July Workshops

This workshop provides an opportunity and space in which participants reflect on the way they teach writing, and they are introduced to IWT’s basic writing practices. The daily sessions focus on such topics as invention strategies, coaching the writing process, and revision. The workshop also addresses the questions and concerns that our teacher-participants bring with them.

Because teachers often work alone, without the support of a vital learning community, and often have little opportunity to write in or out of the classroom, the work-shop is communal and collaborative. Teachers write together, exchange ideas, and respond to one another’s work. Through these activities, they become more aware of the composing process and of their students’ struggles to acquire the ability to pro-duce expressive, well-developed, and engaged writing. This workshop is for secondary and college teachers of language arts, English, and composition. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand how writing generates thinking are also invited to participate.

This workshop offers writing strategies that help students gain a better understanding of complex ideas, historical documents, literary texts, and mathematical problems. These writing practices, which can be used in the classroom or for homework assignments, support close reading of documents and literary texts; allow students to make personal connections to people, places, and events they study; and encourage students to learn from one another. Working together on pertinent texts, teachers experiment with the use of student journals and classroom writing assignments to stimulate engagement with the language, ideas, and issues relevant to their subjects. This workshop focuses on ways to use writing to develop an understanding of a text, a first step in creating finished literary essays, critical analyses, or research papers. Participants explore how writing-to-learn practices invite us to reconsider how we teach—to explore how the academic lecture, collaborative learning, and the act of lis-tening exist in relation to one another and to writing.

As the country becomes more openly partisan, the salvation of our democracy may lie in the independence and the integrity of the court system. Following a series of IWT collaborations with the Historical Society of the New York Courts, this workshop approaches historical study from the perspective of justice and the law. Using IWT practices, this workshop will help us grapple with the complexities and the critical importance of a democratically functioning government. We will model writing-to-read strategies for analyzing such primary texts as the United States Constitution and the writings of Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King. This workshop includes sessions on creating writing assignments for students and developing classroom strategies for making the rigorous study of history engaging, challenging, and fun.

“Considering the vast differences between those who attended high school in 1917 and the near-universal enrollments of today, the stability of students’ ignorance is amazing,” Sam Wineburg writes in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. “The whole world has turned on its head, but one thing has stayed the same: kids don’t know history.” Through a focus on case studies in American history, participants will work experientially to consider how we might engage students in an understanding of how the past is constructed and how historians work. In other words, this workshop moves from US history into larger historical realms, asking the question, how do we get students to know history? Just as the excitement of studying science comes from conducting experiments, from learning how scientists make discoveries and verify data, the pleasure of studying history comes from learning how historians think about the past. Many imaginative teaching strategies enrich and enliven students’ curiosity about the past. Writing is the least used and yet perhaps the most versatile of these strategies, since it allows students to discover a world that differs from the present and to appreciate different—and often conflicting—interpretations of key moments that shaped the world we live in today.

This workshop is designed for teachers who are familiar with the invention strategies introduced in Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn (or in similar workshops elsewhere) and who want to concentrate on helping students write essays. More than other IWT workshops, Inquiry into Essay focuses on the analytic essay as a finished product, emphasizing ways to pull together fragments of good writing and information into a coherent whole. The workshop begins by defining the essay, considering how its definition changes according to the purpose and content of the writing assignment. Through their writing, participants explore the differences between the capacity for invention required for informal essays and the knowledge of conventions required for the academic essay. Working on their essays, participants observe how inquiring habits of mind help determine the shape of what they write.

This workshop is offered in response to requests from teachers who would like to give time to their own writing within a congenial community. Working independently, with partners, or in writing groups, on fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, participants have an opportunity to write, read, and reflect in beautiful surroundings. Anyone who would like to generate new writing and/or develop and refine their poetry or prose is welcome. Part of the retreat ethos is to offer the space for writers—new and experienced—to build confidence and explore and generate work, while also discussing revision strategies with supportive colleagues. Evening readings by participants and guests provide further enrichment. Spending the week immersed in writing and the writing process will help participating writer-teachers to imagine new ways to teach their own students narrative structures, characterization, active listening, and new strategies for responding to writing.
 
Previous participation in Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn is a prerequisite.  

Focusing on mathematical and scientific texts, this workshop presents writing strategies that help students gain a better understanding of complex ideas. Specific STEM-related writing practices, which can be used in the classroom or homework assignments, support close reading of texts of all genres and allow students to make personal connections to the numbers, formulas, and scientific cases and experiments they study. Working together on pertinent texts and activities, teachers experiment with the use of student journals and classroom writing assignments to stimulate engagement with the language, ideas, and mathematical or scientific practices relevant to the subjects they teach. This workshop focuses on ways to use writing to develop understanding—an important first step in learning to be more conscious and reflective of the process of mathematical proof or scientific experimentation. Participants also explore how writing-to-learn practices invite us to reconsider how we teach—to explore how the academic lecture, collaborative learning, and the act of listening exist in relation to one another and to writing in the classroom.

Teachers see the potential of IWT practices for improving student writing, thinking, and learning and they look forward to using them in their classrooms, but teachers can also leave the workshop with questions about applications: How do I sequence several writing practices—such as focused free writing, double-entry notebooks, believing and doubting—around a text or group of texts? How can a set of integrated writing-based lessons make room for lecture, small group work, and quizzes? What happens if I do not have students read their writing in class; should I assign writing as homework? How can I align IWT writing practices with discrete skills building, course objectives, and/or state standards across all subject areas or disciplines?
 
This workshop addresses the challenges teachers face when they seek to implement IWT writing practices in their classroom. Workshop sessions offer opportunities to create, model, and critique lesson plans designed to use specific writing-to-learn practices to meet pedagogical objectives. Participants also explore how to develop les-son plans that support the goals of the Common Core through writing-to-learn and writing-to-read strategies in language arts, social studies/history, and science. Previous participation in a weeklong IWT workshop is a prerequisite for attending this workshop.

Everyone—inside and outside the academic community—has an opinion about grammar. Parents, CEOs, and, of course, teachers worry that students graduate from high school and college without understanding the rules of grammar. But what does it mean to know grammar? If it were simply a matter of learning rules, teachers would not be struggling to correct grammar in paper after paper. In any case, basic grammatical rules don’t stick. This workshop looks at both the philosophical and the practical questions surrounding the teaching of grammar, investigating connections between philosophical and pedagogical approaches. What assumptions about writing’s relationship to grammar do we bring to our teaching of both grammar and writing? Using diverse literary texts and our own writing, we will ask what grammar is, what it is for, how it contributes to the making of meaning and to creative expression, and how it can be taught using the fluid models for teaching writing that we value. Participants learn practical approaches to teaching grammar that do not focus on rules so much as incorporate them into students’ intuitions and habits as writers. This workshop is for any teacher who addresses issues of grammar in their classes as well as for teachers of English, composition, and grammar.  Previous participation in Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn is a prerequisite.

While we can all recognize good academic writing, especially in our own disciplines, it is more difficult to establish reasonable and professionally-responsible standards for students’ academic papers. This workshop helps to bridge that gap. This workshop explores what we value in academic writing, re-examines how we define it, and offers writing to learn methods for teaching students how to use sources, pose key questions, and make mindful connections to the topic or text. The workshop consists of reading a range of academic papers, writing in response to sources (data, images, etc.) in our own disciplines, and sharing ideas about what high school and college students need to learn.  In the process of these activities, participants come to better understanding of what good academic writing is and how they can best prepare their students to engage research and writing.  

Creative nonfiction reports back to us from what we call the real world, its subject matter “documentable. . . as opposed to ‘invented’ from the writer’s mind,” as Barbara Lounsberry puts it. Its subgenres are many: the personal essay; the essay of place; nature writing; family portraits; memoir; and writing about war, travel, adventure, food, and the like. Creative nonfiction tells stories based in fact, often heavily researched, but always filtered through the lens of what Joan Didion calls “the implacable ‘I’,” and crafted with tools borrowed from fiction’s toolbox: narrative voice, character, plot, description, dialogue. What good creative nonfiction offers, writes David Foster Wallace, is “clarity, precision, plainness, lucidity, and the sort of magical compression that enriches instead of vitiates. . . . It serves as models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways—ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the overall roar.”
 
We will begin to experience the particular richness and variety of creative nonfiction in the short texts we will read. Writers include Susan Sontag, Teju Cole, Natalia Ginzburg, Richard Rodriguez, Luc Sante, Zadie Smith, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, among others. In the short texts we’ll write during the workshop, we will focus on how these writers operate within their subgenre. We’ll use their works as a springboard into our own creative nonfictions, keeping in mind how we might teach our students to do the same.