CCIRA Professional Development Blog

By Louise Borden, CCIRA Conference Speaker

Last August, my friend Patrick Allen invited me to write a blog post for CCIRA as I’ll be speaking to teachers this February about my work as a writer of books for young readers. The other posts I’ve read on the CCIRA website are by amazing educators who are mentors to teachers across the country. Their words are inspiring ones about engaging students, growing readers and writers, and designing strategies for lifelong learning.

I immediately worried: Whatever could I offer in a post to veteran teachers?

Due to travels and procrastination, I delayed in sending Patrick a post. Then, today, while watching a huge snowstorm from the windows of my writing room, a storm that’s affecting most of our nation, I at last found words to share with you.

Over the past decades, I’ve visited hundreds of schools across America from Maine to Florida to California. As a writer and as a visiting author, I consider engaging with students and teachers, and walking their hallways, to be an important and inspiring part of my life. Because of this, eight or so of my books have school settings. Additionally, several of my historical picture books mention school in their stories. And . . .always . . . teachers are my heroes.

In 2012, my husband and I were living in the Washington, D.C. metro area when the tragedy at Sandy Hook began to unfold on a December school morning at 9:35 a.m.

After hearing the terrible news, I recall standing outside of Union Station and looking at the American flags fluttering in the breeze around the entrance drive. And I thought about all the students and all the first graders I’d had the honor of meeting during my author visits. That very December, our oldest grandchild was a first grader – in Colorado.

Since that day, I’ve kept a list of the names of the Sandy Hook first graders near my desk. And on that paper are the names of the teachers and principal lost that morning. Over the years, while our country rushed ahead into the future, the list was my steady way of remembrance. As we sadly know, other tragic school shootings have followed.

Both of our daughters (one is a teacher) have children of school age . . . and each morning when they drop off our grandkids at school in Denver and Atlanta, there are hugs or quick goodbyes with everyone ready for the adventure of the day.

All of us – you in the teaching community – and I as a visitor walking across countless school parking lots to enter through those front doors, have seen this same morning interaction: the goodbyes and the love, between parents and their children, before the day unfolds for teachers and students.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past few weeks about Renee Good – born in Colorado Springs – who was fatally shot in Minneapolis on January 7 after dropping off her 6 year-old son Timmy at his school.

January 7 was a Wednesday, and I assume it was a normal post-holiday vacation morning for Timmy as he said goodbye to his mom . . . a boy who had lost his father just two years before. Timmy probably entered his school with a sense of safety and familiarity and walked up the hall to his kindergarten room, maybe with classmates in their puffy winter coats beside him, chattering away with their backpacks full of kindergarten dreams . . . or maybe Timmy was alone as he hurried up the hall. Sixyear-olds always have an energy and an eagerness in their steps, yes?

I don’t know the name of Timmy’s teacher . . . or what that teacher’s classroom looks like. I don’t know anything about Timmy’s school.

I only know that Timmy’s mother, an English major who wrote poetry, was shot in the head at 9:37 a.m. Central Time . . . while Timmy was in his classroom, or maybe he was lining up with other kindergarteners to go to Library or Art.

What was he doing in that tragic moment . . . in the routine of a school morning . . . snow scattered across the landscape outside his classroom windows?

In that moment, at 9:37 a.m., Timmy’s entire educational life was a bright horizon before him.

This winter . . . kindergarten.

Then next year . . . first grade!

Each year unfolding into the upper grades.

On January 7, Timmy’s future held many teachers . . . waiting for him in their classrooms in the years to come.

I can only imagine the deep caring and love that any teacher must offer to a student who has lost his or her parent. My own dad at age 12 and his younger brother at 11 lost their father to a sudden heart attack. I’ve never reflected until today, while writing this post, on what teachers at Beechwood Elementary during that week in 1931 said to the two Walker brothers when they returned to school after the days of mourning an unexpected death.

What are the words to offer a child who is stricken with shock or grief or fear?

Thank goodness that today, in 2026, we have school counselors across the nation who have the training and the hearts to bring comfort and courage to bereaved students and their teachers.

Perhaps some of you have had to be that teacher . . . enveloping your students with compassion and patience after they’ve endured a loss at a young age.

The news stories and the politicians will debate videos and accounts and the sad moments before and after what happened at 9:27 a.m. Central Time to a 37-year-old Minneapolis mom, born in Colorado.

But we, those who will attend CCIRA in February, work in schools. It’s a true honor to learn with, and from, children. Each school morning, we walk down hallways echoing with the voices of our staff and our students.

And sometimes we walk past the classrooms of kindergarteners who are just learning what the routines and rhythms of education are all about.

We’ll remember not the politics of January 7, 2026 but in our hearts we’ll carry Timmy’s teachers, our colleagues who’ll be beside him in the days and years to come as he continues his journey of education.

And I will say prayers of thanksgiving that TEACHERS are the ones who shine lights of hope and healing in this world. Your weekdays are crammed minute by minute – and with schedules and responsibilities that neighbors and family have no clue about.

On this January Sunday, as the predicted big snow (yes, it is now here!) is sweeping across many states and school parking lots, I offer you no strategies for reading, no wise words from my work as the author of 33 children’s books.

But I thank you for being dedicated teachers – who show up on school mornings before your students are dropped off by their moms and dads with a hug or a smile or words of love.

Thank you for your classrooms, your dedication, and your passion. Let us all together beam courage across the snowy miles to Minnesota to bring healing to Timmy and to the staff at his school. In this moment on a school morning, in this one historic and tragic moment, you too, are this boy’s teacher.

I look forward to meeting you this February in Denver . . . and thanking you in person for your life work with America’s children, leading them to literacy with love.

“To consider yourself a writer as you move about the world is . . .a beautiful way to live, a form of open-mindedness, even in terrible times. Here life is, going on all around. It is a form of writing itself; if you do it, you are a writer. It’s likely to lead to putting words down on a page, at least a few, but even if it doesn’t, it can make you feel alive. Lucky. Luck you can make yourself.” – Elizabeth McCracken from A LONG GAME – Notes on Writing Fiction

Louise Borden graduated from Denison University with a degree in history. She taught first graders and preschoolers and later was a part-owner of a bookstore in Cincinnati, Ohio. In addition to writing children’s books, she also speaks regularly to young students about the writing process. Her books include Good Luck, Mrs. K!, which won the Christopher Medal, and The A+ Custodian. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and you can visit her at LouiseBorden.com.

by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, 2026 Conference Featured Author

Right now, as millions flirt with AI partners, discuss suicide with ChatGPT, doomscroll, laugh at fake videos of bunnies jumping on trampolines, soothe loneliness by talking with Alexa, and settle in for hours of gaming in both dingy basements and luxurious leather chairs, snow falls softly outside. One cardinal swoops across a cold winter sky.  This small, feathered flash of red may go unnoticed though; many of us are looking at digital windows instead of out of glass ones. Our bodies are in the real world, but our minds are in the cloud. 

As writing teachers, we show our charges how to analyze mentor texts, try craft moves, and study sentence structure. And while writing craft matters, it is important to remember that literature does not exist to be deconstructed. We humans write to share ideas, explore feelings, teach concepts, tell stories, and express opinions. Humans write to connect with other humans. Artists write and paint and dance and sing about their ideas. Yet often, our young writers lament, “I don’t have any ideas.”

In this very-virtual time in history, we must remind our students that the concrete world of our senses is a meaningful and worthwhile place to spend time and examine. It is our job as teachers of writing to help students find ideas by (re)connecting them to the actual, physical world of planet earth. How do we help our digital-native students believe they can conjure and elaborate on their own ideas without relying on Gemini?

Turn Tech Off When Not in Use – We can turn interactive whiteboards on when we use them and turn them off when we are finished using them. This models intention – we turn technology on when we need to use it. Screens need not constantly stare at us.

Read Books Straight Through – We can read whole poems and books straight through, allowing students to get lost in texts. By reading whole texts aloud, we give students new worlds to inhabit and imagine. Listening to whole texts focuses and lengthens attention and builds empathy. We can always return to these texts later to evaluate craft moves or character traits.

Visit Nature Outside – We can take children outside to make shadows, gather oak leaves, watch a robin look for worms, reminding these children that our world is beautiful, interesting, and worth learning about. We can teach them the names of a few local plants and animals so that they will recognize and care about these plants and animals as fellow living things.

Bring Nature Inside – We can set up a wee nature table, inviting students to share found shells and stones and pinecones, helping them notice and wonder about pocket-sized, free treasures. Many of the best treasures, after all, are free, and free is for everyone.

Keep Notebooks – We can write for a few minutes each day, by hand, in paper notebooks. By doing so, we help students develop agency as they realize one need not be plugged in to create. Writing in notebooks, students realize that thoughts come through the motion of a hand on the blankness of a page with the inkness of a pen.

Be Present – We can turn our own phones off when in our students’ presence. When we do this, we silently say, “I will not be distracted from this important time we have together.”

Make Art – We can make things with our hands, folding origami stars or painting with watercolors during a ten minute transition. Students deserve to know that their growing bodies can manipulate materials in the 3-D world as well as their thumbs can manipulate pixels in the 2-D world.

Make Peace with Quiet – We can provide a few moments of quiet, allowing students to put their heads down or close their eyes or breathe deeply. While they (and we) may be uncomfortable at first, they (and we) will come to trust that every quiet space need not be filled with beeping and Googling. Brains think new thoughts when given such space. 

Engage Students’ Senses – We can offer our students tiny sensory experiences: smelling cinnamon, touching sheepskin, tasting cider. While video game characters fly and shoot aliens, human bodies touch and taste and smell and hear and see. We cannot control the hours of online time students spend at home, but we can feed their senses as we look at light through a prism or pass around a scrap of velvet. We can remind students that human beings have senses and that ideas come through these senses.

Listen and Model – When students say “I don’t know what to write,” we can listen. Rather than suggesting topics, we can share bits of our own real lives and pages from our own paper notebooks, modeling how we find ideas through the act of writing, modeling how we allow our thinking to change and do not expect perfect ideas to arrive fully formed.  We can trust that – through our trust – young writers can and will welcome ideas of their own.

Yes, AI is everywhere. Yes, many parents know students’ grades before students do, and many young people are digitally tracked wherever they go. Yes, children and adults both play hours of video games daily. Yes, it is difficult to know what is real and what is not real online. It’s all true. But so are cardinals true. So is snow true. And a most precious role of the writing teacher is to point to cardinals, to encourage students to touch snow. For real.

For ideas’ sake.

Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is author of several poetry and picture books for children, including Forest Has a Song, With My Hands: Poems About Making Things,Write! Write! Write!, and her latest, The Sound of Kindness. A former elementary school teacher and longtime writing teacher with a master’s degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, Amy is also author of the professional book Poems Are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres. She has blogged for children at  The Poem Farm since 2010 and is interested in your ideas about keeping it real in education. Find Amy online HERE, and watch for her forthcoming book, John and Betsy, a story told through poems.