Take-Aways from the Western PA Writing Project Summer Institute for Teachers by Hannah Lewis

Take-Aways from the 2023 WPWP Summer Institute for Teachers

by Hannah Lewis

“The Best Writing Teachers Are Teachers who Write”

Such was the premise of the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project Summer Institute for Teachers I attended at the University of Pittsburgh this summer. While the WPWP and National Writing Project have been around for a long time, and while I’d heard a lot about it from peers and at conferences, I never really realized what it truly was until this summer. 

In addition to the general take-aways that other WPWP teacher consultants like Lauren Spang and our own Amy Bouch have already shared, I’d like to share some ideas below that I think are going to help me to really humanize my English instruction in the 2023-2024 school year. 

For those of you considering participating in the SIT, please know that the “tips and tricks” you pick up are only a small fraction of the story: the Western PA Writing Project is really about the people in the community. I worked with so many incredible educators and all of them were so eager to share ideas and contact information and invite future conversation and collaboration. If you want to be a better teacher and to be tethered to a community of writers, educators, leaders, and learners, I can’t recommend the experience enough. 

That said, here are a handful of treasures I’m taking with me into the upcoming school year:

For my Students:

Class Playlist

While I’d heard the idea of creating a class playlist, I never fully appreciated its potential until this summer. Songs, after all, are poetry, and critical listening is a vital skill that rarely gets the attention it deserves. Perhaps most importantly, students love music and we can learn a lot about them by inviting them to share some of their favorite songs to a class playlist. I also found that low music in the background helped to inspire me when I wrote, and I generally begin my classes with a short period of free-writing perfect for such background music. I’ll be making playlists on Spotify for each of my classes this year and playing them to begin class as we work on our quick writes and get settled in. 

Inquiry Questions

We began the summer institute collecting questions we wanted to answer–or maybe not answer, but rather, in the spirit of Rilke’s “Live the Questions Now,” questions we wanted to “live into.” These questions ranged from “How can I motivate reluctant readers to find books they enjoy?” to “How do we operate into oblivion?” to “What do the spiders and the worms know?” to “Do we (teachers) only need to ‘fill our cups’ so that we can pour more out, or do we deserve fullness in its own right?” Some had direct answers, others inspired creative writing and poems, and others just led to more questions. I’d like to begin this year collecting questions about the words “American,” “Literature,” “Language,” “Rhetoric,” and “Composition.” Then, I’d like to use these questions to guide students’ research projects, class discussions, and even reading selections. 

Annotation as Storying

While annotation probably appears in most English or ELA classrooms, we took it in a new and super interesting direction. One thing the Writing Project director Dr. Khirsten Scott said that stuck with me went something like this: “Active reading is fine, but we need to examine what the activity is.” 

We looked at layering annotations and annotation as storying. We annotated the texts we’d written ourselves–including our own questions–and we also annotated texts we read as a group. We might then go back into dialogue with our old annotations or with one another’s annotations at a later date. We did a lot of this in a graffiti wall/gallery walk style, so I’ll need to adapt it to work online, but activities that get students to see the connection between reading and writing–consumption and creation–are so valuable. I look forward to teaching students to see their annotations as a form of writing that others can read with curiosity and respond to.

 

Loop Writing

A bit like annotating one another’s questions, loop writing is where writers write a short response to a prompt (in our case, it was “What matters to you?” but it could easily be a prompt asking students to respond to literature). Then, two (or more) authors trade writing and begin on the next page writing “I hear you say…” and then restating what they read. The original author gets the chance to respond, correct any “mis-hearings,” and elaborate or wonder in response to their response, and the loop can keep going on and on if needed. This was really powerful for making me feel heard and understood, and the project director, Dr. Khirsten Scott, described it as “listening writers into their own genius.” It’s definitely something to try since it supports social literacy and social-emotional learning as well.

Co-authoring with A.I.(!?)

I’ve been fascinated with generative A.I. since ChatGPT launched last year (read more about my “hot takes” on A.I. here), but before this Summer Institute for Teachers, I had trouble imagining how it could play a creative role in my classroom and how I could meaningfully engage with it and teach my students to use it critically and creatively (and not, as so many of us dread, as an essay mill). I found these great ideas at the Summer Institute for Teachers:

Found poetry written with A.I.

Allegheny County Youth Poet Laureate Danielle Obisie-Orlu conducted a workshop to demystify generative A.I. and large language models. One exercise she shared that I found especially compelling was a form of co-authorship with A.I. She prompted ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of another poet. As I’ve discussed before, I generally find that A.I.-produced writing in a genre that requires a lot of creativity tends to leave much to be desired, but what Obisie-Orlu demonstrated was how to find germs of creativity in these compositions and use them in a new way. She invited us to find an A.I.-generated line or two and use those lines to write poetry of our own. I found this especially interesting because I see it as a collaboration between the poet whose style A.I. is imitating, the A.I. itself, and the user of the A.I., the ultimate author. I look forward to doing something like this in my class and to the discussions about authorship and reinvention it may yield. 

Podcast “interview-ee”

As part of the 2023 Summer Institute, we spent a week at the Children’s Museum for their Genius, Joy, Love institute, in partnership with Pitt’s School of Education. There, I met so many great educators, one of whom, Ryan Devlin of Fox Chapel, shared this incredible idea to enhance students’ reading and composition skills: ChatGPT as podcast guest. In his assignment, students ask ChatGPT to impersonate a fictional character and then proceed to interview that character for their podcast episode. 

For Me (as a Writer and Educator)

Action Research/Teacher Research

I’ve been interested in trying out action research for quite a while, but since I’ve started doing differentiated projects for my educator evaluations, I’ve realized that it turns out, I don’t really know what I’m doing when it comes to action research and teacher research…

 

I was delighted to work closely with Dr. Khirsten Scott and Lucy Ware, among others, to develop my understanding of what teacher research is and what it can be. I look forward to applying that newfound knowledge to future initiatives at my home district as well as with WPCTE to help all of us educators to better understand English and writing instruction in general, with special emphasis on hybrid, flipped, and virtual learning, since that’s what I know best. 

Establishing a Writing Practice

Probably the most valuable thing I took away from the WPWP SIT (besides the connections to a truly incredible network of educators!) was the reestablishment in my conscious mind of the importance of writing and of maintaining a writing practice. I always think of this quote about writing (which I thought came from Steven King, but it turns out comes from John Green’s Dad): “Coal miners don’t get coal miners’ block.” This reminds me to just do the work. We must show up to the writing desk and write if we believe (and I do) that writing is an important form of expression; that it has the power to do things in the world; and that it can facilitate self-actualization. If we want to impart this superpower to young people and magnify the impact of our words and theirs, we must continue to hone our own writing craft. 

Want to hone your professional writing practice and publish work to share with the WPCTE community? We love to have guest authors on our blog! Review our call for proposals and pitch us your idea!

Author Bio:  Hannah Lewis (she/her) has been teaching English Language Arts online since 2014 in the greater Pittsburgh area. She currently teaches eleventh-graders at the Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School. She began to serve as vice president of WPCTE in 2022. She is an avid reader, hiker, and traveler who loves poetry and her cats--but, most of all, her teenage daughter. Find her on LinkedIn or email her at hlewis3@palcs.org [Updated 9/27/24]