It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year! Bringing Joy, Community, Life, Genre & Voice to @CWPFairfield Educators in July! It's the @WritingProject Way

One of the best parts of being a National Writing Project director is choosing the direction our invitational summer institute for teaching writing will go, especially when offering resources for teacher-leaders. With State of Connecticut funding, and a powerhouse crew of educators coming to us in July, I simply tapped the best texts that have me thinking about the power of words with young people - spectacular books, I feel, that can guide the five-week conversation about community, reading, writing, thinking, and presentation. I worked with Possible Futures Bookstore in New Haven to select books that will not only inspire ideas for K-16 classrooms, but also make sense for working with the 100s of kids who attend our Young Adult Literacy Labs (and participate in classroom instruction during the year.

This is year 10 of the design and the data continues to show it works...so much so that educators are spreading the word to other educators and recommending the summer programs. I knew at NCTE  Unearthing Joy by Gholdy Muhammad was on the top of the list and I was fortunate to be invited to the Scholastic lunch (Gholdy-Star for them, indeed). Also, after a year of work with Jessica Early Singer, co-editing a journal, I realized her book Next Generation Genres is exactly what our teachers need, too. I was thrilled to see Ralph Fletcher re-release The Writer's Notebook, and I couldn't be more ecstatic to share Sonya Huber's Voice First with our summering crew (this is a must-have book for writing classrooms)

I always like to have shared readings with kids on campus and since we debuted New Kid on campus several years ago (200 copies, with Jerry meeting us in a Stew Leonard parking lot....all signed), I knew I had to go with School Trip for 2023. And, for our Ubuntu crew (and my own personal reasons...I worship the work of Luma Mufleh) we will be looking at Learning America, about her quest to support refugee youth through sport and literacy.

I've been telling everyone that the two thing educators need are rejuvenation and the restoration of hope. Since National Writing Project is a gift (and Alan Luke says the same of pedagogy), I've chosen to gift this summer's cohort with readings that will accompany the daily writing and professional development across the State of Connecticut. And I'm also proud to announce that I made all the colors of our summer programs into the sticker for the 2023 writer's notebooks to be gifted to all who come our way: little labbers with big imaginations, novelists, essayists, college-bound writers, and just arriving immigrants and refugee youth. 

This is the 10th Anniversary of our vision and I can't wait to collect another year of day. The formative experiment that began in 2014 has offered me rebirth, vision, and a desire to do better. 

As always, it's the model at work.