Week Three of the Summer Institute

We began the first day of the third week today. Time has been flying. Rachel shared a play script of the minutes from Thursday. Genesis presented her demonstration about collaborative writing techniques that she uses to mimic blogging in her classroom, and Sarah shared reading strategies/reader response strategies that she's incorporated successfully in her classroom.

We also had two guests today. Dr. Matt Pearce, a principal from Cherokee Middle School, and Mr. Marty Marsh, principal from Jarrett Middle School. They were very good sports, and they joined us in writing about and discussing Because Writing Matters. We began by writing about what we wished the ideal administrator would know about effective writing instruction, and we picked one line from Because Writing Matters that we wanted to share with our own administrator. It was a great discussion. It's wonderful to bring in new perspectives to our conversations about writing.

Marty suggested that as teachers we needed to be ambassadors or advocates of effective writing instruction with our colleagues across the curriculum. I challenged everyone to share their Ozarks Writing Project experiences with science, social studies, and physical education colleagues. If writing across the curriculum is as important as we say, we need to work on bringing in more fellows from different content areas. Writing isn't just about English teachers. Hopefully, our guests will nominate teachers from theirs schools for the 2009 Summer Institute, and I hope that the 2008 TC's nominate their colleagues as well.

Once again, it was another great day. I'm anxious to see Debbie's minutes tomorrow. I'm sure it will be on the blog. It's likely she has something up her sleeve! :)