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New York City
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Overview
Services
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| School-Year Inservice Program |
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| Summer Programs |
School-Year Inservice
Program On-Site Consulting and Classroom Support Advanced Seminars Study Groups Professional Development Series
Our school-year professional development model has three mutually-reinforcing components:
On-site support for teachers is provided by a NYCWP teacher-consultant who spends at least
one day each week per school working with teachers to plan lessons and projects, coach and
model in classrooms, team-teach, recommend and share resources, examine student work
samples and assessment data to determine future instructional goals, and encourage the
publication of student writing through anthologies, displays, and weblogs. In their work
in classrooms, teacher-consultants support teachers so that they can successfully
implement balanced literacy practices. They help teachers to initiate and sustain writing
groups and literature circles and model ways to introduce students to active listening,
accountable talk, revision and editing processes, and writing strategies that foster
comprehension and encourage an active critical response to challenging content area texts.
They help teachers to establish classroom environments that are rich in resources and in
which independent, small-group and whole-class literacy activities can flourish.
Teacher-consultants also meet with grade-level groups and interdisciplinary teams,
participate in department meetings, lead after-school professional development, and
organize/facilitate meetings to assist school planning teams with curricular changes. The
consultant supports school-based coaches to enable them to serve as leaders for
instructional change in their schools. Teacher-consultants also participate in school
professional development committees to review and design strategies for implementing
reform in curricula, assessment, and pedagogy in classrooms.
Through its teacher-consultants the NYCWP builds leadership within and across schools.
They help teachers to set up model classrooms for visits by colleagues. They design
structured formats for teachers to share and analyze student work samples and assignments
at school meetings. They invite and train teachers, coaches and administrators to co-lead
NYCWP graduate seminars, thereby nurturing and developing the leadership capacities of
successful practitioners. They encourage participating teachers to initiate, facilitate,
or participate in study groups and make formal presentations of successful classroom
practice at regional meetings and professional conferences, including the annual NYCWP Teacher
to Teacher conference.
Graduate Seminars
During the school year the NYCWP offers after-school graduate seminars on-site at a school
or at Lehman College. Groups of teachers, administrators, and paraprofessionals from
schools, or clusters of schools within a region or network are invited to attend. This
service is usually combined with the services of an on-site teacher consultant. All
seminars are experiential and focus on issues of literacy.
Basic Seminar
An introduction to the work of the Writing Project, the basic seminar or Seminar in
Writing Theory, develops a community of learners in a school or district by bringing
educators together to read, write, and reflect on teaching, learning, and literacy in the
urban classroom. Participants learn ways to enrich their classroom practice by:
Teachers who have completed the basic seminar may continue their professional development
through an advanced graduate-level seminar that is tailored to school needs and has an
applied focus. Special topics may include:
These small-group sessions are designed for educators interested in exploring a particular
topic more fully. Participants have the opportunity to identify an area of concern and to
engage in a collaborative inquiry which might include professional reading, teacher
research, review of student work, and discussion of emerging school issues. The Writing
Project facilitates two types of forums:
The NYCWP, upon consultation with a school or region, will also design and present series
of workshops or professional development sessions to address the specific and unique needs
of their teachers and administrators. These are offered after-school on-site or on
Saturdays for five to ten sessions, for up to a total of 20 hours. These workshops are
designed to address the needs of particular audiences such as new teachers, ELL teachers,
or educators of specific content areas. These series can also focus on topics of special
interest within a school or across a network. These might include: strategies for
supporting readers in content areas, essay writing, or using new technologies to support
literacy. Within these workshops, educators have opportunities to collaborate on the
design of classroom projects and activities aligned with New York State and City content
and performance standards.
Teacher-to-Teacher Conference
Inaugurated in 1998, this conference brings together all the inservice participants
citywide from our elementary, middle and high school programs. Selected Writing Project
teachers are invited to present their work in an experiential, interactive format.
Conducted by teachers for teachers, the workshops are both a celebration of our work and a
valuable source of strategies for urban teachers. In the past, they have included
workshops on such topics as: looking at student work; using gallery walks to introduce a
unit of study; memoir writing in the history classroom; the challenge of revision; and the
use of storyboards with novels.
Celebratory Reading
Our annual Celebratory Reading provides students of Writing Project teachers an
opportunity to read aloud their finished work to an appreciative audience of their
teachers, family, and friends. This honoring of student achievement also honors the
successes of teachers who have used the writing process to help their students find their
own voices.
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Summer Programs
The New York City Writing Project (NYCWP) offers intensive institutes every summer. These
institutes give teachers from all over the City the opportunity to study together in a
community of peers on Lehman College's beautiful campus. These summer intensives are
designed to build and sustain a local community of like-minded professionals. Ranging from
one to four weeks, the institutes focus on the theory and practice of writing, often with
an emphasis on a particular issue or topic.
As a lead site of the National Writing Project (NWP), two of the NYCWP's institutes are
sponsored by the NWP with funds from the U.S. Department of Education. Instruction is
provided by senior NYCWP staff who bring years of classroom experience and exceptional
knowledge of urban education.
NYCWP Annual Invitational Institute
This intensive four-week institute has been a feature of NYCWP summer programs since 1978.
Offered to teachers who use writing successfully in their classrooms and wish to share
their practices with other teachers, this institute seeks to develop leaders who will
return to their schools to share with their colleagues what they have learned. In addition
to offering new approaches in the teaching of writing, this institute also offers teachers
time to work on their own writing, both personal and professional, and develop
presentations of their classroom practice. The NYCWP Annual Invitational Institute is
sponsored by the National Writing Project and is at the heart of the NWP model of
developing teacher knowledge and leadership.
NYCWP Advanced Institute
Open to teachers who have taken previous Writing Project institutes, these intensive
three-week programs help to build teachers' skills in specialized areas. For the last
three years, for example, advanced institutes have focused on classroom uses of
technology: how it can facilitate research, encourage reflection, support communication
and composition, and be used to design websites. Funded by the National Writing Project,
admission is open, and participants may receive tuition-waived graduate credits or a
stipend.
Open Institute
This institute is designed as a two- to three-week intensive investigation of a topic of
particular interest to the profession. In recent years, for example, middle school
teachers explored literature for classroom use. Participants read fiction and nonfiction,
planned classroom activities related to these readings, developed ways to teach a variety
of texts, and created annotated bibliographies for use in middle grades. Work from these
multi-summer institutes contributed to a publication on literature for young adolescents.
Open Institutes are funded by the NYC Department of Education or by private funders.
Teacher Leadership Institute
This two- to three-day institute serves past participants in NYCWP programs who are
interested in further professional development and involvement with the Writing Project.
These institutes develop participants' capacities for leadership by considering how issues
of literacy and learning can be framed and addressed, by presenting structures for
conducting meetings and facilitating study groups, and by developing skills for consulting
with and presenting work to peers. Participants may receive a stipend.
Youth Writers Institute
This two- or three-week institute is for students entering the 11th and 12th grades who
are interested in experimenting with a range of writing forms including poetry,
journalism, storytelling, and dramatic writing. Students participate in daily writing
workshops, learn from visiting authors, and meet other young writers in a supportive
environment. They also explore career possibilities in the world of professional writing,
and use technology for writing, research, and publication. An anthology of student writing
is published at the conclusion of each institute. Admission is open to high school
students at no cost, some of whom may be eligible for tuition-waived undergraduate credit.
Dependent upon foundation or corporate support, this program is offered when funding is
available.
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