ABSTRACT
While the exhortation that “the teacher of writing should also write” is now a commonplace, the action and identity it denotes is not. The teacher-as-writer ethic has been generally shared among educators since at least 1974 (the inception of the National Writing Project) and has shown to be helpful not only to teachers but also to their students (Brooks 2007; Whitney et al. 2012; Whitney 2008; Smiles and Short 2006; Whyte 2011; Frager 1994). Yet even in 2016, many children have never seen their teacher in the act of writing. Many teachers dread and avoid writing, and some by extension dread and avoid teaching writing. Many of those teachers who do write tend to do it privately. Some keep it solely in the context of teaching a lesson (crafting a model on their own to show students in class, for example, but never finishing a text or sharing it with another adult). Others write only in the personal and private domain of a journal, which can certainly be beneficial but which excludes the many ways in which writing is actually also a public and interactive activity. Under these conditions, both teachers and students are deprived of the benefits of a writing pedagogy in which the teacher is positioned as a writer among writers.
