Since 1996 I’ve taken close to thirty Pennsylvania Reading and Writing Project graduate classes, including becoming a Writing Fellow. My instructional practices were impacted on a very deep conceptual level. NWP taught me to treat my teaching as a craft. By craft I mean researching current pedagogy, and then more importantly, how to internalize that pedagogy so that it becomes part of how my language arts classroom ran. Every day. You may be thinking, but how is that different than any graduate class offered anywhere?

I’ll tell you.

It’s all in the people. NWP is organized to cultivate a true sense of discovery learning. NWP teachers don’t tell or talk at you. Oh no. They guide, foster discussion, push thinking. Big difference. There is nothing like it and nothing can compare.

NWP and all it provides to teachers is priceless. Without NWP I never would have learned how to get a sixth grade boy to write a poem about his mother abandoning him…or a sixth grade girl write a personal narrative about the drowning death of her two year old sister…or a fifth grade girls’ memoir describing her first time on a roller coaster. Without NWP, my students’ writing would never have reached the level of being truly publishable – close to two hundred of my students were published over the years, and I give NWP full credit.

I’ll repeat it because it bears repeating, NWP and all it provides to teachers is priceless. Period.

~ Kate Walton

National Writing Project Fellow

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