South Coast Writing Project

Core Principles and Objectives

• Classroom teachers (and not visiting university specialists) are the most trustworthy and credible authorities on what works in classrooms and that the most effective inservice programs will be those in which successful classroom teachers share their expertise with colleagues through "hands-on" demonstration lessons.
  
  
• What working teachers of writing know from their classroom experience constitutes valid professional knowledge, but that, as members of a profession, such teachers also need to challenge, validate, and enhance the authority of their experience by familiarizing themselves with recent developments in composition research.
  


• A successful staff development program requires the ongoing and continually renewed collaboration of teaching colleagues who will continue to share and pool their expertise beyond a few scheduled workshops or even beyond an extended summer institute.
  
  
• All teachers of writing, K-university, belong to a single, interdependent, collegial community with shared professional challenges, which will best be met through collaborative efforts based on mutual professional respect.
  


• Teachers of writing must write: their authority as teachers of writing must be grounded on their own personal experience as writers, persons who know first-hand the struggles and satisfactions of the writer's task.