Why Write: How the Writing Retreat Transformed Us
Why Write?
You may have seen it on TV, heard it in a district meeting, or felt it in your interactions with the community: teaching is not always understood outside of education. Too often, non-teachers tell our stories for us and these facsimiles are what stick in the collective memory. The problem is that teachers are often too busy to set aside time to craft and share their stories. Writing takes time. Writing feels intimidating. And writing means that we have to face the truth.
As William Zinsser states in his book Writing to Learn (1993),
Writing is a tool that enables people in every discipline to wrestle with facts and ideas. It’s a physical activity, unlike reading. Writing requires us to operate some kind of mechanism—pencil, pen, typewriter, word processor—for getting our thoughts on paper. It compels us by the repeated effort of language to go after those thoughts and to organize them and present them clearly. It forces us to keep asking, “Am I saying what I want to say?” Very often the answer is “No.” It’s a useful piece of information. (p. 49)
Whether contemplating a curriculum redesign, struggling with a difficult student, reconsidering a previously held belief, or just trying to organize our thoughts, writing about teaching practice is a tool that helps not only the reader but also the author.
It turns out that science and math teachers don’t always consider themselves to be writers or have the confidence to write. The National Writing Project (NWP) believes that all teachers can be teachers of writing, can write, and can build knowledge about teaching and learning by looking deeply at their practice. They host writing retreats to help teachers of all content areas make sense of their experiences, get feedback from others, and develop the craft of storytelling. Dina Portnoy, former director of the Knowles Senior Fellows Program and active member of the Philadelphia National Writing Project, explains, “writing is both a process AND a product. One also writes to understand what one thinks. Learning is often social. Writing can be social, too” (D. Portnoy, personal communication, August 30, 2024). In seeking to cultivate science and math teacher-writers in a similar vein to the NWP, Knowles Senior Fellow and then-Kaleidoscope Associate Editor Scott Stambach initiated a Knowles grant that funded Kaleidoscope’s inaugural Writing Retreat. Through virtual hangouts over four months in 2016, participants explored how to structure stories, use qualitative evidence, and employ other writing techniques.
Why Retreat?
Over time the format of the Writing Retreat has changed, but the core vision of creating a community of science and math teacher-writers persists. Former Editor-in-Chiefs Rebecca (Becky) Van Tassell and Kirstin Milks collaborated with then-staff mentor Linda Abrams and NWP consultants Diane Wood and and Leslie Goetsch to leverage the social aspects of writing in the next iteration of the Writing Retreat: start with an in-person meeting to build community and develop teachers’ writer identities, then follow-up with monthly virtual hangouts for six months. After that retreat, many teachers had developed a writing practice and discovered what they had to say; however, most hadn’t yet written a full piece. Adding another in-person touchpoint might fortify participants with time and space to think, write, and workshop their newfound ideas, with more follow-up support to refine drafts. So, the Writing Retreat grew to its current format of 12 months, including two in-person meetings: one as a kick off event and another as a midpoint check-in, six synchronous online meetings throughout the year, and, of course, time that each participant dedicates to writing outside of the meetings.
One outcome of writing in a community is that participants can learn from each other. Every experience is different, and each can be impactful. Erin Oakley and Kelsey Rasmussen, two Writing Retreat participants, share their thoughts on the Writing Retreat and what they learned.
Erin’s Experience
I joined an early iteration of the Writing Retreat in 2016 during my second year of teaching. At that time it consisted of a few online meetings and a feedback partner, with whom we coordinated additional meetings and asynchronous feedback. I was absolutely terrified! Not only did I not have a specific written piece in mind, I didn’t even consider myself a writer. On top of that, my feedback partner was Linda, a Knowles staff member, former writing instructor, and proficient writer. She knew what she was doing while I was floundering. I felt like I was in over my head.
Linda was gracious; she asked me to read her academic paper, welcomed my thoughts, and even incorporated my feedback. She believed in me when I didn’t. She listened to my ideas and feelings about teaching and encouraged me to turn them into a blog. But I didn’t write anything for publication, either in a journal or for a self-run blog. It was too much, too vulnerable to share, particularly when I felt I had no authority as a writer or teacher.
Despite not producing much writing that year, I developed a good relationship with Linda, which eventually led me to working as an associate editor for Kaleidoscope. By the time I became an editor-in-chief in 2021, I thought I should tackle my fear of writing and I knew that I wanted a community of mutual support. Despite my trepidation, it was time to return to the Writing Retreat.
Since my experience six years earlier with a fully online retreat, the Writing Retreat had changed substantially to include two in-person meetings; online, synchronous meetings; and our own writing practice. Our small group of four participants were all in a fairly nebulous place about our writer identities.
I told the participants that I did not know what I was doing and how afraid I felt about writing and sharing with others.
For our first activity, our two facilitators led us to discuss our identities as teachers, readers, and writers. While talking about our teacher-personas, people were animated and lively. A few of us excitedly discussed the current books we were reading, but when it was time to discuss our writer identities, the room went quiet. After patiently waiting for someone else, I decided to speak. I told the participants that I did not know what I was doing and how afraid I felt about writing and sharing with others. This seemed to open the floodgates. Others identified with this feeling: putting off writing, getting stuck, and cringing at the mere thought of sharing it with others.
While I came into the experience with an idea for a piece, I was still nervous about starting to write. One of the other participants suggested that I should start writing something to get the habit going, even if it wasn’t about teaching. As a new parent, just finding the time to write anything was a step forward, so my goal became creating a sustainable writing practice. Specifically, I wanted to use writing as a way to help me disentangle a problem I was wrestling with: How on earth do I raise this child?
I started by writing to my strength: the list. I wrote lists about things I wanted my child to learn, lists about things I wanted to show them, lists about the values I wanted to instill. The act of naming all these led to a structured conversation with my partner about what values we each held dear and wanted to pass along to our children. These values now hang on our fridge and guide our big decisions and daily actions. All along the way I had the support of my writing group.
Interestingly, their writing, which was not about parenting, helped me clarify my thinking. Their pieces ranged from a metaphor about how creating curriculum is a cycle similar to the establishment of native plants, to short poems about the economy of care, to how each day is affected by the stories we tell ourselves. Even though those stories were about teaching, each illustrated an important universal idea for me: cultivation is never immediate, care is a form of love, and perspective affects our outlook.
I still did not publish anything after the 2022 Writing Retreat, but my experience affects me every day when I open the fridge. And that is the beauty of the Writing Retreat. Each person is able to take what they need, focusing on a specific piece, clarifying their thoughts, and developing habits. It’s not about identifying as a writer or getting something published, it’s about discovering yourself and your story.
Kelsey’s Experience
The process of writing itself helps sort out thoughts and feelings and even generate new insight. Collaborating around writing can build community and accountability, and strengthen our arguments.
I recall a few school-based professional development experiences that impacted my teaching practice in a lasting way. One was about student writing. The facilitator provided some useful tools, such as sentence starters, but his passion for the imperative of writing remains top of mind for me. He stated emphatically, “If you can write clearly, you can think clearly.” As the daughter of an English teacher/entrepreneur/author, I hadn’t actually thought clearly about the value of writing. The process of writing itself helps sort out thoughts and feelings and even generate new insight. Collaborating around writing can build community and accountability, and strengthen our arguments.
I was in my 10th year of teaching full-time and halfway through an intensive STEM certificate program for educators that consumed most of my nights and weekends. I was flirting with the idea of a career change into project management. My thoughts about recent coursework, an industry externship, and classroom practice were, to use an understatement, tangled. I also felt an obligation to share some sort of insight more widely because my district was footing the bill for my tuition in the graduate certificate program. When the opportunity came to join a group of Knowles Fellows for a year of writing support and community, I jumped on the application.
My hopes for the Writing Retreat were threefold: reconnect with the teaching community at Knowles, use writing to detangle my thoughts about what I’d been learning, and craft a piece for publication to widen the impact of my recent training. Having previously published “Four Phases of the Engineering Design Process in Math and Science Classrooms” in Kaleidoscope, I was confident that the editors would provide me with as much constructive feedback as necessary to get a new piece published.
And so it began. In July 2019 we traveled from the Knowles Summer Conference in center city Philadelphia to a large, single family home in a swanky suburban neighborhood. I was thrilled to be back in Philly, my old stomping ground, and soaked up being able to “travel for business” again. Being back in a Knowles setting to think, work, and play was awesome; my bag was stocked with multi-colored pens and chargers!
We spent two days immersed in a comprehensive agenda: norming, getting to know one another, diving into our self-concept as writers, practicing a variety of writing styles (from haiku to Twitter posts to evening storytelling open-mic style), and evaluating our work together. We discussed articles, audience, and form. We cooked community dinners and went out for ice cream. The workshopping process helped me distill the wheat of my message from the chaff of details about the certificate program, externship, and meandering musings. My core idea centered around how I applied the project management strategies I learned to promote student ownership in my project-based engineering elective courses. A critical friend suggested my piece was relevant for the National Science Teaching Association’s magazine, a moment that stuck out to me as a turning point for seeing myself as a writer.
The small writing groups formed during the retreat continued to meet monthly until our next in-person meeting in January 2020, and onward until our program’s conclusion that June. Although folks in my team didn’t all share the goal of publishing, we encouraged and held each other accountable to write, consider multiple points of view, and reflect more deeply through probing questions. The follow-up meetings provided the nudge I needed to maintain momentum for the process, endure multiple revisions, and eventually submit my writing to a journal.
My piece eventually appeared in The Science Teacher’s May/June 2022 edition (Rasmussen, 2022). The structure of the Writing Retreat, as well as the people who attended it, were instrumental in helping me distill the essential teacher moves I had developed and give back to the community by sharing publicly. I highly recommend the Writing Retreat to everyone—both folks who know what they want to say, and folks who want to discover what they have to say.
Why Wait?
You have read about two participants’ experiences in the Writing Retreat, and now this is your invitation. Whether you feel apprehensive or excited about writing. Whether you already identify as a writer or not. Whether you have already conceived of a story or not. To return to the words of William Zinsser (1993),
“Writing, however, isn’t a special language that belongs to English teachers and a few other sensitive souls who have a ‘gift for words.’ Writing is thinking on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly should be able to write clearly—about any subject at all.” (p.11)
At Kaleidoscope, we believe that teacher stories and diversity of opinion are worth sharing so that we can understand, think, learn, and grow together.
If you are interested in learning more about the cost and process for joining, please click below to express your interest.
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Johnson, K., Murphy, S., O’Hara, C., & Shirey, K. (2015). Four phases of the engineering design process in math and science classrooms. Kaleidoscope: Educator Voices and Perspectives, 1(2), pages 19-24.
National Writing Project. https://www.nwp.org/
Citation
Oakley, E. & Rasmussen, K. (2025). Why write: How the writing retreat transformed us. Kaleidoscope: Educator Voices and Perspectives, 11(2), https://knowlesteachers.org/resource/why-write-how-the-writing-retreat-transformed-us.