What should writing teachers know? is a question that has not been finally answered. From our experience in two NEH-sponsored Institutes for the Teaching of Writing, we believe that a pre-service or in-service program for writing teachers, whether at the secondary or college level, should train writing teachers to be writers and to be editors. In this position, we find ourselves agreeing with James Moffett, Barrett Mandel, Donald Murray, and Peter Elbow-and disagreeing with those who, with Richard Gebhart, argue that writing teachers should know quite a lot about linguistics, invention theory, rhetorics new and old, and the history of the language. Our differences with the latter group are not absolute, but a matter of emphasis. Writing teachers should know everything; that is understood. But if there is not infinite time to learn, and there never is, then a program director must make choices. Our experience with the institutes suggests that actual writing and editing should be the core of a training program for writing teachers. The Institutes for the Teaching of Writing were Extended Teacher Institutes, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1978 and again in 1981, forty-two secondary school English teachers came to the University's campus for sixweek summer sessions. At the center of the summer program were two complementary units that proved to be effective and could easily be replicated. The first, and perhaps the most important, was a writing program for the teachers. During the summer sessions each teacher was expected to write for at least eight hours each week. The writing was to be expository-no novels or short stories or poems or plays, but practically anything else. Furthermore, the writing was not to be teacher-writing: no curriculum plans or incipient textbooks. The teachers were to be writers, and they were to work in the kinds of expository writing they often expected of their students. The teachers were to bring all of their writing to a weekly 45-minute tutorial with one of the Institute's staff members. To this tutorial the teacher brought all writing-rough drafts, notes, aborted beginnings, sketches-whatever the