Teaching isn’t about a competition; it’s about learning and conversation. It’s about resource sharing. It’s about the real work of teaching: asking question after question until you find a method, resource, or approach that works for your context. It isn’t about being the best. It’s about building the reflective capacity to know when you have to seek help and change what you’re doing. (Kevin English, Teacher Consultant, 2013)

The 23rd summer institute of the Eastern Michigan Writing Project soared into the sunset, trailing clouds of witnesses. This could be the smallest teacher’s institute in the annals of the National Writing Project with four new teachers graduating. However, it also brought back two teachers from 2013, two from 2012, and one from 2010 to relive the glory of those previous institutes and make it wonderful for the other four.

It also featured guest speakers from days of yore, on Family Literacy (2013), on classroom research (2011 and 2003), on writing  (2011, 2005 and 2003), on professional development (2004), on school improvement (2009), and on literacy coaching (1998).   And today it featured our published authors of poetry (1998), of professional inquiry (2000) and of children’s fiction (2011).  From this point of view, this was the most widely-attended Institute we have sponsored at Eastern Michigan University.

It illustrates the point made by Kevin English (2013) above that, “It’s about building the reflective capacity to know when you have to seek help and change what you’re doing.” As a network of Writing Project teachers we have built a shared “reflective capacity” that makes us much larger than the four teachers we had this summer or the nine teachers we had last summer or the eleven we had the year before. We are not getting any prizes for head count, but we could really set off tremors with our “reflective capacity” because it is shared, not only this summer, but across the generations.

When we celebrated the authors today, quite a few generations of teacher consultants looked on and cheered for three who made a mark by publishing. The moment gave me that feeling that the early Christian writers had a generation after Jesus had walked the earth: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles and let us run the race with perseverance, the race marked out for us” (Hebrews 12:1).

This is no race to the top, but a race to make schools better and students valued and writing a lynchpin in the curriculum.  The “sin” that entangles us is helplessness, the sense that we don’t matter in this race.  When we stand with the “cloud of witnesses” we are much more than victims, more than the faithful remnant of those who put students first. We are a shared reflective capacity for improvement and making a difference.

If anyone wonders how you hold a “Writing Teacher’s Leadership Institute” with four teachers, here is the answer: teach together. Gather the “cloud” and let teachers collaborate. There was very little design in this, just a faith that teachers are stronger together than apart. The new teachers came together the same way as their predecessors had, because they shared their own “reflective capacity.” They also made their unique contributions to inquiry, to digital stories, to metaphors (“writing is like a hula hoop”), to adopting social media.

So thanks to the clouds of witnesses who joined us today and thanks to the new teachers who joined them enthusiastically.

May the reflective capacity be with you.