Getting a Jump on the Work of a New Site
By: J. Elaine White
Publication:
The Voice, Vol. 10, No. 1
Date: 2005
Summary: A site director describes how she launched her site's programs—and learned that when she taps into the energy and expertise of the teacher-consultants, the potential for the site is unlimited.
At the Live Oak Writing Project, we were a small group with much to do. The foundation for our site had been laid by the South Mississippi Writing Project (SMWP). Before our site existed, Jeanne Ezelle, director of SMWP, had offered a summer institute in our area on the Gulf Park campus of the University of Southern Mississippi. Because of this, many teacher-consultants in our coastal counties had been trained and could help us provide staff development programs, but we didn't know who wanted to affiliate with our site. Even as we pondered this, districts interested in our inservice programs were contacting us to schedule sessions in their schools, but we didn't have enough teacher-consultants to staff the requests.
The previous year my co-directors, Mary Kay Deen and Frances Weiler, and I had attended the Visioning Retreat sponsored by our state network organization, the Mississippi Writing/Thinking Institute. It impressed me how teachers were enlisted into the work of the institute and then were given the freedom to collaborate in planning the network's work and creating programs that tapped into the participants' interests and experiences. This seemed to be a model that might work for our site. A retreat to identify and involve teacher-consultants who were ready to participate in the Live Oak Writing Project might be just the thing. So I organized a retreat that we now call the Jump Start Retreat.
The first step was to contact teacher-consultants in the counties we served. When we established the Live Oak Writing Project, Jeanne Ezelle had given me a roster of about 100 teacher-consultants who had been trained by her site and lived along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I sent a flyer to each teacher on the list, explaining our goals for the weekend. Although I had no idea how many would participate, I felt these participants would become our core group.
I knew that it would be impossible for me to single-handedly. . . carry out the work of the Live Oak Writing Project; the retreat was the answer to that dilemma.
In planning the agenda, I kept in mind that the people who would attend were busy teachers with multiple responsibilities. Some people might not be able to attend the whole retreat. I had to decide what was most important: having participants stay for all of the sessions or allowing them to come when they could, running the risk that some of them might miss out on the full experience. I decided that we needed all the participants we could find, so if teacher-consultants could come for only part of the retreat, we would make that possible.
As the director of a new site, I shouldered most of the responsibility for the planning. However, I wanted the retreat to demonstrate the leadership style that I envisioned: shared governance—teachers teaching teachers. I wanted to empower teacher-consultants to develop into teacher-leaders. As soon as I knew who would attend, I asked for help in preparing and conducting the retreat. One co-director agreed to facilitate the writing and sharing sessions; one teacher-consultant would work the registration table; and another took on the challenge of welcoming participants, introducing teacher-consultants to each other, and making sure everyone was included in conversations. Three others worked together to plan and facilitate team-building activities.
Twenty teacher-consultants sent in reservations, and 15 attended the entire weekend. Half were participants from the 2001 summer institute; half were teacher-consultants who had gone through the South Mississippi Writing Project program. On Friday evening, the group met for dinner and then settled down to work, writing and sharing. Co-director Mary Kay Deen prompted us to write about how involvement with the National Writing Project had affected us professionally and personally. When we shared our writing, we found that although each person was at a different stage of involvement, all of us felt that being part of a writing project site gave us motivation and confidence to be innovative in our writing instruction. Many also expressed a need to stay involved with a group that would foster their personal growth as writers. By beginning our work through writing, we were blending our experiences and aspirations into a new community—the Live Oak Writing Project.
After a short break, I described what we had accomplished over the previous year and my vision for the site. I asked participants to think about their visions for the Live Oak Writing Project, and I shared with the teachers my goal of helping them find places in our site where they could use their interests and expertise effectively. By 9:00 p.m., we had completed the night's agenda.
Saturday morning began with writing—on the campus grounds, under the oak trees or by the beach, or in a quiet place in the conference center. The enthusiasm the teacher-consultants showed confirmed my impression from the previous night; these people were hungry to write for themselves and to share their thoughts with colleagues who were as passionate as they were about the practice and teaching of writing. At 8:30 a.m., we gathered to share our writing. Because giving up part of a weekend was a sacrifice for these teachers, I wanted to fill every minute with meaningful activity. Consequently, I made sure everything began on time.
At 9:00 a.m. we began the work of our retreat. I had posted butcher paper on the walls indicating three areas for discussion—summer institute, inservice, and continuity. On the paper we brainstormed the work we envisioned doing in each area. The only guideline was that each idea had to fit into one of the three. In a few minutes, lists of ideas covered the walls as the group projected what they wanted to see happen immediately and in the years to come. They suggested professional writing groups, writing retreats, and advanced summer institutes focused on specific areas of writing. They wanted research groups, study groups, technology training, and demonstration lesson refresher groups. They were eager to affiliate with the Rural Sites Network and to organize writing marathons that would include parents and community members. They also suggested young writers camps, festivals for secondary students, inservice programs that involved teachers not affiliated with our site, and ways for working with new teachers. With our vision set, we now needed to focus on making it a reality.
I explained that the people who were at the retreat, plus a small group who had responded as "interested but unable to attend," would become the chairs of committees we established, based on matching their interests with the site's work. Looking at our butcher-paper lists, the teachers realized that we didn't have nearly enough people to staff everything we had envisioned. So we reviewed our brainstormed ideas, consolidating some and moving others to a "Look at these as we grow" section. In the end we came up with ten committees that the teacher-consultants thought we needed to establish immediately: Summer Institute, Young Writers Camp, Membership, Partnerships, Public Relations, Continuity, Rural Sites, Inservice, National Board Certification, and Professional Writing. Next we looked at each committee and decided what needed to be done immediately and what would need to wait until our site had grown. I then gave the participants three Post-it notes each, asked them to write their names on the notes, and invited them to place a note under the committees that matched their interests. By the time we finished this activity, we had discussed the work of our site and the areas that needed to be addressed quickly. We had defined the work of each committee, looked at our potential for growth, and identified areas that we wanted to address when we had a larger cadre of teacher-consultants.
After lunch, I opened our discussion by further describing my vision. I explained that I wanted to ensure slow, steady growth for our site. I wanted teacher-consultants to be as active as their lives allowed. That meant that a person might be very involved during some years and might need to be only marginally involved other years. I also explained that I wanted people to feel free to move to different committees as their needs or interests changed. From here, I suggested we find a chairperson for each committee. Since some committees had several Post-it notes under them, the teacher-consultants began to revise the lists, moving their names around until each committee had a chair and co-chair. Once all committees had leaders, we used the roster to identify teacher-consultants who might be interested in serving as committee members. The chair and co-chair of each committee agreed to recruit these people for their committee and create a job description for the committee's work.
By the end of the weekend, I felt good about the work we had accomplished. It seemed that all of the participants had a better grasp of the NWP requirements to provide a summer institute, inservice, and continuity, as well as the long-term goals for our site. They were excited about what we were going to do as a site and had committed themselves to the work. During our Saturday session, several teacher-consultants mentioned that they would like to hold this kind of retreat periodically. The co-directors and I realized that this would be a way for our site leadership to stay in touch with the needs of our teacher-consultants, evaluate our progress and direction, and reorganize our work to address changing interests. We decided that having a retreat every three years might be doable.
As a result of our retreat, we were able to do some important things quickly. In addition to helping us create a structure for our site, the retreat served as the initial meeting of our Teacher-Consultant Council, our advisory body. All committee chairs and co-chairs plus the director, co-directors, and inservice coordinator sit on that council. We agreed to meet three times a year—once each semester and once in the summer—and to rotate the meeting place to different parts of our service area, reinforcing our commitment to work with all areas. Next the teacher-consultant in charge of the Membership Committee worked for months to contact everyone on our original roster. In the end, she produced a list of 90 teacher-consultants who intended to be active at some level with the Live Oak Writing Project. Also, as teacher-consultants recruited others to work with them on committees, many of those committee members became involved not only with their committee but with other programs our site offers.
The framework we developed at the Jump Start Retreat has changed and grown as our work has developed, and each successive summer institute has added more teacher-consultants to our rolls. As a result, some of our original committees have disappeared, and others have taken their places. For example, we have a Professional Writers Group, which formed when the committee interested in National Board certification mentoring decided to broaden its work so that it could serve more people without duplicating services the university offered. We also created a Continuity Committee, using new teacher-consultants as the co-chairs, to organize study groups for the year following each institute and oversee the advanced summer institute. We established another committee to devise a plan for mentoring new teachers. And we have joined the Rural Sites Network and the Teacher Inquiry Communities Network, because our teacher-consultants are ready to connect with teacher-consultants from other sites across the nation.
In looking back over the past five years as a site director, I consider the Jump Start Retreat a milestone. I knew that it would be impossible for me to single-handedly organize and carry out the work of the Live Oak Writing Project; the retreat was the answer to that dilemma. It gave me an opportunity to identify and interact with people who wanted to see our site succeed as much as I did. I also knew that the retreat was the perfect forum in which to introduce the NWP concept of teachers teaching teachers. Introducing that concept at the retreat naturally built that concept into our site structure, giving our teacher-consultants ownership and empowering them to pursue interests they had that were in line with our work.
The final validation of our retreat's success came from one of our teacher-consultants. "The thing that is so great about our site is that you've made us feel important," she said. "You've trusted us to help decide what needs to be done and how we can do it best." Those words are recorded in my journal, both as an affirmation of the retreat's success and as a reminder that when I tap into the energy and expertise of our teacher-consultants, the potential for our site is unlimited. I look forward to our next Jump Start Retreat. It will be enjoyable to evaluate our work as a group, celebrate our successes, and plan for our continued growth.