ABSTRACT
People have found that teachers' writing groups helps to restore agency and authority to writing teachers. What teachers learn in the groups informs how they go on to teach in their classrooms. With their professional authority 'rebooted', they can start to cultivate a wider writing community in and around their classrooms. On a school training day, an National Writing Project (NWP) group leader, and secondary head of English, offered the colleagues a writing workshop. In November 2010, as part of his work as a local authority advisor, Simon decided to explore whether children, teachers and other writers in the Princes Risborough community, benefit from working alongside each other on a community writing project in Buckinghamshire. In 2014, Simon interviewed five members from different local writing groups in Bedford to find out what schools could learn from them. Berlie Doherty visited an NWP school with established writing practices and was impressed by the readiness to write of both children and adults.
