Working Solo: The Experience of a Lone Teacher-Consultant
By: Lyon Rathbun
Date: March 2008
Summary: Taking a writing project approach, a teacher introduces the magic of writing to teachers and students in a low-performing school in an economically depressed former mining town.
For much of my teaching career, I worked at a school far from a writing project site, and eventually I began promoting at least some of the project’s goals as a lone consultant. My experience might be of value to others who find themselves in similar circumstances. And in broader terms, my story highlights what communities around the country are missing by not having a writing project site close by.
I had the incredible good luck of participating in the South Bay Writing Project at the opening of my teaching career, in the mid-1980s. For me, the writing project, as it has been for so many others, was a transformative experience. W.B. Yeats points out that education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. It was the writing project that taught me how writing can light fires in the hearts and minds of students and teachers alike.
It was the writing project that taught me how writing can light fires in the hearts and minds of students and teachers alike.
I stumbled across the project when I was beginning my first teaching job, in a small Catholic school on the San Francisco Peninsula, where I was expected to teach social science, literature, and composition classes. In high school and college, I had received mediocre writing instruction and knew nothing about teaching others to write. Hoping to find some way of connecting with my students, I eagerly responded to a flyer announcing a writing project workshop that promised to demonstrate effective ways of teaching writing.
I will never forget my very first workshop session, conducted by Iris Tiedt, then the director of the South Bay Writing Project. She divided the twelve of us who had showed up into three groups and then, standing before us, read Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. Caught up in the enchantment of listening, I was suddenly gripped by apprehension when, having finished reading, she asked us to write out whatever memories or associations that marvelous book had for us, and then read our responses out loud to each other.
Dimly, I realized that I was experiencing the very same kind of anxiety that my students feel knowing they are about to be put on public display. Yet as we wrote, and then read our writing out loud, my anxiety began melting into delight. By the time our group had finished sharing, we were no longer strangers; writing, and then reading our words out loud to each other, opened conversation and established a rapport between us.
When that session ended, I had a powerful new tool for connecting with my students—and for fostering a genuine sense of community within a classroom. I was hooked.
The writing project lit a fire in my teaching career that I have been feeding ever since. I enrolled in the summer institute, became a teacher-consultant, and began conducting writing workshops in local schools; I went back to graduate school in the UC Berkeley Rhetoric Department, where I could teach in a college writing program that had informal affiliations with the writing project. And when I left California in 1994 to take my first college teaching job, I remained committed to the core principles of the writing project.
Lackawanna Valley: A Legacy of Coal
After teaching at Mesa State College in Colorado for three years, in 1997 I accepted a job at Penn State, Worthington Scranton, a regional extension of the university located in Lackawanna Valley in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania. For decades, its feeder schools had trained their students for the blue-collar workforce and only recently had begun attempting to prepare the majority of their graduates for the rigors of college.
The city of Scranton is the old urban center of the anthracite coal industry that dominated the local economy and shaped the local culture from the 1870s right into the 1960s, when mining anthracite coal ceased to be economically feasible. The very names of many towns in Lackawanna County—Old Forge, Carbondale, Pittston—recall the legacy of coal that shaped the entire region.
This legacy remains alive in the ethnic makeup of the valley’s population—predominately Italian, Irish, and eastern European, groups who were drawn to the valley by the thousands in the early twentieth century. The legacy of coal is also alive in the sustained economic slump that has gripped the valley ever since the collapse of the coal industry.
Many of us experienced episodes of acute aggravation and bouts of private despair despite our best effort.
The Schools’ New Challenge
For decades, the Valley school districts had provided rudimentary education for the workers who entered the mines, construction sites, and factories that had once dominated the area. For decades, the vast majority of their students had been absorbed into local industries rather than matriculated to college. Seemingly overnight, Valley schools have been forced to alter their entire focus and prepare their students for a postindustrial economy in which a college education is a minimal ticket for admission.
No tenure-track faculty member at the campus had graduated from any of our feeder schools; only a handful were even from Pennsylvania. Tellingly, the most revered and popular teacher on the campus, Mr. Peronne, a full-time lecturer, had graduated from a local school and could identify, deeply, with our students.
Of course, there was a solid cadre of caring and competent faculty who could connect with students and engender real learning by bridging the gaps of age, gender, and culture. Yet many of us, lacking roots in the local community and without sustained relations with local schools and teachers, were often confounded by our students and reduced to corrosive, sometimes vitriolic complaining.
Many of us experienced episodes of acute aggravation and bouts of private despair despite our best effort. But in situations like this, it is my belief that we can choose to use our private despair as a catalyst for public action.
A Collaboration: First Steps
I began to wonder if I could initiate collaboration between our campus and local schools, and if the pattern of exchange that I had experienced in the writing project could be duplicated in some fashion on our campus.
I contacted the county coordinator for curriculum development and told her I wanted to offer writing workshops in local schools as a form of community service. She invited me to a meeting she was sponsoring for local principals and curriculum coordinators.
Two months after speaking at this meeting, I received a call from the superintendent of the Old Forge School District, in the very heart of the old coal belt, who invited me to meet with him and talk about how I might work with his district to promote writing and improve scores on the writing portion of the state assessment test, the PSSA.
Old Forge High School
Old Forge was one of the little boroughs, made up of fading row houses dating back to mid-century, with a decaying main street pockmarked with boarded-up shops alongside the occasionally thriving coffee shop, beauty salon, or church. The school was a looming rectangular structure with long, sloping athletic fields on one side. It had been built in the early ’60s, and housed all 700 students in the district, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. A quick search on the school’s website revealed that Old Forge School District had the lowest standardized test scores for reading and writing in Lackawanna County.
I found the superintendent’s office down a cool, empty corridor and was surprised to find myself shaking hands with a tall, youthful man who was in his second year guiding the district. Sitting back down in his swivel chair, he explained with worried earnestness that as part of his effort to “turn the school around,”he wanted all of his teachers, in every subject, to use writing as a learning tool. His standardized test scores needed to go up, or under the guidelines of No Child Left Behind his district would be placed on the state’s list of at-risk schools. Could I work with his faculty over the course of two or three years to promote writing across the curriculum?
Introducing the Writing Experience
My first workshop at Old Forge took place on September 11, 2002, the first anniversary of 9/11; I met with the whole faculty, some thirty teachers, from grades seven through twelve. We congregated in the library, where there were enough small tables for everybody to sit in groups of four or five.
They all slowly shuffled in listlessly at two o’clock, walking in small groups of two or three, having already endured one post-lunch professional development meeting. They were not looking forward to a two-hour writing workshop that would result in more work being demanded of them, while reminding them that the very survival of their school would be at risk if they did not improve their students’ performance in the next round of statewide testing.
In the eyes of these teachers, I was an outsider, an intruder.
One or two looked over at me apprehensively. In the eyes of one male teacher, who held my gaze, I sensed a palpable glint of hostility. In that moment, I knew that as a solo consultant, I could never substitute for what a whole writing project site could offer: a broad-based effort of collaboration that resulted in teachers teaching peers. In the eyes of these teachers, I was an outsider, an intruder, who was likely to further complicate their lives. But even as an interloper, I could write with them—and writing can always create magic.
I played an audio clip downloaded from the Lehrer News Hour of Billy Collins, then serving as poet laureate, reading his poem “The Names,” which he’d recently read to an assembly of US representatives and senators who had congregated in New York to commemorate the anniversary of the attack on the twin towers. We listened. Then we wrote. Then we shared.
I sat at a table with a chemistry teacher, the football coach, and a math teacher. As we wrote in silence, and then read our writing amid a comforting cacophony of simultaneous voices speaking all across the room, the discomfort melted away. For several moments, we were just four guys sitting around a table, sharing the agony of an inexplicable experience.
Listening to the voices around me, I felt reverence for the revealed mystery of others’ thoughts made visible through written words. My hope was that they felt the same awe, and would be sufficiently motivated to duplicate the experience in their own classes. If each teacher in each discipline had their students write, as we were doing, twice a month, and gradually incorporated more formal forms of writing once or twice a semester, writing could be gradually integrated into the whole curriculum.
However, what seemed to me like a modest beginning struck many of them as a daunting imposition.
During the break, as I was passing a table of teachers, one veteran member of the English department touched my arm as I passed her and looked up at me. I saw deep fatigue in her eyes. “How many students do you teach in a day?” she asked. Before I could answer, she exclaimed, eyes widening, that she taught 150 students, every day.
Did I really expect her to assign more writing? With the new testing, the new reading, and the new tutoring, how was she going to fit in more writing? I was ready with a spiel about peer grading, portfolios, and holistic assessment. But seeing no bottom to the fatigue in her eyes, I didn’t answer. I didn’t have an answer.
Establishing Teacher-to-Teacher Contacts
That same semester, I came back and worked for an afternoon with the English faculty on incorporating narrative, descriptive, and argumentative writing in seventh through twelfth grade English classes. They had never met before as a faculty to talk about curriculum or pedagogy. Year after year, they had taught five classes in a row, Monday through Friday, and had never met as a department outside of class. In fact, to make this meeting happen, the superintendent had hired substitutes to cover their afternoon classes out of a discretionary fund that had to finance many competing projects.
When I came into the conference room where we met, I was immediately struck by the collective sense of exhaustion in the room. They had taught all morning, had had a half hour lunch, and had been discussing test preparation strategies with the vice-principal and curriculum coordinator for the last hour. Now, as they all looked at me, standing to shake my hand, their fatigue was palpable.
The room was stuffy and hot. Sitting down, dreading the next hour and a half, I suggested, half seriously, that we go outside, into the afternoon sunshine, take a good walk, and then sit around the picnic table I could see through the window and eat fresh pizza. Laughing together at the delicious audacity of the idea, we relaxed. Somebody opened a window, and somebody else brought in a pitcher of water. For the next hour and a half we talked, informally, about a range of topics.
Mostly, they vented— about students, about parents, about their back-breaking workload, about the rigidity of their schedules. During the time that we talked around that table, we were unified as teachers, working together, facing common problems. The conversation jumped from one topic to another; the time passed quickly. As we were saying goodbye, the acting chair of the department exclaimed that this had been the best professional development meeting he had ever participated in.
Driving home, gratified by his comment, I realized anew that the writing project approach to professional development works: Establishing teacher-to-teacher contacts, especially where they have not yet been established, can bring fresh oxygen into the professional lives of both high school and college teachers alike.
Maybe the teachers were just telling the superintendent what he wanted to hear; maybe he was just telling me what I wanted to hear.
Workshops with Students
Over the next year, I led six writing workshops in the library with combined classes of Old Forge students in various subjects, from seventh through twelfth grade. I would introduce a prompt; we would write, and then share our writing. I always gave the attending teachers handouts with subject-specific prompts and writing ideas so they could replicate the experience on their own.
During the 2003–2004 academic year, I gave another four workshops. Over the course of two years, I met with students and teachers from seventh through twelfth grades, modeling how to break students into writing groups and share. In the fall of 2003, a newspaper reporter and photographer came and wrote a story about my efforts. Teachers from my campus and from Old Forge complimented me on the story, pleased to see their school receive some positive press in the local paper.
When I asked, the superintendent told me that some teachers werehaving their students do more writing. Maybe the teachers were just telling the superintendent what he wanted to hear; maybe he was just telling me what I wanted to hear. I made no effort to measure the actual impact of my efforts.
I did know that I had gained a foothold in the lowest achieving school in Lackawanna Valley. I was on a first-name basis with many of the teachers. I felt welcome when I hurried down the corridor to the library, barely in time to make a workshop.
Reflections
As a lone consultant, I could never achieve what a writing project site could accomplish. Despite moments of rapport with some teachers, I was an outsider, constrained by what a lone individual can get done. But I had initiated a collaborative relationship between an isolated college campus and a distressed local school.
Had I remained at Penn State, simply conducting one or two workshops a semester, I could have had my writing students exchange essays with Old Forge classes. I could have invited campus colleagues to make guest appearances in Old Forge classes; I could have invited Old Forge classes to my campus. And these are only some of the possibilities.
At the end of the 2004 academic year, I left Northeastern Pennsylvania for a new teaching opportunity in Texas. Leaving Penn State foreclosed the possibilities that could have ensued from continuing my work at Old Forge. Nevertheless, my experience demonstrates that one lone writing project consultant, working far from a writing project site, can still advance the goals of the project.
Perhaps the most important lesson of my experience is the most obvious: it is precisely where the writing project has not yet established itself that the cooperation and enrichment engendered by the project is most needed. Though the project has spread across the country, many schools remain isolated and many teachers are still not using writing to ignite enthusiasm and excitement in their classrooms.
However, my experience as a lone teacher-consultant has taught me that the NWP principles of teachers writing and sharing together, of teachers teaching each other, of building a community of educators—the ideas that are at the core of writing project professional development—have a power that can be ignited by a single teacher-consultant, or in fact by any committed educator, whether there is a local site available or not.