They're asking us to write at the #NWP session. That's good. The prompt is - "Tell us your 'from silence to whispering' story.' How has NWP helped you find your teacher/writer/leader voice?"

Here's mine -

Earlier this morning, I mentioned to the director of my writing project site, Cindy O'Donnell-Allen, that she had quite literally changed my life. She came to CSU as a professor when I was an undergraduate, and CSU was a wonderful place for me. Cindy was my teacher several times, and she taught, well, differently, than many of my other teachers. I didn't know it then, but that was the first intrusion of the National Writing Project into my life. A few years later, as a first-year teacher, I learned that Cindy had started a site at CSU. My wife, also a teacher, and I joined the first class of folks who went to the SI at the CSUWP. That's a pretty big deal. What I learned about how to do professional development by learning from and with my fellow teachers would shape my career later - but I didn't know it yet. I just knew that it was important to be writing with and for my students, to show them that I would be walking the walk I asked of them. That was the way to powerful learning. So that's how I taught. I had no other choice.

Later, when I left the classroom to become a professional developer, I knew that the writing project could show me the way to do it right. So I modeled a summer camp in my school district after the summer invitational that I had experienced at CSUWP. Teachers came together to share their learning and to learn together, in much the same way that I had. We wrote together - via a shared blog - to begin and end our days together. This wasn't a writing project, but it was of the Writing Project.

Later yet, that camp would expand and become the seed of a two-year professional learning program that I co-facilitate in my school district, the Digital Learning Collaborative. In the DLC, we bring teachers together to learn from and with each other, and we write together - now in some other digital spaces - every time that we meet. And we make meaning of words and images and our experiences teaching and learning with technology. Walking the walk with teachers is as powerful as it is to walk that walk with students. We are all learners, and writing is powerful learning.

Now, we have hired the CSUWP to come into our district, and to learn with us about teacher research in the DLC, because once you start writing in your teaching, you can't help but explore and write about it, too.

And that all happened because I was shown how to do that by someone who knew the Writing Project.

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