A Personal and Collaborative Journey of Change: Lessons Learned About Leadership, Mentoring and Motivation from an Educational Community's Work with Donald Graves (Plummer Jasinski)

The work being done at the University of New Hampshire, particularly in the English, Education and Early Childhood departments, may also have played a role in encouraging consideration of some of these approaches to pedagogy. Interestingly, Graves began his work at UNH associated with the Early Childhood department. As mentioned previously, two participants had just completed the Masters in Early Childhood program at UNH prior to the Atkinson study and had the opportunity to work with Graves during this time. This program was characterized by Judy as "...all about Piaget and doing all those wonderful things... [it was also] involved in Gesell developmental work and really looking at kids from a developmental perspective." ... Jo An, who worked with Judy at the time in Derry, NH, enrolled in the same Masters program and shared a classroom with her. (64)

As mentioned previously, Graves himself taught in the Early Childhood department at the University of New Hampshire. He initially had a strong orientation towards child development and suspected that individual learning too place along a continuum or sequential process. According to Newkirk and Kittle (2013), Graves began his study in Atkinson "as a Piagetian" by expecting to find "invariable sequences--in spelling, revision, use of conventions--that could be placed on a continuum, much as Piaget defined stages of children's thinking" (p. 4) but his work in Atkinson challenged the rigidity of this perspective, forcing him to acknowledge significant variability in individual learning. Graves' report to the NIE (Graves, 1981), the funding organization for the Atkinson research, refers to this change in thinking. In it he states, "Many similarities were seen in the children when they wrote, but as the study progressed, individual exception to the data increased in dominance. In short, every child had behavioral characteristics in the writing process that applied to that child alone" (p. 29) (65).

By the conclusion of his research in Atkinson, Graves clearly no longer supported his original contention that writing development was the same for every child. Instead, he proposed that individual learning demanded "a waiting, responsive type of teaching" (Newkirk and Kittle, 2013, p. 29), an approach being explored in Atkinson classrooms connected with the Project (and in some beyond the Project). Participants describing their personal philosophies often talked of this responsive approach both in their pedagogy as well as in the environments they created. (65-66)

Everybody wasn't doing the same thing at the same time (quote from Judy Egan, p. 68)

The Graves research came to Atkinson because of the school's principal, Jean Robbins. Graves himself wrote about this in a letter of recommendation for Jean in which he stated,

Early in 1978 I surveyed five elementary schools as sites for my National Institute of Education study of children's writing. Highest on the list of criteria for site selection was a strong building principal. Research simply cannot be conducted in a building where a principal is not respected by staff, central administration and community. (p. 73)

There was some variation in beliefs about teaching and learning, though the majority of classroom teachers with whom Graves worked, encouraged collaboration and activity-based learning in their classrooms and none of the teachers believed themselves to be strong teachers of writing. (77)

Despite the commonalities revealed in this preliminary analysis of data, change took hold in very different ways and to varying degrees depending on the individual being interviewed. Instructional practices developed through the interaction of teachers and researchers as they studied the writing process of their students. These new practices as described by many of the participants included: organizing classrooms to allow children to make choices about writing topics and materials to use; providing opportunities for collaboration and sharing; teachers modeling their own writing processes; providing regular, uninterrupted times for writing every day; and conferring individually with students to help teachers understand and support their individual needs as writers. (77)

Carolyn Currier and Judy Egan become lead teachers in Project Write (p. 78)

The research team observed in a number of Atkinson classrooms to choose research sites for the following year. They chose Mary Ellen Giacobbe's classroom as their 1st grade site and Pat Howard's as one of their 3rd grade sites (the other 3rd grade teacher was not available to be interviewed for this study). They also observed Lyn Kutzelman's readiness class that year. The following year, they continued to observe in Mary Ellen's 1st grade but followed the children to John Gaydos' and Judy Egan's 2nd grades and Carolyn Currier's 4th grade. Jean helped Graves choose the classrooms in which to be based. (89)

The children to be observed by Graves and his colleagues, were chosen by how they might be characterized as learners. Jean described the groups of students who were being followed as "students having a hard time learning, students who were somewhere in the middle or students who were excelling" (1-2 students from each ability level were chosen per class). (89)

Jean stressed that Graves did not intentionally create conditions for teacher change when he came to Atkinson. He was available if people were interested to talk with him but he didn't intend to impact the teaching practices at the Academy. Change in thinking about the writing process of young children and instructional practices arising from this new thinking evolved from a community of learners working together across many classrooms, not as an expected outcome of the research itself. (89)

Project Write was a professional development model developed by Jean that allowed for the dissemination of these new ideas about writing instruction. It began during the summer of 1980, funded by a Title Ivc grant and ran for three consecutive summers, ending in 1982. It was based on Jean's prior experience with a similar model used by the New Hampshire Association of Readiness Teachers (NHART) where teachers came together to study intensively for a few weeks, working during the day and continuing their conversations at night since they were all housed together. The Project Write model had similarities to the current New Hampshire Literacy Institutes which was originally established in 1982 by Tom Newkirk and the English Department at the University of New Hampshire and has been offered every summer since then. (90)