July Workshops

This workshop introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing practices, while giving participants an opportunity to reflect on how they approach their own writing alongside how they teach writing. Sessions focus on such topics as invention strategies, coaching the writing process, and revision. Because teachers often work without the support of a vital learning community and have little opportunity to write in or outside the classroom, the workshop is purposely 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 produce expressive and engaged writing. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand how writing generates thinking are invited to participate.

Like Writing and Thinking, Writing to Learn introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing practices, but with a particular emphasis on their application to teaching in specific subject areas. This workshop is multidisciplinary: it models writing strategies that help students explore complex ideas in diverse contexts, such as historical sources, literary texts, or mathematical problems. These writing practices support close reading, encourage students to learn from one another, and help them make personal connections to people, places, and concepts they study. The workshop focuses on using writing to build understanding of texts—a crucial first step in creating formal essays or reports. Teachers experiment with in-class writing assignments and student journals to stimulate engagement in their subject areas. Participants explore how writing-to-learn practices can reshape how we teach and how the academic lecture, collaborative learning, and the act of listening exist in relation to one another.

“The whole world has turned on its head, but one thing has stayed the same: kids don’t know history,” writes Sam Wineburg in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. In the classroom, history teachers work with a mix of methods and techniques for giving students basic historical information—the sequence of historical periods; dates of important events; and key figures in social, political, and cultural movements. It is often more difficult, however, to impart an understanding of how the past is constructed and how historians work. How do we get students to “know history”? Just as the excitement of studying science comes from conducting experiments and learning how scientists make discoveries and verify data, the pleasure of studying history comes from learning how historians think about the past.

The workshop focuses on writing-to-read strategies for analyzing primary documents, secondary texts, and visual artifacts so that participants learn how historians interpret evidence and construct stories based on those interpretations. Many imaginative teaching strategies enrich and enliven students’ appreciation of 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 in the past. The workshop includes sessions on developing good questions and creating writing assignments for inside and outside the classroom.

“Climate change is not the concern of just one or two nations,” the Dalai Lama declared at the COP24 UN Climate Conference. “It is an issue that affects the whole of humanity and every living being on this earth.” This workshop will explore how writing-to-learn strategies can help students build their understanding of the urgent, multifaceted, and deeply interdisciplinary topic of global climate change. Participants will work with a range of texts that engage with political, geographical, economic, and scientific aspects of the climate crisis, and explore the pedagogical challenges that arise when teaching current hot-button topics. The workshop will be communal and collaborative: we will write together, exchange ideas, and respond to one another’s work, wading into the complexities of climate change as a team of learners. This workshop is open to teachers of all disciplines.

This workshop is designed for teachers who are familiar with the strategies introduced in Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn (or in similar workshops elsewhere) and who want to focus on helping students write essays. “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 and considers how its definition changes according to the purpose and content of the writing assignment. 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 own 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 devote time to their own writing within a congenial community. Working independently, with partners, or in groups, participants write, read, and reflect in beautiful surroundings. Anyone who would like to generate new writing and/or develop and refine poetry or prose is welcome. Part of the retreat ethos is to create a space for writers—both 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 participants imagine new ways to teach their students narrative structures, characterization, active listening, and strategies for responding to writing. Previous participation in at least one IWT workshop is a prerequisite.

Focusing on mathematical and scientific texts, this workshop introduces writing strategies that help students develop their understanding of complex ideas. STEM-related writing practices, which can be used in the classroom or in homework assignments, support close reading of texts of all genres and help students make personal connections to the problems, formulas, and experiments they study. Working together, teachers experiment with classroom writing assignments to stimulate engagement with the language, concepts, and mathematical or scientific practices in the subjects they teach. This workshop focuses on ways to use writing to build understanding—an important first step in becoming more reflective and engaged in the process of solving a problem, reasoning through an explanation, or carrying out an experiment.

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 practical questions surrounding the teaching of grammar and investigates connections between philosophy and pedagogy. Using diverse literary texts and our own writing, we 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 but rather draw on students’ intuitions and habits as writers. This workshop is for teachers of English, composition, and grammar, and for any teacher who addresses issues of grammar. Previous participation in Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn is a prerequisite for this workshop.

Essay writing is a struggle for many students, and the transition from high school– to college-level expectations often proves to be a particular challenge. This workshop helps to bridge that gap by exploring what we value in academic writing and offering writing-to-learn methods for teaching students how to use sources, pose key questions, and make mindful connections to a topic or text. We will unpack the complexities of reading and research in our respective disciplines, attending to the ways we build meaning and advance academic conversations through inquiry, interpretation, and synthesis. We will explore the questions and trends surrounding academic writing, including the challenges of a shared nomenclature—is it an essay, a paper, or an article?—and the role of the writer’s presence. We will also consider the value of assigning traditional academic assignments (e.g., the term paper or the five-paragraph theme) and consider alternative methods and genres. In the process, participants will come to a better understanding of how they can best prepare their students to engage in research and writing.

Creative nonfiction reports back to us from what we call the real world—its subject matter is “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; writing about war, travel, adventure, food, and more. Creative nonfiction tells stories based in fact, often heavily researched, but always filtered through the lens of what Joan Didion calls “the implacable ‘I’.” It is 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 read. Writers include Susan Sontag, Teju Cole, Natalia Ginzburg, Richard Rodriguez, Luc Sante, Zadie Smith, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, among others, and we will focus on how these writers operate within their subgenre. We will use their works as a springboard into our own creative nonfictions, keeping in mind how we might teach our students to do the same.