As director of the National Writing Project (NWP) at Florida Gulf Coast University, one of the first questions the author gets from both elementary and high school teachers when she talks about the NWP Summer Invitational Institute is this: "What can we possibly hope to gain from each other as we share our best practices?" High school teachers often feel that the content and practices they present will seem irrelevant to elementary teachers. Elementary school teachers, on the other hand, worry that their best practices will pale in the shadow of their accomplished secondary colleagues and seem simplistic in comparison. But in the summer of 2002, two very talented teachers from very different learning environments came together at the NWP at Florida Gulf Coast University Invitational Summer Institute, changing their ideas of what they can gain from each other forever and providing a model example of how to create a learning community. High school students flourished as role models, reading and writing stories modeled from children's literature for first graders, who also gained in literacy skills.