A preliminary study examined the experiences and perceptions of experienced teachers about writing and gathered feedback about teaching practices involving direct instruction in process writing. Subjects, 30 experienced elementary teachers enrolled in a graduate-level course on theories of teaching reading and writing, completed a survey about their writing practices and kept a response journal in which they responded to prompts four times during the semester. Results indicated: (1) the majority of subjects did not frequently (daily or weekly) engage in writing activities; (2) writing personal reflections/thoughts was the most frequent creative writing activity; (3) the overwhelming majority indicated a general uneasiness with writing academic texts; (4) the majority of subjects felt comfortable with the process of sharing paper outlines and felt they received valuable feedback from their peers; and (5) most of the subjects perceived themselves to be inadequate writers and expressed feelings of anxiety and frustration when required to write in an academic setting. Findings suggest that if the nature of writing instruction is to change at the classroom level, then teachers need to become writers themselves. (One table of data is included; 14 references, the survey instrument, and the prompts for the response journals are attached.) (RS)