When the bell rings on the last day of the school year, students often leave clicking their heels in the excitement of upcoming summer activities and vacations. But that isn’t always the case for the teachers. The truth is that some educators never stop preparing and training, regardless of the season. That is why in June and July, you’ll find the parking lot is full at the Alpine School District Professional Development Center in American Fork.

The ASD Professional Development Center is the site chosen for the Central Utah Writing Project. This is where 24 educators from across Central Utah come together as fellows of CUWP, a writing project developed for teachers to share and swap resources, lesson plans and technology tutorials. It is a collaborative environment where educators may read, write and share, filling their teacher toolboxes with ideas to develop more engaging classrooms for their students.

The CUWP, which is housed at Brigham Young University, is affiliated with the National Writing Project. The director is Deborah Dean, professor of English, and Chris Crowe and Karen Brown are associate directors. Dean wrote a proposal in 2008 to be accepted into the NWP and it was approved, making 2009 its implementation year.

Dean felt strongly about having a program that was accepted into the NWP.

“George Hillocks Jr.’s findings in ‘The Testing Trap’ show that in states where teachers have access to writing project sites, the students perform better on writing tasks,” Dean said. “The Testing Trap” is a research-based book arguing the validity of high-stakes testing as the best measurement of student learning.

Dean went on to say that she had been to several summer institutes and conferences, witnessing firsthand the positive impact NWP had on educators. Dean knew she wanted to be involved.

“When I saw what it did for teachers, helping them see themselves as writers and teachers that can help students see themselves as writers, it’s worth any amount of effort,” Dean said.

Sarita Rich, a returning fellow, CUWP research assistant and seventh-grade reading teacher at Elkridge Middle School in South Jordan, started working for the project while working on her master’s degree in English at BYU last year. Attending the conference led her to write and publish a piece for Utah English Journal in 2010.

“Last year was my first summer institute. One of the things I love most about the writing project is that it turned me from someone whose last personal journal entry was in May 2004 to someone who writes regularly. I turned into someone who better understood the personal rewards of writing every day, and that made me understand the rewards and challenges that writing poses for my own students. It made me ask myself, ‘If I’m not a writer, how can I teach my students to write?’ ” Rich said.

CUWP fellows are invited to the summer institute based on a careful application and interview process. Once accepted, fellows are encouraged to bring laptops to summer institute, where, in addition to other tasks, they have the opportunity to write daily, either individually or collaboratively, and are encouraged to produce two publishable pieces by the end of the four-week institute.

Timbre Greenwood, an English, yearbook and film literature teacher at Lehi High School, applied for this summer’s institute hoping that it would help her improve as a writing teacher.

“The Central Utah Writing Project has been a wonderful opportunity to meet with teachers from all disciplines who are interested in not onlyteaching writing, but who also are interested in developing their own writing practice,” Greenwood said. “It is so nice to meet with like-minded educators who are doing more than just griping about ‘what they have to do’ or ‘what they don’t have enough money to do.’ Instead, we’re working collaboratively to find and share ideas that can work within today’s educational climate, things that will, hopefully, contribute positively to student learning.”

The common theme this year has been engaging students with digital media with a goal to effectively overlap and weave together content of all subjects. In research-based teacher demonstrations, the fellows were shown how to use digital storytelling as an alternative to conventional methods. Teachers learned how to use blogs as a vehicle for peer editing and a forum for publication and discourse. History teachers learned how to incorporate music into a research unit by having students expand on traditional research and primary sources to discover and defend a hypothetical playlist of past presidents.

“We’ve seen a lot of examples on how to bring writing into the 21st century,” said Jon Ostenson, a BYU professor of English education. “We are seeing how to translate traditional writing instruction into new media genres.”

CUWP is an annual teaching conference that lasts for four weeks overlapping June and July, Mondays through Thursdays from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Kirsten Anderson,a fellow from this year’s institute and history teacher at Independence High attests to CUWP’s worth.

“The institute has given me time to concentrate on improving my teaching, time that I don’t have during the year,” Anderson said. “I am experiencing writing more like a student would, and for that experience I will be able to teach my students how to write better.”

Audrey Fuller, a seventh-grade English teacher from Mapleton Junior High added, “This conference has been such a wonderful opportunity for me to build my confidence as a writer. I have gotten so many good ideas from the other teachers at this conference about how to incorporate more writing in the classroom. I know that as I become a better writer, I will be a better writing teacher,” Fuller said.