I began teaching writing in 1971, 40 years ago. I was just out of college, enrolled in an MA program at NYU and hired as an adjunct at Hostos Community College, one of the community colleges created to handle the influx of students as a result of the City University of New York’s new Open Admissions policy.  I had no idea how to teach writing so I followed what my department told me to do. I based my comp course on Lynn Troyka’s Steps to Composition, taught a lot of grammar using exercises from a workbook called Grassroots, eventually added Bill Strong’s sentence-combining techniques, and hoped for the best. I assigned writing using the different modes of discourse and asked my students to generate lots of topic sentences. I could talk knowledgeably about Bloom’s taxonomy, understood the rudiments of Chomsky’s transformational grammar, had read about Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and had learned how to write the kind of performance objectives my department wanted faculty to include on their syllabi.

Seven years later, in 1978, I had completed my research on the composing processes of basic writers, understood a great deal about the ways my students composed, and had received a Ph.D. from New York University, but my pedagogy was still this odd array of borrowed ideas and formulaic procedures that made it look as if I was actually teaching writing, but if anything in this hodgepodge of practices was actually working, I could probably not have told you why.

Enter Jim Gray, founder and director of what was then called the Bay Area Writing Project. Jim was in New York to meet with the directors of the newly funded sites in NY state, sites that would in the near future all come under the umbrella of the National Writing Project. My colleagues Richard Sterling and John Brereton joined me at this meeting as the three of us had been selected as the co-directors of the New York City Writing Project.

Jim’s purpose was to inform us about the structure and content of Writing Projects, in other words, the inner workings of the project he was funding and that we would now be representing.

“First,” he said, “everyone has to write.” OK. This made sense. We were, after all, directing a writing project.  “You, as the teachers write, too,” he emphasized. That also made sense, and was certainly OK with us.

Then, he said, “and every day, everyone will meet in writing groups to share their drafts.” Remember, this is 1978. Six years before Ken Bruffee published “Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of Mankind.”  Nine years before Anne Ruggles Gere published her study on writing groups. To us, this practice – sharing messy, barely formed, unfinished work in small circles -- smacked of California therapy groups, Esalen hot tubs, and folks running around without any clothes on. 

“No way,” we said, rolling our eyes at one another. “People in California may want to share their work like that, but in New York, they just won’t do it.”

Jim didn’t miss a beat: “Now they will,” he replied.

That was my introduction to writing groups. A mandate. You will do this or you won’t run a Writing Project. We were stymied and a bit nonplussed. But shrugging our shoulders, we gave each other a look that said, “Well, if this is that important to Jim, we might as well give it a try.”

So, what can I say? That summer, sitting in my first writing group, listening to my peers read their drafts aloud, often in awe at a turn of phrase or an image from someone I had not suspected of having such talent, mustering the courage to read mine, noticing how our hands shook and our voices wavered, I was hooked. Something quite real and honest was occurring. Writing was becoming the center of our interest, everyone’s writing as it was in the process of being shaped. Of course, it dawned on me: in a writing classroom, not only does everyone need to write, everyone also needs to read his or her piece aloud, everyone needs to feel the words on the tongue, to hear the words in the ear; everyone needs space and time to talk about what is on the page -- and what yet isn’t.

I realized that I did not necessarily need to abandon books or teaching about forms, or focusing on errors and how to correct them, but it was clear to me that what had been missing from my pedagogy was this way of making everyone’s work count by making it visible, accessible and live.

From that summer on, I have probably never had a class that did not in some way make the sharing, the reading aloud of drafts, a central component. Writing groups have become a staple of my practice whether I am teaching freshmen, seniors, or doctoral students. Nor does the subject matter make a difference. Literature classes, writing classes, seminars on research methods or on memoir, or even more recently on trauma and the Holocaust, all include time in class for students to share their work as it is evolving.

My way of using writing groups has evolved over 40 years, as has my understanding of teaching and learning, but it is not an exaggeration to say that it was in my first summer seminar that I learned the what it means to teach writing. I learned what it means to have a theory-based practice and a practice-based theory. I learned what it means to collaborate. And I discovered a community of like-minded colleagues who would accompany on this journey for as long as I wanted and needed.

I have had – and continue to have – a varied and deeply fulfilling life as an educator. Over the past 40 years, I have been a researcher, a writer and a winner of grants and awards, including the Carnegie Foundation’s Professor of the Year award. I have been and continue to be an advisor in a Ph.D. program in English, mentoring doctoral students as they prepare to enter higher education. Six years ago, I founded and I now direct the Holocaust Educators Network, a national program funded by a private foundation. When I was seeking a partner for this program, I knew immediately that the only place to go was the National Writing Project. Just about everything I have accomplished, in fact, owes its power the lessons I learned in the National Writing Project network, starting from my first experience as a young teacher and continuing to this day. The Writing Project network has nurtured me and continues to sustain me. I hope that I will not have to mourn its loss.

Sondra Perl

Founding Co-Director, New York City Writing Project

Professor of English and Urban Education at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York