By Barbara McKenna
Walk into Suzanne Brady's fourth-grade classroom at Monte Vista School in Monterey and it may take a moment to pick her out of the group. "I used to have the children sit in straight rows, and I was at the front," says Brady, who has been teaching since the late 1950s. "Now it's hard to find me in the classroom. I'm no longer the authority. Now we have 29 teachers, and I just happen to be the tallest."
Coauthor of the book Mindful of Others: Teaching Children to Teach, Brady dramatically altered her teaching style in 1977, inspired by her experience at a UCSC summer institute on teaching writing. "I learned so much that summer that I knew there was no way I could go back and teach the way I had before," she says.
The institute Brady attended was the first offered by the campus's Central California Writing Project (CCWP), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this summer. Like its sister programs at seven other UC campuses, CCWP exists to improve the teaching of writing in California's schools.
The project offers a range of programs, from the five-week invitational institute--offered in both English and Spanish--to a myriad of other workshops and retreats. Funding is provided by UCSC's Humanities Division, UC's Office of the President, and the California and National Writing Projects.
In the past two decades, well over a thousand teachers from Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Benito Counties have participated in CCWP programs. Many, like Brady, found that the experience sparked major transformations, both professionally and personally. It's CCWP's philosophy--that writing is a process, not just an end product--that sets the program apart. "When people learn to write well they're not just learning a skill, they're learning how to claim their voice and articulate it," says Don Rothman, CCWP founder and director and a senior lecturer in writing at UCSC. "When people write about ideas that are significant to them, they want to share their work, and through sharing they become active participants in society."
CCWP doesn't promote any particular formula for writing, Rothman explains. Instead, teachers learn to help students tap into their thoughts and feelings, bring them out on paper, and revise them.
An important tool in this process is the writing response group, in which writers read their work to classmates and a discussion of the work follows. "The aim isn't to get everyone to agree with what a person writes but, rather, to collaborate and provoke dialogue," Rothman says. "Dialogue becomes a way of learning. If people can figure out how to sustain dialogue they can think together and reach solutions to difficult problems."
"A lot of us learned to teach writing in a very traditional way," says Sylvia Mendez, a bilingual resource teacher at Starlight Elementary School in Watsonville. "We'd say, 'Let's diagram sentences; let's do a three-paragraph essay on what you did this summer.' But we learn a very different approach at the Writing Project."
Mendez has cofacilitated three CCWP institutes in English and will cofacilitate this summer's Spanish-language institute. After her first institute in 1982, she changed her approach dramatically. "I learned the importance of providing a lot of prewriting stimulus for younger children--a field trip, a math concept, some kind of firsthand experience," she says. "If I just assigned a specific topic, children ended up writing what they thought I wanted to hear. When they were allowed to write from their own feelings and experiences, I saw such a powerful change."
"Once children experience the pleasure of communicating their own ideas they get excited about writing," Rothman adds. "Once they want to write, then they will want to learn how to write well."
Lucía Villarreal, who teaches first grade at Mintie White School in Watsonville, remembers the excitement in her classroom when her students focused their writing on the Gulf War. The activity became a highlight of the week--sparking intense classroom debates and a letter-writing campaign. Tim Willis, a history teacher at Anzar High School in Castroville, talks about two projects he and several other teachers collaborated on in the mid-1980s that inspired both them and their students. The first involved correspondence between area high school students and students in Nicaragua. The second centered on a writing project by several high school classes who sent a collection of their work to the Soviet Union. The collection was displayed in Leningrad in a public exhibition. "The effort and creativity the kids invested in those projects was remarkable," Willis says.
The inspiration and enthusiasm of Villarreal and Willis are typical of teachers who have participated in a CCWP institute. Ideas that are born in the small UCSC conference room during the summer take on momentum when teachers bring their newfound expertise back to their students, their colleagues, and their personal lives.
"Many institute participants emerge as leaders in their profession," notes CCWP workshop coordinator Robin Drury. "CCWP teachers bring what they've learned back to their own schools, presenting workshops and modeling for others. They also serve in noticeably large numbers on county curriculum councils, statewide textbook committees, and as supervisors in UCSC's credential program." Several teachers were inspired to write books, and Willis even decided to run for the Santa Cruz City School Board following an institute he attended. (He was elected in November 1994.)
When people talk about CCWP, the discussion invariably turns to Rothman who, as one teacher says, "has truly touched many lives."
David Schumaker, director of the Central Coast Consortium for Professional Development and a former middle school principal, explains it this way: "Don is one of the most inspiring, easy-to- work-with people, and at the same time, one of the most demanding. He encourages you so that even though you're always going uphill you're feeling good about it. He is a remarkable model of the kind of teacher we all aspire to be."
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Go to related story: "UCSC writers reach out to K-12"
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