the Words is kinda beautiful, although I’m struggling a bit with its utility.
• IdiomSite.Com may become a quick favorite of some teachers I know…..
• RhymeZone is a rhyming dictionary and thesaurus
• Visuwords is an online dictionary that graphs word relationships

I know that I may be a bit late to the table here, but I’m loving this tool.

Lately, I’ve been teaching with StoryCorps almost as often as I’ve been teaching with TED. So much potential for the classroom……

Been playing with Firefox add-ons—simple ways to download YouTube videos here.

Had the chance to create a few new Sir Ken Robinson fans last week. The Future of Education is featuring him in a free webinar next week!

And check this out–a tool that allows you to print a wall-sized poster with a standard printer (and if you aren’t subscribed to Free Technology for Teachers, you should be….that’s where I learned about this!)

And last but not least……AnyClip helps users locate slices of scenes from thousands of films.

Happy Tuesday! Hope the sun is out where you are today!

One of the greatest challenges that all facilitators face is ensuring sustainable learning and work. I’m still uncertain whether this is even possible, but my fellowship with Communities for Learning has inspired me to plan for this far better than I was ever able to in the past. I embraced literacy coaching as a means to a more sustainable end several years ago, and in the process, I’m discovering that facilitating lasting learning experiences is just as challenging for coaches as it is for those lead event-based professional development. I’m realizing that sustainability has less to do with how often people are exposed to information and support and more to do with the ways in which information and support are accessed and provided.

Often, adult learners expect (even demand) “stuff.” When teachers invest a chunk of their time in professional learning, they often want to leave with some “thing” to show for it. Resources. Materials. Tools. Examples. When I consider sustainability, I struggle with this reality. I’m not certain how this helps to create lasting learning experiences. And yet……

Isn’t there a time and a place for sharing what we know in service to others who are just beginning their study or practice? Aren’t models a necessity? Doesn’t gradual release imply moments where facilitators “do” while participants “watch”?

Last week, the teachers that I worked with were exposed to the Studio writing community model directly. I shared the work of our community and what I’ve learned as a teacher, coach, and professional development provider over the years with the group as a whole. Then, they had the opportunity to assess their own needs and engage in a variety of center-based experiences aligned to them. Each center provided models, resources, and questions intended to prompt further conversation. Teachers were expected to share their own ideas, strategies, and tools. This gave me time to confer with people individually and to sit in on conversations as a listener and participant myself.

This was my effort to strike a balance between “providing teachers stuff”, engaging them in their own learning, and expecting them to share their expertise with one another. If you’d like access to the centers, you can download them here. If you have other things to add to that space, please join and share what you can. I plan to spend some time this week adding links and web resources as well. I’m going to bet that few people will do this within the wiki though–just as few people did it within the physical centers themselves.

I wonder what would have happened if each center was absent of models and “stuff”? What if teachers visited each center to engage in discourse and reflection and share what they do? How would this have changed the experience? What kind of value would have been added? What might have been lost?