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As part of a larger study into the influence of a Writers in the Schools (WITS) professional development consultancy, this narrative inquiry began just as Hurricane Harvey, the second most costly hurricane to hit the United States, devastated the Texas Gulf Coast in August 2017 and drew to a close in late 2020 during the COVID-19 global pandemic. This chapter explores the 2017–2018 school-year interactions between WITS Collaborative writer, Mary Austin (pseudonym), and six writing teachers with whom she worked at McKay High School (pseudonym) in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. With record flooding and widespread damage causing school-opening delays, teachers, students, and WITS consultants navigated a rip tide of emotions as they strived to balance educational/professional needs and duties with personal loss and unexpected financial burdens. This inquiry examines how WITS teacher professional development was carried out in the midst of these trying circumstances.

This chapter revolves around a Zoom conversation between Tim Martindell and Cheryl Craig to which Chestin T. Auzenne-Curl added field-based evidence and reflective comments. The exchange between Martindell and Craig had to do with how Tim facilitated the Writers in the Schools (WITS) writers in conjunction with Tina and Maryann who led the WITS Collaborative. The embedded snapshots and excerpts stemmed from the field notes we accumulated during the life of the project. The conversation discusses some of the fine points of facilitation as well as the boundary areas where what unfolds fringes on the unknown. Near the end, hope for the future is discussed.

Craig and Auzenne-Curl reflect on how their individual experiences and personal practical knowledge developed in context over time contribute to a collective review of the backdrop of the stories of experience shared in this volume. The chapter provides context for the study that inspired the collection and a preview of the chapters yet to come.

This chapter explores the complexities of leading the improvement of literacy instruction at a secondary school populated by a majority of culturally diverse, at-risk, and low-income students. The principal's narrative charts the journey to evaluate the campus' comprehensive needs and human capital. In an effort to build teacher capacity and foster authentic learning experiences, the school leader partners with an instructional specialist and a nonprofit organization, WITS Houston (WITS), Houston. The unique professional development program designed by WITS allows teachers to connect directly with writers in order to cultivate their own voices as authors and create more culturally relevant writing instruction for students. After navigating the challenges of program implementation and the COVID-19 pandemic, the campus successfully launches the WITS Collaborative as a multitiered approach to school improvement and literacy intervention. To catalog the experience, the principal details the objectives of the partnership, preparatory considerations, tensions regarding enactment, and the implications for the field.

In this chapter, we describe our experiences creating and providing job-embedded professional development to teachers with an emphasis on creative writing. Our focus is on the intersectionality of communities. We share narratives and scenarios from each of the communities – the participating teachers/administrators and the writing coaches collaborating with them. The program's objective is to empower teachers to see themselves as writers to become more effective teachers of writing. We discovered the unique nature of each campus community of teachers/writers and also found the need to provide a space and intentional structures to enable writing coaches to support each other. To measure our impact on teachers, we describe a qualitative evaluation process. Using the lens of two disruptive forces – a hurricane and a pandemic – we explore the implications for the future of the work. Each disruption brought inequities in education to the forefront of our thinking.

To be a writer, one must write. Research shows when teachers write and identify as writers, they transfer their writing practice into their classroom, positively impacting their students' writing development. Shifting instructional practices or identities requires educators to self-determine a gap in order to take on transformative learning experiences, such as mentoring, professional development, or modeled learning. Often professional development is chosen by administrators for educators to shift their instructional practice, ignoring a teacher's curriculum-maker role, and best-loved self identity. This narrative inquiry analysis details one teacher-writer in a creative writing professional development residency as she supports educators with a goal to transform educators into teacher-writers. This chapter includes the small step successes and systematic struggles the author faced as she modeled the writer's craft and writer's workshop strategies with her teachers. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the important role teachers have to decide, navigate, and discover their own best-loved self-teaching identity.

This concluding chapter discusses how the unfurling of the Writers in the Schools (WITS) Collaborative took place against a backdrop of four pandemics: COVID-19, the movement against racial injustice, climate change, and the inevitable economic despair that spills over into the field of education. The work looks backwards on the chapters in this book and their findings. It also looks forward to the lessons that the WITS Collaborative has taught – and will teach – as it moves toward a future unknown, yet much anticipated.

This chapter is a personal account of the development of the Writers in the Schools program by immediate past-Executive Director, Dr. Robin Reagler. She notes the roots of the organization and the challenges of internal and external growth from 1998 to 2020.

This chapter is guided by Abdulkader Mokhtari's reflections on participation in the Writers in the Schools Collaborative. As a member of the professional development program on two campuses in the Houston Area, Mokhtari recalls the program model as part of a structured enactment of DuFour and Eaker's (1998) Professional Learning Community concept and an organically nurtured, portfolio-based knowledge community (Craig, 2007). During what he recalls to be a difficult time on campuses seeking to engage learners in a fresh approach to literacy, Mokhtari recounts pivotal moments of success and struggle to Chestin T. Auzenne-Curl and KaLeah Hicks, both former high school teachers and contributors to research on teacher development programs.