Prior to the March, 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in New Zealand I was invited to offer professional development on ways that the writing of poetry could be facilitated in a Rotorua primary school. In March/April of that year, I engaged around 18 teachers (including the school principal) in four, twohour PD sessions using Zoom. A year on, in May 2021, I…

This article reports on a small-scale case study involving all English teachers of junior classes in a rural high school in New Zealand. The Head of English had been involved in Writing Project professional learning, designed in accordance with principles and practices that can be found in a number of countries, especially the United States. The…

This paper reports on the responses of six secondary teachers to a six-day writing workshop led by the author in January, 2013. These teachers, representing a range of subject areas, underwent this professional learning as key participants in a two-year, participatory action research project being conducted in their school entitled: "A…

The practice of assessing student poetry is neither widespread nor widely theorised. In fact, its absence in the literature is itself worthy of comment and conjecture. This article begins with an account of a writing workshop for pre-service teachers, which highlighted the way participants found themselves tongue-tied when asked to engage in the…

This paper arises from a two-year project: "Teachers as writers: Transforming professional identity and classroom practice'" and draws on self-efficacy questionnaire data collected at the beginning and end of the project and interview data from five participating high-school teachers who were also co-researchers in the project.…

This article draws on early data from a two-year project (2009-11) being undertaken in the New Zealand context by the authors entitled: "Teachers as Writers: Transforming Professional Identity and Classroom Practice". Based on the National Writing Project in the USA (and in New Zealand in the 1980s) its hypothesis is that when teachers…

This paper draws on a case study undertaken by an English teacher in a rural school with a Year 12 English class, most of whom had been singularly unsuccessful in terms of NCEA achievement. The case study was undertaken as part of a two-year project, directed by the first author, entitled: "Teachers as writers: Transforming professional…