Oregon Writing Project

1999

Reflections on the Oregon Writing Project

By Karen Backman

The Oregon Writing Project has been good for me in a number of ways. After participating in the program, I feel I will be a better teacher, a better writer, and a better resource for my colleagues. I'm glad I decided to join the Project so early in my career, because now all my future students will benefit from what I've learned this summer.

OWP has helped me become a better teacher by reminding me that learning should be fun, and that writing should be a social activity. Because the state writing assessment tasks are done on a wholly individual basis, I got caught up in giving my students lots of practice at working on their writing individually. Unfortunately, this was frustrating even for my capable writers, and my struggling students quickly learned to hate writing time. During the Writing Project, we not only wrote a lot, we shared a lot, and coincidentally, we learned a lot. That's exactly what should be happening in my classroom! And next year, it will.

OWP has also helped me become a better writer. Like most people, when I get busy, I start cutting "unnecessary" activities out of my life. Since this was my first year in my own classroom, a lot of things got the ax. Writing was one of them, so it was a bit intimidating to be put into a position in which I was expected to write every day. However, the in-class writing tasks helped me ease back into the process, and the response and editing groups served to spark my imagination as well as refine my own work. The papers became almost collaborative as we discussed them, adjusting wording here and adding punctuation there. Talking to others about writing and about writing processes in the classroom was both enlightening and invigorating.

OWP has prepared me to be a better resource for my colleagues. Not only did I have the chance to do some focused reading about best practices in writing instruction, but I also was introduced to some great uses for computer time. Finding ways to integrate subjects so that students get the most from our limited time with them is invaluable, so it was great to learn how technology can be dovetailed into the writing process. I am eager to experiment more with electronic publishing, and with classroom web pages, and with research on the Internet. I also plan to use a presenter hookup to facilitate whole-class-generated stories and to model word processing and editing on the computer.

I would highly recommend the Oregon Writing Project to a friend, a colleague, or even a total stranger (if the opportunity presented itself). I thoroughly enjoyed the presentations given by both members of the class and by guest speakers. I came away with the realization that nearly any of the writing tasks we were given in class could be modified for use in my own classroom, providing both variety, challenge, and success for students at all levels. I plan to revisit the Writing Project several times during my career, and I am confident that each time I will be able to contribute something different and acquire something new in return.