1. The Professional Leadership Development Project: Building Writing Project and School-Site Teacher Leadership in Urban Schools. National Writing Project at Work. Volume 1, Number 5
- Author
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National Writing Project, Berkeley, CA., Boykin, Zsa, Scrivner, Jennifer, and Robbins, Sarah
- Abstract
Between 1996 and 1998, a team of teacher-consultants affiliated with the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project (KMWP), Georgia, used support from Project Outreach of the National Writing Project to develop a model for promoting teacher leadership within individual urban schools and for their writing project site as a whole. Their model is not a preordained set of steps to follow or even a detailed set of guidelines; rather, it is a flexible framework--an adaptable set of concepts and promising practices for thinking about and carrying out school-based inservice grounded in teachers' own collaborative inquiry into their work. All of the individual inservice projects drew on and contributed to the framework for leadership development that KMWP was gradually defining through a shared inquiry process. This monograph revisits the experiences of some key participants in this inquiry process to highlight what and how they learned about promoting teacher leadership in urban schools and for their National Writing Project (NWP) site. Their story is closely tied to the early history of the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project, especially its deep commitment to teachers working in urban settings. The first section of this monograph provides relevant details from the early history of KMWP--decisions and practices that helped shape this project. The two subsequent sections describe the heart and core of KMWP's work--the development of the leadership group and the site-based study groups. And in the final section, the authors collectively reflect on what they learned about reaching urban educators during the academic year through collaborative, school-based staff development. This monograph was written in the belief that those individual school-based projects and the process followed by the multimember Project Outreach team working at KMWP could serve as models for other writing projects to use in small-group inservice during the school year. Appendix A presents the percentage of Summer Institute Participants from At-Risk Schools, 1994-2003; Appendix B presents the Mission Statement of the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project; and Appendix C presents Project Outreach (Professional Leadership Development Project Planning Guide).
- Published
- 2004