| Deborah Wiles -- Home
Here's a page about Honorariums and Work in Schools and at Conferences.
Conference honorarium: $3000/day plus hotel and airfare. I can deliver a keynote address and up to two breakout sessions, workshops, panel discussions, Q&A sessions, etc., and will happily sign books as well. My home airport is Atlanta, GA, or ATL. School Honorariums: For school year 2008/9 -- $2500/day plus expenses, which are airfare and hotel. School Visit and Residency Letters: Here are the standard school visit and writing residency letters I send to teachers who ask about an author visit day or writing workshop/residency. I work with the principal, reading specialist and/or librarian in each school to fine-tune each visit according to each school's demographics, strengths, and needs. Spring 2008 Thanks so much for inquiring about a school visiting time. I love spending time with students and teachers, teaching. This is a long letter full of information and I hope you'll find it useful. I write picture books and novels for children, and I write out of my life experiences. I write fiction, so the stories are entirely made up, but their backbone is my childhood. When I visit schools, I concentrate on showing students where I come from. Then I ask them where they are from, and I try to show them how their lives hold the stuff of magic in the stories they write. I do two things in schools: An author-in-the-schools visit, and a writing residency or workshop. I treat both as instructional time and consider myself to be a partner with classroom teachers. For the author-in-the-schools program, I tailor a visit to your school's needs/desires, and I do three-to-four assemblies in a day. I would like to have at least 45 minutes with all grades above grade 2. Sixty minutes is preferable -- it works, you'll see. I have no limit on numbers of students, although I will want to have a schedule before I arrive with times and numbers of students to expect (generally). I fine-tune and tailor my program for each grade level. I use all five of my published books in presentations and I work to help students make text-to-self connections, showcasing different books in each grade level/age group -- FREEDOM SUMMER for older elementary, LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER and EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS for older and middle elementary, RUBY and ONE WIDE SKY for the youngest students, and LITTLE BIRD and THE AURORA COUNTY ALL-STARS for middle schoolers. I use slides and props and music and movement, and I show students how I take the people and experiences of my life and turn them into stories. Then I have them do the same thing. We dance, we sing, we tell stories! I believe that we are all storytellers, that all history is really biography, and that every person's story is important. I want children to understand that there are so many ways to tell their stories -- they can dance them, sing them, paint them, tell them, write them. I want them to understand that words are power -- how do they choose to use their words? And what stories do they have to tell? The second thing I do is the writing residency. I have been teaching writing for over fifteen years in various settings, including elementary school, middle and high school, and college. Until I moved to Atlanta in June 2004, I taught "Writing Techniques for Teachers" or "ECED422" at Towson University in the Early Childhood Education Department. I now teach creative writing in the MFA program at Vermont College and I regularly do staff development -- writing poetry and personal narratives with students and memoir writing -- with teachers in elementary and middle schools across the country. Residencies can be day-long workshops (and some are two-days, some are three -- once again, I work with each particular school), and are structured differently for each school. I work in advance (by phone and email) with the reading specialist usually, so I know what skills you want to target and in which grades. Then, when I arrive, I work with students on personal narrative writing or poetry, very specifically with a plan in mind that is structured to hit many state assessments and goals for writing for the grade I am teaching. I teach using children's literature as models for students, and I have students write "short." Within this "one clear moment in time," and using children's literature as models, I can teach all the wonderful conventions of writing -- what makes writing good? How can we learn to do this with our work? We learn together. I teach sessions all day during the week and I conduct a teacher training or in-service during this week, sharing the techniques I am using and offering lesson plans and strategies. Wonderful writing comes from these residencies -- students find out how they can access their lives to tell stories; they should be empowered and feel like real writers by the end of the week. We work with all the conventions of writing, and work from idea to pre-writing, rough drafts, revision, revision, revision... final draft. Sometimes schools want a combination of residency/workshop day coupled with an author visit. Sometimes I do a visit coupled with a teacher in-service -- there are many ways to work this, and each school is different. I consider it a trust to spend time in a school and I am grateful for the students and teachers you share with me. I want to do useful and meaningful work and to leave your students and teachers with ideas and techniques they can build on through the years. What I need: For assemblies I need an LCD projector and the cord that will connect it to my laptop -- I'll bring various Powerpoint presentations even for the youngest learners. I'll need a good working microphone -- this is essential even in a small space, as I use it to modulate my voice and for classroom management as well as just plain fun. I want everyone to hear me well. A cordless mic is perfect (but not a must), since I move quite a bit while I'm talking. I need a screen for the slides, a CD player, a table for props, and we're set. Now, Fees. For Schools OUTSIDE the Atlanta Metro Area, that involve airline travel and an overnight stay : My school schedule for the fall 2008/9 school year is full. There are some spring and fall 2009 dates available. My honorarium for the 2008/9 school year is $2500 per day plus travel/lodging expenses. Flights: I am happy to make airline reservations and promptly ask for reimbursement. Where I stay: A Hampton Inn, Courtyard by Marriott, or similar type place which offers an early-morning breakfast. I am happy to do three-to-four 45-60 minute sessions in a day. I can also have lunch with teachers or students and sign books with students, however you want to mix it up and whatever is most useful for your students, teachers, and scheduling. Sometimes schools get together and split expenses, which works well for me, too, when I'm traveling, as I'm happy to spend two or three days in schools when I'm in a faraway location, but this is not a prerequisite. You can let me know if this particular way of spending an author day with your teachers and students fits into your scheduling, goals, and budget. If you have questions or would like to talk further, I'm happy to do that as well. Please feel free to email me for more information: debwiles@fred.net Thanks for your interest in bringing an author -- and another way of highlighting literacy -- into your school. My
best to you, ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Here
is an example of the standard workshop/residency letter: I'm very much looking forward to visiting and I'd love to have a discussion about what might work best for you, your students, and teachers. I can teach writing workshops in a residency atmosphere, which I have done for over fifteen years, or I can do a one-day standard author visit with you all, whereby I would see all students in all grades. I have written books that span the grades and curriculum, from K-8. I tailor my assemblies to the grades I'm working with and I focus on where story comes from, showing how my stories come out of my life, and challenging students to make those text-to-self connections so they can do the same. I try to leave teachers and students with tools they can use all year in the classroom to write their own personal narratives. I consider an assembly to be instructional time, and I come prepared with slides and props and movement and music and we have a lot of fun. The writing workshops grow out of the assembly time. I structure the assembly in a different way if I will be working subsequently on writing with students. I use the assembly time as our first writing session together. I like to tailor this sort of assembly to fourth and fifth grades and above as I find students are best able to do the dual work of making those connections and starting their own stories (by brainstorming ideas with me in assembly) when they are fourth-grade and above. It's not that younger students cannot do this -- students have great success in all grades, even K. The way I work, however, lends itself best to workshopping with one grade or grade-combination at a time -- this way I can focus my time and energies on that one population of students. I have worked in schools where I have taught a workshop each day in each grade, but I have found this to be scattering, as I am preparing workshops for many grade levels and abilities, and although I can do this, I have seen the overall result to be stronger and more meaningful if I concentrate on a program for one or two grades, fourth grade and higher. I don't officially use terms such as "four blocks" or "six traits" or other buzzwords, but I know these programs well, and I have integrated those techniques into my own program as well -- using a wide variety children's literature as my models. I use a cart and go from classroom to classroom when I teach, taking my materials with me, so students stay at their own desks, with their classroom teachers and peers, as they work So, if you think that an assembly for each grade, tailored to age-level, would work for you, with an additional day or two of writing workshops with grades 4 & 5, I could schedule those visits, and plan to inservice your teachers (all grades) in order to show them the method I am using (Monday after school would work best for purposes of giving teachers an overview). I teach using children's literature as models of good writing. I believe that we can teach all the conventions of good writing by having students brainstorm well their stories, pick "one clear moment in time" to write about, and then, through a series of short prompts and working with one another, have students write short -- one paragraph can be the unit of composition. Within that paragraph, students can write about their "one clear moment," can work on revision, and can hear their own voices develop. We start with poetry and move to personal narrative. If you are interested in the workshops and feel they would be useful to students and teachers, we can talk more about this by phone or email. If you would prefer the assembly program alone for each grade, we could schedule one visiting day together. In any case, I can see each child during one assembly day, I can construct the assembly time as our first session for grades 4 & 5 (and up), and I can take grades 4 & 5 further with their writing for two more residency days. I can also inservice your teachers on Monday after the assembly day, so that they can take these techniques, integrate them with their already-in-place program, and use them -- across the grades and curriculum -- to enhance their writing programs. If you are able to secure substitute teachers for any grades other than the 4-5 writing workshop, teachers in other grades can observe in the workshop setting, and I will put them to work as well. In this way, students in all grades benefit from the writing program, even though I am not physically in each classroom. I'll stop here -- this is a beginning. You can let me know how you'd like to proceed from here. I can do three writing sessions in a day, and each session can be from 60 to 90 minutes long, depending on your scheduling concerns. I love having 90-minute blocks with students, as we can give them the gift of process. Four sessions in one day is possible for an extra $400 honorarium, for either the 60 or 90 minute block. I read out loud quite a bit, snippets from different books, and some full texts. We take stretch breaks. I meet with teachers each day to discuss the day's progress and reassess. I assign homework each night, but it is not onerous. And, depending on how much time we have for each day's workshop, I construct a program for the three days that will leave you in good hands with tools to use in helping students finish their stories and showcase them for others to read. Looking forward to hearing from you, Deborah
Wiles |
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