- Volume 11, Issue 2, 2002

Donna Bell, Donna Jarvis, Clint Wills, Josie Pough, and Kezia Myers were all members of the Reading Initiative study group at Bradley Elementary School in Columbia, SC. RI is a 3-year professional development experience created by NCTE. Twelve teachers formed the original Reading Initiative group at Bradley in October 1998. I am the local professor who supervised interns in their classrooms and who became the facilitator for their study group.

Not confident that their early literacy curriculum was all it could be, Donna Bell and Donna Jarvis used their Reading Initiative study group exploration to look more closely at what their kindergarten students already knew. Beginning from that point took their curriculum in whole new directions.

One of the literacy rituals that connected us was daily sharing. I believe that students who are adept at storytelling are able to find and use their writer’s voice more easily, so daily sharing was structured to support the creation and recording of told stories.

We were excited and a little nervous. If we tried writing workshop, would we be comfortable with a “hum of noise”? Would the children learn everything they needed to know to excel on the state writing test? Most important, would writing workshop help us find ways for our children to fall in love with writing, or would we still hear the groans that typically accompanied our announcement, “It’s writing time. Everybody get out your journals.”

Through years of programmatic mandates, teachers’ guides, and teach-to-the-test directives, too many teachers have learned to distrust their own knowledge and to distrust that they have the capacity to generate theory and practice in their own classrooms.