The Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking greatly appreciates the invitation from The Francis W. Parker School in Chicago to host a day of IWT Core Workshops on Friday, January 24, 2020.
Further information about the Francis W. Parker School can be found at
https://www.fwparker.org/
This workshop is an introduction to IWT's core writing-based teaching practices. The day is composed of sessions focusing 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, particularly when it comes to the role writing plays in their own classroom(s). IWT workshops are fully experiential, bringing together a range of teachers to 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 produce 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workshop offers an introduction to writing strategies that help students gain a better understanding of complex ideas, historical documents, literary texts, and mathematical problems. In other words, this workshop offers faculty models for how to implement writing practices into discipline-specific classrooms. 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. This workshop focuses on ways to use writing to develop an understanding of a text, a first step in creating finished 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 listening exist in relation to one another and to writing.
“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 of developing good questions and creating writing assignments for inside and outside the classroom.
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 though an explanation, or carrying out an experiment.
