A little over a year ago, I was enjoying a wonderful Twitter chat about writing instruction.  I think it was #EngChat – or it might have been #NCTEChat or something like that.  I don’t remember.

Anyway, shortly after the chat, I received a direct message (or DM as we like to call them) from someone I didn’t know very well – Lisa Hughes.  It turned out to be an important moment in the history of #TeachWriting.

“That was cool,” she said.  “Where can I find more chats about writing instruction?”

(I’m paraphrasing, because I can’t remember exactly what was said.)

“Well, there aren’t really any chats just about the teaching of writing.  Other chats talk about it sometime, but nobody focuses just on K-12 writing instruction.”  I had looked, and I had been looking, for some time.

And then, I’m pretty sure it was Lisa who said, “Maybe we should start one . . . ”

I wish I could say “the rest is history.”  But it took a while for us to get things together.  We started a Google doc and invited as many people into the conversation as we could.  We talked about days and times, how often we should chat, and all sorts of things.  The first decision was the hashtag.  We had a few ideas, but we seeemd to settle on #TeachWrite.

It was Troy Hicks, a well-known scholar and teacher of writing instruction, who suggested that we make #TeachWriting our hashtag.  “It makes more sense, and it’s easier to remember.”

(I told him at a workshop that he was the Sean Parker/Justin Timberlake to our chat.  If you’ve seen the movie Social Network, where Sean Parker suggests Mark Zuckerberg to drop “the” from Facebook, that’s what I’m talking about.)

We had a remarkable amount of help crafting that initial vision, and our ideas were pages and pages long.  We decided on a March start date, and we created a dedicated Twitter account (the mouthpiece of our chat – a nice idea that I stole from #TXEduChat) and chat homepage (also stolen from #TXEduChat).

Then it was just a matter of making it happen.  Sometimes a chat feels a lot like a party, only the invitations don’t involve RSVP’s.  You never know who is going to show up.  We spent weeks promoting the chat, and we had hopes that ten or fifteen people would show up.  It turned out to be much bigger than that – 20 or 30 teachers joined in, and it was a pretty big opening night.  Check out the archive if you want to see how big.

From that first chat, the magic of Twitter took over.  It quickly became a community, with people joining (and leaving then returning) on a regular basis.  While it remains bi-weekly (which is about all we can handle right now), we regularly attract a crowd of teachers who share and learn together about writing-related topics.  It’s a wonderful thing, and I think we organizers of #TeachWriting recognize that we don’t deserve the credit for the energy of the chat.  That’s from the participants, the people who show up and challenge us, share with us, and talk through ideas with us.  I think the only kudos Lisa and I deserve are for recognizing the need for this space and making it happen every two weeks.  The real power of #TeachWriting comes from the people who contribute.

Thanks for reading.