Happy summer, my dear teachers! I hope you are enjoying a well-deserved break.
As for me, my break usually consists of catching up on readings—essays, professional texts, books—that I haven’t had time to read yet. But for this summer, I’ve been doing my readings a little differently. You see, I’ve started a writing group with other teachers this summer based on three beliefs: 1) That I, personally, should seek professional learning anywhere I can, even if it’s reading by myself; 2) That the best development for our professional practice is learning from other teachers; and 3) That teachers of writing are writers who must engage in writing daily.
This group gives me—and anyone else who wants to join—a way to consider writing practices with other like-minded educators. (I would note here that this summer group was going to be just two of us at first, until we decided to open it up to others in our district. And I’m so happy we did!)
So what does this writing group look like? Well, we read a couple of chapters on writing to start our discussions of the week’s topic (see the image for the topic list), and we consider how we can implement these writing practices in our secondary ELA spaces. We meet for two hours every Monday for writing and collaboration and camaraderie. Kind of like a book club, except we read chapters from professional texts that serve as a springboard for our discussions, writing, and teaching. Such a joyful time!
As the one who suggested this little group, I get the honor of selecting the readings—at least for now—so my readings have been centered on the topics of discussion (see list below). I decided to focus on writing practices at the center since writing is such an important part of thinking that is necessary in all classrooms. My co-facilitator and I decided that this session should consider the practices of the writer’s workshop, as touted by Atwell, Kittle, Wood, and others!
As such, the Writer’s Notebook became the main tool for these sessions. Our first session started with the Writer’s Notebook, how we’ve all implemented it in the past and how we’ve seen others implement it. We read the writer’s notebook chapter from Sarah Donovan and Jenn Yong Sanders’ new book Writer to Writer: Seven Community-Building Workshops for Teaching Language Arts (2026) and a chapter from Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them (2008). While we started with the chapters, we also did “writing in,” as Donovan and Sanders call it, on the poem “i didn’t eat the sun” by ire’ne lara silva, where we each had to take a line/phrase/sentence/word/idea from the poem and create a new piece of writing from the choice. This is a technique I adopted from a workshop I attended with Penny Kittle this past year, and I’ve used it several times with students and teachers. It works great to get the thinking flowing with any group! After this “writing in,” we discussed and pondered the chapters we read and potential ways to implement the writer’s notebook in our individual classrooms.
What a joy this group has already been!
If a summer writing group is something you are interested in, feel free to contact me for more info. I can’t speak for everyone in the group, but I’m learning a lot from my fellow group members and already getting excited about new practices I can implement into my and my students’ writing next year!
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