Professional Development for Teacher-Writers

I took my first course in the teaching of writing in 1979, and a simple idea that I learned there opened up a world of teaching possibilities: Writing can be taught. I had always believed that you were innately either a good or a bad writer and that teachers could only help you become a “correct” writer. I came to the writing instruction course with years of experience in red-penciled essays that noted my incorrect use of who and whom; in comment-free papers handed back with a seemingly random A, B, or C emblazoned across the top; and in yearly instruction in the five-paragraph essay, with its set conclusion, “Certainly, one can see . . .”

This is not to say that I had bad, lazy, or uninformed teachers. I studied, for the most part, with caring professionals who spent hours reading their students' writing, correcting every error they found. But I experienced something different in that writing instruction class, what Hairston referred to a few years later as “the winds of change” (1982). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a revolution in the community of writing teachers led to a shift in writing instruction. Hairston characterized this shift by distinguishing between a traditional and a new model of writing instruction. The traditional model focused on the composed product, with its adherents believing

that competent writers know what they are going to say before they begin to write; thus their most important task when they are preparing to write is finding a form. . . to organize their content. They also believe that the composing process is linear, that it proceeds systematically from prewriting to writing to rewriting. Finally, they believe that teaching editing is teaching writing. (p. 78)