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Main Image for July Weeklong Workshops

July Weeklong Workshops

July Weeklong Workshops

Sunday, July 13 – Friday, July 18, 2025
Registration is now open!

The July weeklong workshops help teachers deepen their understanding of writing-based teaching, its theory and practices, and its application in the classroom. Each workshop focuses on a particular form of writing—the essay, academic paper, creative nonfiction—or on writing-based teaching in a particular subject area, such as history, science and math, or grammar.
 
The workshops offer a retreat in which participants learn new writing practices, read diverse texts, and collaborate with teachers from around the world on the Bard College campus. The luxury of time helps us envision how we might make these new practices our own by adapting writing prompts, accommodating collaborative learning in larger classes, and incorporating new readings. We also explore how different forms, such as poetry, might inspire students from diverse backgrounds.
 
During the week, teachers live in private dorm rooms on the Bard campus, eat meals together, and enjoy the beautiful setting and lively atmosphere of Annandale-on-Hudson in the summer. Workshop groups meet for 14 sessions, beginning Sunday evening. Subsequently, groups meet three times a day between 9 am and 4 pm, except Wednesday and Friday, the final day, when workshops conclude at 1 pm. Workshops are capped at 15 participants.
 
The schedule gives participants time to explore the scenic Mid-Hudson Valley and take advantage of lovely walking paths and Bard’s recreational facilities, including the Stevenson Athletic Center swimming pool, tennis and squash courts, and fitness center. The Bard SummerScape festival showcases an extraordinary program of performing arts and an international roster of acclaimed artists. For more information and to reserve tickets, visit fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape.

Workshop descriptions below. 

2025 July Weeklong Workshops

Click to read descriptions of our 2025 workshops

Writing and Thinking

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 and how they teach writing. The goal of the work is to create, nurture, and sustain a writing-based classroom. Sessions focus on writing practices, engagement with texts, revision strategies, and developing learning communities in the classroom. The workshop is purposely 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. Together, we discover how writing generates equity, community, and responsibility within a classroom. 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 multidisciplinary: it will draw on a variety of works that might include historical sources and literary and scientific texts. Writing to Learn introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing-based teaching practices with a particular emphasis on their application to specific subject areas and disciplines. The central focus is modeling lively and collaborative ways to use writing to explore texts, pose questions, and scaffold discussions of complex concepts by connecting seemingly disparate sources. Working together, we consider how writing-to-learn practices can transform how our students navigate challenges, develop agency, and share in the joy of discovery.
 

Writing for Active Listening

Active listening is central to the work we do as teachers. In this workshop, we will focus on student-to-student active listening and how it builds toward meaningful discussions and equitable classroom cultures. Listening is a crucial component of healthy classroom dialogue, and yet students’ attention is often focused on how to speak and respond. We will use writing-rich practices to explore strategies that can help students value comprehension, understanding, and empathy-led inquiry. We will explore how writing practices can build students’ intellectual confidence and trust in themselves and others, while fostering more balanced class participation. This workshop is multidisciplinary, and teachers of all subjects are invited to participate. Together, we will read, write, and listen—deeply, purposively—to one another as we consider ways to support our students’ learning.

The Academic Essay in the Age of AI

The teaching of academic writing has entered a new era. Whether you consider ChatGPT an innovative tool, a fast track to plagiarism, or something in between, its impact on our classrooms is undeniable. This workshop will model how teachers can use in-class writing practices to help students articulate their own thoughts and questions as a starting point to researching, writing, and revising academic papers. We will explore strategies for crafting complex and insightful questions, assessing and evaluating primary and archival sources, and making personal connections to a topic. In the process, we will contemplate the role of the author in academic writing, and consider the possibilities and potential dangers of ChatGPT and other AI writing programs. Participants will craft their own essays, drawing on collaborative practices for drafting and peer feedback.

 

Thinking Historically through Writing

This workshop explores a variety of writing-based teaching practices that help students make personal and probing connections with historical texts and narratives. Participants will explore how writing-based teaching helps students to become more nuanced, critical readers of history, allowing them to discover a world that differs from the present and to appreciate different, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of the past. This year, the workshop will also grapple with how Generative AI is transforming the discipline and the teaching of history. Our focus will be primary sources, the “raw materials” of history. The workshop will model thoughtful, playful ways to work closely with primary sources as fascinating windows onto the past. We will also practice the skills of critical scrutiny that can help students use their best possible judgment to discern between authentic historical sources and the proliferation of AI-produced “historical” images. Finally, we will consider how teachers can lead transparent, constructive conversations about using AI in historical research and learning.

Funded in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program

Creative Nonfiction: Life Writing

Creative nonfiction reports back to us from what we call the real world, telling 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. Its subgenres are many: the personal essay; the essay of place; nature writing; memoir; writing about war, travel, adventure, food, and more. We will examine the particular richness and variety of creative nonfiction through short texts, then use these texts as a springboard into our own creative nonfictions, keeping in mind how we might teach our students to do the same.

Writing and Thinking for Middle School Teachers (New!)

This foundational workshop introduces participants to IWT’s writing-based teaching practices, with a focus on how they can best serve middle school teachers and students. The goal of the work is to create, nurture, and sustain a writing-based classroom. Workshops will explore the movement from idea to sentence, and from paragraph to essay, while simultaneously developing learning communities in the classroom. The workshop is purposely 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 writing process and better perceive the roots of their students’ struggles to produce clear and expressive writing. Together, we discover how writing promotes equity, community, and responsibility within a classroom. Middle school teachers of all subjects who want to understand how shared writing practices can generate rich thinking and learning are invited to participate.

Funded in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program


 

Writing to Learn in the STEM Disciplines

This workshop introduces writing-to-learn strategies that help students develop their understanding of complex ideas in science and mathematics. In STEM classes, writing is most often used to assess what students know (or don’t know) on tests, lab reports, and assignments. By contrast, this workshop focuses on using writing as a tool for constructing knowledge. It introduces writing practices that help students find points of entry into challenging texts and concepts, interrogate their understanding when it is still fuzzy, tentative, or mistaken, and revise their thinking. Working together, participants write in response to playful and exploratory prompts that build classroom community and approach science for what it is: open-ended, experimental, and collaborative. In addition, we will explore how writing practices can deepen engagement and spark curiosity, an important first step in the process of solving a problem, reasoning through an explanation, or carrying out an experiment.

Teaching the Multimodal Essay (New!)

Multimedia texts—video essays, podcasts, cultural reportage, and graphic journalism—are powerful mediums for students to explore and reflect on the world around us. Through close reading and shared writing in response to a wide variety of sources, we will create cross-disciplinary essays that consider how digital and multimodal texts expand our understanding of what counts as literacy. This workshop will use hybrid tools to deepen engagement and help students recognize and harness their own diverse literacies. It seeks to redefine the traditional essay through hybrid narratives which communicate ideas and information while enhancing students’ engagement in the classroom led by their own voice and curiosity.

Funded in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program

Registration and Fees

  • Tuition
    Standard Fee: $3,300
    Includes workshop tuition, private dorm room, meals, and an anthology of texts. 

    Early-Bird Fee: $2,750
    Tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshops.

    Group Discount Fee: $2,970
    10 percent discount for teams of three or more teachers from the same school.

    Early-Bird Group Discount Fee: $2,475
    10 percent discount for teams of three or more teachers from the same school. All must register by the Early-Bird deadline; tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshops.

    Early-Bird Commuter Fee: $2,420

    Includes workshop tuition and meals. No overnight accommodations. Must register by the Early-Bird deadline; tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshops.

    Commuter Fee: $2,970

    Includes workshop tuition and meals. No overnight accommodations.

    REGISTER TODAY!
  • Credit and Scholarship Opportunities
    The Teresa Vilardi Scholarship
    IWT welcomes scholarship applications from those studying to become teachers (i.e., those registered in Bard’s MAT Program or another accredited program in education) and in-service teachers with limited professional development funds.

    Graduate Credit
    Bard College IWT and the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Bard College have a partnership that allows participants to earn one graduate credit for completing a July Weeklong Workshop, along with a reflection paper and lesson plan that uses writing in the classroom. This credit option costs an additional $900. For details, contact Director of MAT Admission and Student Affairs Cecilia Maple at (845) 758-7145 or [email protected].

    CTLE Credit
    All Bard IWT workshops are Continuing Teacher and Leader Education approved in New York State. The July Weeklong Workshops are 40 CTLE hours.

    APPLY TODAY!

Past July Workshops

Want one of these to be offered again soon? Drop us a line at [email protected]—we'd love to know.

Inquiry into the Essay

This workshop introduces dynamic and generative writing-to-learn practices designed to coach students through the drafting and revision process for analytic essays. To begin, it considers how we define the essay and how this definition can shift according to the purpose and content of the project. Writing together, we experiment with the kinds of exploratory writing that help students find points of entry into challenging texts, explore and articulate their readerly perspective, and affirm their ability to uncover fresh insights. We highlight strategies for pulling together fragments of good writing into a coherent whole, practice the kinds of inventive and exploratory writing that can produce a draft, and explore the use of the conventions that characterize formal writing. Working on their own essays, participants will focus on the creative and collaborative tools for teaching the analytic essay.

Writing and Thinking: Restorative Words, Restorative Practices

Restorative Words, Restorative Practices introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing practices, while giving participants an opportunity to learn how restorative justice can be integrated into their classrooms and learning communities. Rather than solely placing restorative justice outside the classroom, as alternative conflict resolution, we bring RJ principles of community building, accountability, active listening, and shared, empathic learning inside the classroom. In this spirit, workshop sessions relate IWT’s writing-based teaching strategies and restorative justice practices to explore how they support one another. The workshop is multidisciplinary, and we will read and write texts across genres as participants explore their own writing and activities for helping their students’ writing, reflection, and creative and critical thinking. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand restorative justice and how writing generates thinking are invited to participate.

Writing-Based Teaching and Antiracist Pedagogies

This workshop, designed for teachers of all disciplines, uses IWT’s foundational writing practices to see how writing-based teaching can help foster an intentionally antiracist, equitable, and inclusive classroom community. Reading and writing together, participants will examine ways to think about race and identity within our classrooms and practice strategies to support nuanced and thoughtful discussions. We will apply these strategies to other pedagogical practices, such as developing assignments and providing feedback to students. The workshop will model collaborative, interdisciplinary activities that encourage self-reflection, invite active listening, and cultivate a more expansive and inclusive classroom environment.

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? 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 grammar that 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.

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P.O. Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504
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