IWT at Your School

Writing and Thinking

This workshop is a good starting point for faculty who are mostly new to IWT writing practices and who wish to focus on how they guide students through the writing process. This foundational workshop introduces participants to IWT’s writing-based teaching practices, while giving participants an opportunity to reflect on how they approach their own writing, as well as how they teach writing. The goal is to create, nurture, and sustain a writing-based classroom. The workshop is communal and collaborative: teachers read and write together, exchange ideas, and respond to one another’s work. Through these activities, teachers become more aware of the scaffolding behind the composing process and better perceive the roots of their students’ struggles to produce expressive and engaged writing. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand how shared writing practices can generate rich thinking and learning are invited to participate

Writing to Learn

This workshop is a good starting-point for multidisciplinary groups of faculty who are mostly new to IWT writing practices and who wish to focus on how writing-based teaching practices can enrich learning in different subject areas. Like Writing and Thinking, Writing to Learn introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing-based teaching practices, but with a particular emphasis on their application to specific disciplines. This workshop models writing strategies that help students explore a variety of texts such as historical primary sources, literary texts, essays from the social sciences, and STEM texts. These writing-to-learn practices support close reading, encourage students to learn from one another, and help students make personal connections to the people, places, and concepts they study. We will explore how writing-to-learn practices can reshape how we teach and how the academic lecture, collaborative learning practices, and the act of listening can reinforce one another within the classroom.

Writing with (and without) AI

The Quest in the Question: Crafting Prompts for Writing-Based Learning

Students can spot a question with a right answer from a mile away. At the same time, an entirely open-ended prompt can leave students unsure as to whether their responses matter. Between these poles exists a world of open-ended yet purposeful inquiry. In this four-hour workshop, we will respond to, reflect upon, and design “odd-angled” prompts that foster writing-based learning. Rather than inviting students to lead with argument or opinion, an odd-angled prompt guides students (and teachers) to write probingly and playfully, often drawing on the text itself for the terms of inquiry. During a time of curiosity and concern about AI’s influence upon students’ learning, we will consider how authoring our own questions can empower the work of education and self-education. This workshop will examine how odd-angled prompts can create generative uncertainty rather than quick answers and support risk-taking as learners engage with texts, language, and one another.

Thinking Historically through Writing

This workshop is designed for teachers of history, global studies, and social studies. It can serve either as an introductory workshop or as a follow-up to Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn. It introduces participants to writing-to-read strategies for analyzing primary historical documents, secondary texts, and visual artifacts in order to help students learn how historians interpret evidence and construct stories based on their interpretations. How can teachers help students encounter historical texts in a way that makes them more nuanced, critical readers of history? More important, how can teachers help students see that history is relevant to them personally—that they operate within a historical context and have the power and agency to make historical change? This workshop will explore writing as a means to help students gain a richer appreciation of the past, to discover a world that differs from the present, and to grapple with different—and sometimes conflicting—interpretations of key moments in history.

Writing to Learn in the STEM Disciplines

In STEM classes, writing is most often used to assess what students know (or don’t know) on tests, reports, and assignments. By contrast, this workshop focuses on using writing as a tool for constructing knowledge. We will introduce writing practices that help students find points of entry into challenging texts and concepts, interrogate their understanding, even when it is still fuzzy or mistaken, and revise their thinking. Working together, participants write in response to playful and exploratory prompts that approach science and math as open-ended, experimental, and collaborative. In addition, we will explore how writing practices can deepen engagement and spark curiosity: strengthening students’ capacity to solve problems, reasoning through explanations, or carrying out experiments.

Revolutionary Grammar   

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. Note: Revolutionary Grammar requires at least two days as an on-site workshop.

Reflective Writing for Agency, Equity, and Community

In How We Think (1910), John Dewey writes that when we are faced with a difficulty or dilemma, “we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another.” We achieve this more commanding view through our capacity for reflective thinking, which helps us recognize not only how concepts connect to one another, but also how we, as learners, relate to those concepts. Process writing, a cornerstone of IWT’s writing-based teaching, is an essential reflective practice. We make space for reflection at the end of most writing sequences; it is an opportunity to assess how our initial thoughts have evolved by exploring them in writing and by hearing the writing of our peers. We flip through the pages in our notebooks and trace our steps back through the movement of our minds to understand both process and content. Reflection paves the way for us to approach the next learning experience with a better sense of how we make meaning; it sharpens critical thinking and normalizes struggle. This workshop will investigate the principles and practices of metacognitive writing and focus on how to make process writing integral to our teaching. We will interrogate our goals as educators, and explore how reflective practices can foster equity and community in our classrooms. We will work across genres and disciplines, exploring how reflective practices can enrich both academic and creative writing. From small-scale daily work to playful and collaborative activities that promote democratic learning communities, we will explore what can happen when we make reflection central to our students’ learning.

Which workshop should we start with?

In most cases, if teachers are new to IWT writing-based teaching methods, we suggest beginning with Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn. Our discipline-specific workshops can also be tailored to first-time participants. See the workshop descriptions below or reach out to us by phone or email to discuss what option works best for you.

What is the difference between a one-, two- or three-day on-site workshop? 

The main difference is the depth and range of practices that can be introduced. Because workshops model collaborative reading and writing practices, the pace is intentionally slow. When possible, we recommend beginning with a two-day workshop. One-day workshops typically begin with exploratory writing and writing-to-read strategies, whereas two- and three-day workshops might also explore the drafting and revision process. International on-site workshops are usually four or five days long.

What workshops do you offer online?

All our workshops can be offered both in person and online. Please contact us to inquire about workshops with a particular focus on online and hybrid teaching modalities.

Can I bring one of your Writer as Reader or July Weeklong Workshops to my school?

Yes! We are happy to discuss how we might adapt one of our Writer as Reader workshops or July Workshops for your faculty.