Dear Quest Teacher Coaches,

We hope to be back to a live event next year, but we're grateful for the ability to hold a virtual competition in 2022! We know it's an unpredictable, chaotic year for everyone, especially our beloved teacher coaches who volunteer many hours of their time--an unbelievably generous sacrifice in the best of years.

We love you! Thank your for supporting Utah English Quest! Thank you for giving your students this opportunity to shine! Quest would be impossible without you. (And we mean literally impossible--in the literally-est literal sense of the word literal.)

We see you juggling an incomprehensible workload during this third year of pandemic teaching, and we carefully considered how we could hold Quest 2022 while keeping things as manageable as possible for our teacher coaches.

Our solution?

In 2022, we're scaling back the usual 20 English Quest competitions down to only 4 writing categories. As these prompts are aligned with ELA standards taught across Utah's secondary classrooms, we encourage you to use these for full-class instruction if they fit into your existing writing curricula. (Need a sub plan? Stepping in for a colleague who didn't have time to make a sub plan? These prompts have got you covered!)

The changes for this year mean:

• You will only need to register your school--no individual student registrations required.

• No scheduling busses, checking eligibility for travel, or sub planning. Quest 2022 is completely virtual!

• No keeping track of which three competitions your 40 individual students are competing in. (Ditch that complicated spreadsheet!)

• Minimal rubrics and instructions--and they're available NOW on this website!

• No reading lists to distribute (This one kinda hurts, if we're being honest. We hope it gives you time to read something that makes you happy!)

• Only four competitions (and you set the boundaries for students submitting at your school):

  • • • Argument

      • Personal narrative

      • Poetry

      • Short Story

• You will select and submit up to your maximum number of student writing entries (entry cap TBD depending on how many schools participate), and you're done!

  • • • Students whose work you submit to the competition will receive personalized feedback on their submissions by preservice teachers overseen by veteran ELA educators.

Are you ready for more good news? After 16 years of your support for Quest, it's time we did something to support you in year 17. We're pairing with our featured author, Jill Bowers, to bring you some ready-to-use ELA teaching resources. We can't wait for you to see these! If you're a Quest advisor, we'll be sending them to your inbox when they're ready!

Much love from us to you. We hope to see you again in person for Quest 2023!

Kim Irvine, Jessica Rivera-Mueller, and Angela Woiwode

Your Quest Chair Team