Exactly two years ago I wrote a blog called “Not Waiting for Superman,” seizing on Rethinking Schools’ critique of that movie that was then dominating the conversation about school reform. Tonight I realize how much this conversation persists and how much the teachers of our Summer Institute continue to be the rejoinder to the claim that it will take super-heroes to change public education.
In 2011 I wrote:
I am “not waiting for Superman,” because I have spent twenty days listening to, and delighting in, twelve amazing teachers of writing, who gave up four weeks of their summer to become better teachers of writing. And I know, from experience, that there are 200 more sites of the National Writing Project completing very similar summer institutes as I write this. That makes about 3,000 teachers of writing becoming better writers and teachers by concentrating on their craft for six hours a day, while many of their detractors assume they are traveling or lying by the pool.
What they are doing is writing relentlessly, listening to demonstrations on teaching writing, offering feedback on the demonstrations, and setting a research agenda to investigate writing in their own classrooms.
Amazing how easily this memory translates to 2013. We again have twelve courageous teachers of all grade levels, K-college. We again have writing, teaching demonstrations, and teacher research proposals. We again share our model of professional development with nearly 200 sites of the National Writing Project. But there are amazing differences.
We have four teachers with three years’ professional teaching experience among them, who have stepped into their profession with remarkable talent and confidence. We have several teachers at the other end of the spectrum, one even about to retire, and they have taken inspiring risks with writing and technology. They are the ones beginning novels, mastering Prezi, demonstrating Haiku Deck and other tricks of digital writing. We have teachers who have been abruptly shifted into new roles, when before they were math teachers, ESL teachers or Speech Therapists. They came to find out if they could teach writing, and they taught us how a professional steps up to challenges. We have teachers who came from almost a hundred miles and some who nearly lived on campus. We have teachers who come from schools under siege, from forced consolidation to the targets of lawsuits to demoralized faculty. You might say “a motley crew.”
I would say “an inspiring company,” who threw off their differences, their baggage, their inexperience and their despair to work together as caring teachers, trusting and supporting each other, and reclaiming their voices as writers. And how they opened their hearts to the motley crew that began the summer together is an entirely new version of the Writing Project narrative. Yes, it has happened before, but never like this.
Ask a Writing Project teacher about the Summer Institute, and you will hear various stories of transformation, rejuvenation, re-invention, and recovery, but they are all different. This summer was full of surprises, from the sneaker found in the road of our Writing Marathon to the surreal rendition of Peter Elbow’s Yearbook. We’ve been visited by Writing Project teachers from Pennsylvania and Virginia, by pre-school, middle school, and never-left-school children, by superintendents and principals and associate deans. We have been a crossroads of learning.
We are still “not waiting for Superman,” because education is going to be saved by regular classroom teachers who understand the power of two . . . or three or more. The power of teachers working in concert, whether in melodic or discordant song, but working together to learn and to teach. That’s what we witnessed again in the Summer Institute, but in a completely different way.