Bay Area Writing Project Fostering Connection Conference, 2025

The Personal Creed Organization

UC Berkeley, CA. August 2025 – The Personal Creed Project and The World Wisdom Project

Students’ first need is for a deeper connection with themselves. A few years after I entered the classroom in 1987, California introduced statewide assessments in reflective writing. Inspired, I developed a practice to help students better understand themselves through regular reflection. Over time, this practice evolved into a semester-long sequence of weekly writings I call sustained purposeful reflection, guiding students to explore the people and forces shaping their identities.

With greater self-awareness from these extended reflections, students are ready to meet their need for richer bonds with their classmates and teachers. They gain these connections through a culminating presentation when each student shares:

a) the most significant influences in their life,

b) the values they choose to stand for, and

c) the difference they hope to make in the world.

These presentations become powerful rites of passage, fostering deeper, more meaningful connections than most students have ever experienced with their classmates and even teachers. In directly meeting teenagers’ two primary developmental needs — forming healthy identities and gaining increasing autonomy in relationship with others – this project can both engage/re-engage students in learning and elevate their sense of wellbeing. 

The final student need is for learning broadly across the curriculum. For nine years I shared sophomores with my colleague in our connected cross-curricular program. My friend adapted a parallel approach in his world history classes—inventing the Personal History Project and guiding students to reflect on their personal and historical influences.

Join us for students’ takes on how these practices have transformed their experience of learning. Learn to implement or adapt them with your own students.

We’ll begin our session with an eye-opening video of a presentation showcasing both the self-knowledge a student gained from his reflections, and the deepened connections the process brought him with his classmates.

- John Creger

This session introduces teacher-participants to practices that connect their students with needs too rarely met in school. These practices: nourish their developmental well-being, deepen their academic knowledge and skills, and re-engage students’ interest in learning.

This curriculum includes: Sustained Purposeful Reflection (Personal Creed Project), Full-process Analytical Essays (World Wisdom Project or The Partnership Essay), and Cross-curricular Reflective Practices (The Personal History Project).