By Anna J. Roseboro, secondary section, Grand Rapids, MI:

Learning together with other teachers can be both enlightening and inspiring. One such experience occurred during a summer writing retreat. The instructor invited us to describe our earliest memory experiencing the power of the written word. After hearing a variety of stories, a fellow teacher’s account stood out and inspired me to turn his revelation into a short story. I subsequently designed a successful class assignment based on that three-part experience: being asked a probing question; listening to a variety of classmates’ responses; then crafting a chosen response into a narrative account to share with the class in a repurposed format.