The Western Kentucky University Writing Project

Writing Advisory Board Minutes

September 18, 2004

Tom Stewart, Dwight Holder, Karen Alford, Karen Scott, Rich Haynes, Joyce Elmore, Sonja Otto, Katy McCalla, and John Hagaman were in attendance.

Joyce Elmore secretary for this session only. Rich Haynes will be secretary for next meeting.

Old Business:
The minutes were reviewed and discussed. The minutes were accepted and approved.
Concerns raised by Karen Scott because WKU chose not to implement the optional writing section of the ACT college entrance exam.

New Business:
Very positive reflections were offered on the Advanced Literacy Instititute by Joyce Elmore. Follow up meeting date is November 13^th. Marsha Kerr and Anne Padilla are continuing to work on reading through our involvement with the NWP Reading Initiative Grant awarded us along with the Blue Grass, Morehead, and Purchase Area Projects.

The Gender Discrepancies mini project was successful this past June. Rich Haynes and Karen Scott gave feedback. Rich discussed the lack of male oriented texts in his school. Concerns were voiced that he has been unable to get on the blog for the participants. Positive evaluations were shared by John. Discussion of gender based classes were shared.

Four Week institute input was positive; Katie shared the fact that she doesn’t need to make a special place for writing in her science classroom. Dwight shared his use of journals in social studies. Dwight hopes that the writing in his classroom will be reflected in open-responses. Karen S. shared the importance of stressing that writing is vital to getting good quality writing. Katie shared the importance of having structure and organization in their journals.

Statewide Network Status: Each writing site sent representatives to help create Literacy Teams to fill some of the void left by the loss of the regional service centers. The leadership academy represents all Writing Projects and will sponsor a 2004 Fall Conference on School Wide Literacy will be held at Richmond on Oct. 16^th. The Network has been the subject of a self-examination and directors will meet with Cindy Britt, who headed the study, on Oct 15 to learn how we can strength the network.

State budget has been reduced by $20,000. The project will no longer be able to pay the tuition and stipend for the summer institue. The tuition will be paid for the college credit.

Janet Martin, Warren East High School, will narrate the Celebration of Western Kentucky CD and radio program. Teachers will be able to get a CD along with teaching ideas for its use in the classroom.

Outreach Program: Concerns were voiced because of low participation in some of our workshops. Perhaps the outreach program needs to be revamped. We want to continue with high quality presentations.

    Two planned workshops: Kelly Long: Sept. 25^th. Do/What organizers for open-response. She has already presented a real world transactive writing workshop. Joy Buchingham will offer a digital poetry and fiction writing workshop on Nov. 18.

    Two workshops were canceled summer because of lack of interest. The high school attendance at our PD workshops is low.

    Katie suggested taking a survey of teacher needs in the professional development areas. Get feedback to find out what people are interested in attending as well as leading. The outreach programs seem to be successful because of presenter quality and word of mouth..   Karen Scott will draft a questionnaire and send it to Board members.

    The pay for beginning presenters is $60.00 an hour. The pay for intermediate presenters with two or three successful Project workshops will be $80.00 an hour. The pay for experienced presenters with three or more successful Project workshops and/or experience at the state and national level will be $100.00 an hour.

    How do we decide when a workshop is cancelled? Karen and Karen will make the decision to cancel a workshop that does not have a good-sized audience. There must be at least 12 participants signed up. The best dates for workshops seem to be early summer.

    John would like to offer a February 3^rd session on successful standards based units of study created by Project 19 participants. Teachers wishing to attend the session would pay only a nominal fee for refreshments.

April 16^th reunion workshop: Possible choices;

Judith Gould - Four square writing organizer for on-demand, paragraph writing,

Ross Burkhardt, Writing for Real

Stephanie Harvey, literature circles

Ruth Culham, 6 plus 1 Traits of Writing

Linda Rief, 100 Quickwrites

George Ella Lyons

Silas House

Mini-grants for 2004/2005 The money available for mini-grants is between $2500-$3000. Book discussion groups (focus groups) in schools would provide the follow-up sessions that have ongoing PD. Sizes up to eight teachers were thought feasible. Mini-grants for research last year did not have a good teacher response. Another option would be partial funding (up to $200) for registration to attend a variety of PD workshops as long as the school covered travel and subs. Still another would be support for classroom project involving writing. Deadline for application: Nov 5^th Applications will be put on our website and appear in our newsletter.

Ideas were offered for possible summer 2005 one week Advanced or open institutes:

Possible topics – ESL, Special Education, Linking Technology and Literacy

Announcements

NCTE Indianapolis, Nov. 18-21

KCTE/LA in Bowling Green in February 2005 Laura Robb will present.

Next meeting for the Writing Advisory Board:
January 8^th, 2005, at 9 am in Cherry Hall 105.

Respectfully,

Joyce Elmore

Secretary for September 18

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