Karen Smith began teaching the primary grades in northern California in the early 1980s in a small, intimate community on the delta in Sacramento where she taught first grade for over six years and knew the names of almost everybody associated with the school.
Late in the 1980s she was hired to teach in Placer County at a much larger school where relationships among people in the school community were of necessity more anonymous. Her teaching engaged her kids in opportunities to write as a way to think and to find joy in continuous composition.
In 1987 she enrolled in a summer writing professional development program at UC Davis sponsored by the Writing Project that was to change her professional life. There, she participated in workshops led by writing project teacher leaders talking about their own writing instruction, she read research, and she wrote in a writing group.
In 1991 she was selected to participate in the Summer Invitational where the Project deliberately prepares teacher leaders to do professional development work in the schools. By the early 2000s she had become a co-director of this Writing Project site and began providing project leadership for teacher leaders until she retired in 2021.
In this podcast Karen presents a portrait of her growth and development as a writing teacher, a teacher leader, and a project director who found herself in the undulations of transitions from Whole Language to No Child Left Behind to the Common Core. She shares her experiences in working within these parameters set by the proverbial swings of the educational pendulum to keep the light of authentic writing shining in classrooms around the region.
