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 at 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.

Tim Hillmer’s 2nd novel, Ravenhill. explores school violence through the eyes of multiple characters on a fateful day in a public high school. Reviewer Clay Evans of the Boulder Daily Camera says the book “bravely addresses some tough issues for both kids and adults. Ravenhill is a fast, compelling read that offers a vivid, realistic glimpse into a (white, middle-class) school environment.”

Hillmer works with early career teachers in the Boulder Valley School district in addition to his position as a teacher consultant with the Colorado Writing Project. His first novel, The Hookmen, received the The Colorado Fiction Award and grew out of Tim’s other passion, guiding river rafts.

Both books are available at Amazon.com.

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.