Meet Gwen
As a high school student, Gwen used to hide her carefully typed papers from her mother, Rosalie. Rosalie would find them, take her red pen, and destroy the clean pages. Reluctantly, Gwen would put another piece of paper in the typewriter and start all over again – only to have her mother find the paper again… Gwen’s mother believed in the power of writing. She was the best writing teacher Gwen ever had.
Gwen’s journey to becoming a teacher educator started in the classroom. She taught 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-grade English during her first few years of teaching. Armed with her textbook and no training regarding how to teach students to write, she walked into the classroom determined to change the lives of her students. It did not take long before she was crying over a stack of 150 papers one weekend, realizing she was in way over her head.
Over the years, she has spent countless hours researching best practices in writing instruction and attending workshops – each time adding to her teaching tool kit. She would pass these strategies on to her students and hope something stuck. But in all of this, she was often alone. The teachers next door would be teaching something completely different – in a different way, using different language. She began to see that in order for students to be truly successful writers in all areas of their lives, there needed to be a united approach. This became her calling – to help schools create a united approach to teaching writing in all content areas.
Gwen Geivett believes writing instruction is the responsibility of teachers at all grade levels and in all content areas. Her passion is to help administrators and teachers work together to build a coherent and unified approach for teaching writing that builds upon itself and is supported by all content areas.
Ultimately, Gwen knows the ability to use the written word to communicate effectively and powerfully beyond the classroom is one of the most important – if not the most important – skills we can teach our students, starting in kindergarten and building through high school. Students must be able to navigate the informational age and be able to put forth their own ideas in a clear and convincing manner. This skill is not easily learned and is not gained simply through maturation. It is a skill that needs to be taught, practiced, and honed on a daily basis with a consistent approach from classroom to classroom, content to content.