In 1987, Suzanne Wates, Language Arts Coordinator for Sumter District 17, got the order from District officials: “We must get a National Writing Project Site here in Sumter.” S.C. had recently begun testing writing on the Basic Skills Assessment Profile (BSAP) and the news in the area wasn’t good. Teachers wanted to know better ways of teaching their students how to write, and teachers and district officials had heard that the National Writing Project could provide the means to this end.
The Beginning
That summer, Suzanne Wates and Ramona Lawson, a District 17 principal, traveled daily to Columbia, SC to become fellows in the Midlands Writing Project, the geographically closest site, directed by Beverly Busching and Harriett Williams at the University of South Carolina. Suzanne and Ramona soon learned that the Writing Project is no course with expert professors who’ve never been in a public school classroom pontificating about what teachers should do. Instead, it is a model in which teachers teach other teachers, sharing their expertise, research and experience as the group builds theory and knowledge together. They learned, too, that the fellows learn to teach writing by becoming writers themselves, compiling a portfolio of polished work spanning many genres, with self selected topics and research in areas that matter most to them professionally. At the end of the summer, Suzanne and Ramona were sold on the NWP model and were determined to start a site in Sumter the next summer.
They invited Harriett Williams to become the Director of the inaugural 1988 Summer Institute, which would be headquartered at USC Sumter. Because the Santee Wateree Educational Consortium already existed, providing professional development opportunities for the combined counties of Sumter, Clarendon and Lee, the newly formed site took this name and invited exemplary teachers from each of the six school districts in these counties to participate.
SWWP Starts
The summer of 1988, 22 teachers, kindergarten through twelfth grade, and Harriett recreated the Summer Institute model in a portable behind USC Sumter. The model, already time-tested since 1974 when the Bay Area Writing Project held its first Summer Institute, worked its magic again, with teachers sharing their professional expertise, becoming writers, developing professional presentations to share with peers and colleagues from other school districts at professional meetings. These first fellows created a groundswell of interest when they returned to their classrooms that fall as changed teachers. It’s been said that the Writing Project experience is life-changing. For some of us, it truly is.
Since then, the site has welcomed more than 300 teachers to Summer Institutes, the project has received Federal Funding, and many of those early teacher-consultants have gone on to positions as Curriculum Resource Teachers, literacy coaches, department chairs, principals, and even superintendents in our area. We also celebrate the teachers who have remained closest to the action: in the classroom with our students. The National Writing Project’s theory of distributed leadership is exemplified by the fact that Harriett and our site now have three co-directors: Suzann Sears, an exemplary TC from the early 90’s; Suzanne Wates, our founder and biggest supporter; and Henrietta Green, who became a stand-out TC even though she was already Language Arts Director in Sumter District 2 at the time she became a summer fellow.
Santee Wateree Teacher Consultants direct literally hundreds of inservice programs each year, and our site now has offered more than 20 Open Institutes, or tuition-free graduate courses, which are staffed by our veteran teachers. We have a Teacher Research Program that has involved over 100 teachers in studying their own practice and their own students, and we have offered an Advanced Institute to teachers who wanted the stimulation of the Summer Institute experience.
Santee Wateree Writing Project has been recognized as a national leader, becoming one of only nine sites to participate in the NWP Reading Initiative, a Carnegie Foundation-supported effort to improve reading comprehension of nonfiction and content-area texts, grades 4-12. More specifics about this effort can be found elsewhere on this site.
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