ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, many people had mentioned that we should really study the National Writing Project (NWP). The author spoke with a few others who were in NWP leadership and they suggested looking at two different sites – one that had been going for a long time, and one that was fairly new. They thought that would give a sense of what the basic elements were, how routines were developed, and possibly how it had become influential all over the United States. So the author set about finding out what was possible and how they could negotiate a study where they could document the summer institute and why teachers spoke of it as having a "magical quality". And in a few months of discussion, they finally realized that they were seeing a set of practices, which taken together totally involved teachers in sharing their own work and then opening up to others their colleagues and to other authors doing research.
