CWP Consultant Co-Authors Book
Stevi Quate's career in education has spanned many years as a secondary teacher, service as State Literacy Coordinator
for the Colorado Department of Education and a professor at University of Colorado -- Denver. She embodies that dictum
that teachers of writing must also be writers themselves. Her recent book, Clock Watchers (Heinemann),
draws on all her experience and addresses what she and her co-author, John McDermott, felt was an essential and necessary
focus of their teaching: “How can I motivate my students and then create a context that will engage them?”
Clock Watchers is their powerful answer to that question—a plan that gets kids to care about learning and truly
engage with the curriculum.
Quate and McDermott apply the research on motivation and engagement to support
increased achievement and improved attitudes about school, using a framework that:
·
catches students’ interest across the content areas
· holds it through
meaningful learning and valuable interactions
· uses assessment to create
further opportunities to connect kids with content
· sustains it all with
ideas for projects, activities, and even classroom routines and rituals.
The book has received positive reviews
from educators who have used its ideas and strategies to address issues of motivation with a variety of students across the
grade levels. Congratulations to Stevi.
CWP Collaborates in South Africa
In June 2006, CWP Director, Karen Hartman, and consultants Sheila Kaehny
and Stevi Quate spent 2 weeks in Dundee, South Africa, at the invitation of the South African Writing Project, working with
teachers in the township schools there.
They worked at a high
school in the township with about 35 teachers over 10 days. CWP had sponsored two teachers from Dundee the previous summer,
Sizwe and Mpume Mchunu, to come to Colorado and participated in the summer CWP I workshop. They each spent an additional
two weeks helping two of our consultants teach CWP I, so that they experienced the course both as student and teacher.
The South African North Star Writing Project helped arrange for CWP to come
to Dundee in to work directly with a larger group of teachers.
