A two-day National Conference was organised by The Foundation for Educational Services (FES), in co-operation with the Department Curriculum Management at the Education Division, from the 16 th to the 17 th September 2005 at the Tumas Dingli Primary School , Hal Warda Street , Attard . The theme of the conference was ‘ Writing to Learn, Writing to Teach: Writing Process for School Community Development . The Conference discussed the key role of writing process in the personal and academic development of teachers, parents and children in the school community. This Conference was being organised within the framework of the Malta Writing Programme (MWP), which was part-financed by the Department Curriculum Management and managed by the FES .

The Conference was the culmination of four years of growth of the Malta Writing Programme, in partnership with the National Writing Programme, USA . Since 2001, the Malta Writing Programme has

• trained 982 teachers in intensive Writing Institutes and professional development sessions

• supported writing process teachers in their classroom practice and to develop into communities of writers

• achieved expertise transfer from its American partner by training Maltese writing process trainers to spearhead the growth of the Programme

• supported writing application n the home through family writing initiatives that featured the participation of 228 families in Malta and Gozo.

The aims of the Conference:

•  Celebrate the achievements of writing process teachers in Malta

•  Strengthen the role of writing process as a key literacy strategy in Malta

•  Strengthen the community of teacher-writers in Malta

•  Provide a key conceptual and practical learning experience for educators and education stakeholders in Malta

The Conference will include two internationally-renowned keynote speakers:

Prof. Richard Sterling, Executive Director of the National Writing Project (NWP) and Adjunct Professor at the University of California , Berkeley , in the Graduate School of Education. Formerly he was the founder and director of the Institute for Literacy Studies at Lehman College , an Organized Research Unit at the City University of New York, and a member of the faculty at Lehman College . He was also founder and director of the New York City Writing Project and the New York City Mathematics Project, both of which are housed within the Institute for Literacy Studies.

During his tenure as Executive Director of the National Writing Project, the project has increased its annual funding from $2.4 million to $18 million. This expansion has resulted in a significant increase in services and resources to the 185 writing project sites housed in universities across the country. He has also overseen an increase in publications for teachers, new national research on the effectiveness of the project's work, and a policy book written in 2003—Because Writing Matters—that discusses the importance of writing in schools and in the workplace. Since 2003, Professor Sterling has chaired the Advisory Panel to the College Board's National Commission on Writing for America 's Families, Schools, and Colleges.

Richard Sterling has lectured and presented papers at conferences and universities across the country and abroad. In 2003, he presented at the College Board's Annual Conference in Atlanta , at the NCTE Conference in San Francisco , to faculty and students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong , and at Shantou University in Guang Dong province, PRC. He is a co-author of "The National Writing Project: Scaling up and Scaling Down," in Expanding the Reach of Reform: Perspectives from Leaders in the Scale-Up of Educational Reform ( RAND , 2004, in press). He is currently working on projects for new teachers under a grant from the Stone Foundation and on issues of adolescent literacy under a grant from the Carnegie Corporation. [View Speech]

Dr. Christine Johnston, Rowan University , New Jersey . Christine is the Director of Rowan University's Center for the Advancement of Learning. As such, she is currently heading-up research inquiries studying the effects of the Let Me Learn Process on teacher-student interaction, student assessment outcomes, literacy, and student persistence. For the past seven years she has engaged in studies on the Let Me Learn Process including work with four overseas universities, twenty-five school districts, and seven U.S. institutions of higher learning. She is currently a consultant to the EU's LML Grundtvig Project working with participants from Italy , Spain , the UK , the Czech Republic , Slovenia , and Holland .
Dr. Johnston received her Ed.D. from Rutgers University in 1985, her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee , and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She has presented 29 refereed papers in the US and abroad on the Let Me Learn Process, authored three books on the topic, two articles, and two chapters for publication in education texts. Dr. Johnston has been the recipient of a Ford Foundation Educational Internship, an NSF Graduate Fellowship, a Department of Education, State of New Jersey , education-innovation grant, and a Corporate DuPont Education grant. [View Speech]

Mr. Sandro Spiteri, head of the Malta Writing Programme, taught for 13 years in state and non-state schools. As head of department he was in charge of staff training, syllabus design and development for Maltese and Religion in an independent secondary school. He has a Masters degree in the teaching of writing and is a pre-service and in-service teacher trainer in Maltese methodology and lecturer in Maltese for Specific Purposes. From 2001 as the National Co-ordinator of the Institute for Child and Parent Learning Support in the Foundation for Educational Services (FES), he led national programmes to establish and expand family literacy and parent empowerment provision as well as to assist schools to develop in-house basic skills provision. He was also the Project Co-ordinator for the P.E.Fa.L (Parent Empowerment for Family Literacy) partly financed by the EU under the Grundtvig strand of the Socrates Programme. P.E.F.a.L was the first Grundtvig thematic project co-ordinated by a Maltese institution. Sandro is also the founder and Head of the Malta Writing Programme that is now within the FES, and has led and participated in Writing Workshops for student teachers, teachers, school administrators and parents. He is now Senior Executive within the FES, with responsibility for training, research, development and international projects. [View Speech]

The Conference also included practical writing process workshops with applications for different home and school settings, and displays by teachers of how they apply writing process to their own classroom situation. See list below

The following 12 workshops are going to be delivered during both days of the conference.

Rm	Day	Workshop	Presenter	Information
				English version	Maltese version
1	Fri - Sat	Effective Strategies to unlock for writing: A Writing Workshop for families	Stephen Bonnici
2	Fri - Sat	Parents as Model Writers Building a Character Description	Fiona Falzon
3	Fri - Sat	A good Introduction	Miriam Galea
4	Fri - Sat	Home: A source of learning	Reno Saliba
5	Fri - Sat	TEACHING FOR REVISING IN THE UPPER PRIMARY: communication through writing	Joanne Mifsud
6	Fri - Sat	Using I.C.T as a Tool for Writing	Tania Bezzina
7	Fri - Sat	Writing as a Tool for Deeper Comprehension: Helping Students Become Better Readers	Maria Pace
8	Fri - Sat	Developing the skills and abilities of paragraph writing during the history lesson.	M Louise Schembri
9	Fri - Sat	Using fairy tales to generate different types of writing for different learning styles. Individual Differences in Children's Writing	Maria Montebello
10	Fri - Sat	Piecing it Together The use of the thematic approach in the Writing Process	Jane Farrugia Buhagiar & Alison Mifsud
11	Fri	EFFECTIVE PRE-WRITING STRATEGIES IN THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH	Janet Farrugia
11	Sat	Assessment of writing / Assessment for Writing	Sandro Spiteri
12	Fri - Sat	Generating Ideas for Different Domains of Writing Teaching Writing in English in the Upper Primary Years	Josephine Saliba

Invitations were open to all education administrators, educators and parents in Malta and Gozo.

View School Map

Special Thanks to the Conference Sponsors

The Malta Writing Programme (MWP) is a project co-ordinated by the FES under an inter-agency service agreement with the Department of Curriculum Management at the Education Division.

The MWP is one of the many methodologies that can be used in the implementation of educational basic skills policies. It has the advantage of being consciously grounded in the ethos, theory and praxis of the National Minimum Curriculum of Malta. This is because it does not only address writing strategies, but the reading-writing connection, writing across the curriculum, formative and summative assessment, autonomous learning and teachers' reflective practice and action research. It is therefore one way of implementing holistically the NMC whilst effectively addressing basic skills concerns.

The MWP uses a ‘teachers teaching teachers' model that is demonstrated as being very empowering and perceived by participant teachers as very realistic and acceptable.

Cont... ( Link to General information on the Malta Writing Programme (MWP) )