10 am – 2:30 pm EST
Check back in October for the list of 2026 workshops!
The New Kinds of Attention online workshop series offers short, accessible introductions to IWT writing-based teaching practices. It is designed for educators who are curious about IWT workshops or looking to expand their writing-based teaching toolkit, including those unable to attend IWT’s on-campus workshops at Bard. The workshops in this series provide an immersive, online introduction to IWT pedagogy and a taste of the experience of our popular July Weeklong Workshops.
In 2026, the series will be held on February 6, February 27, and March 6, from 10 am – 2:30 pm EST, including a 30-minute break. You can find the list of 2025 workshops below.
Stay tuned for updates! Registration will open in late October.
Friday, February 7, 2025
Introduction to Writing and Thinking
This four-hour workshop introduces participants to IWT’s writing-based teaching practices while providing 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. 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 gain more understanding 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.
Introduction to Writing to Learn
This four hour introductory workshop demonstrates IWT’s foundational writing-based teaching practices, with emphasis on their application to texts and concepts in different subject areas. 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. The workshop is multidisciplinary, drawing on a mix of literary, historical, and scientific texts. 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.
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.
Friday, February 28, 2025
Introduction to Thinking Historically through Writing
We all have a tendency to process new information through the lens of our entrenched beliefs and values. This tendency can be particularly visible when students grapple with the challenges posed by historical documents. This four-hour workshop focuses on writing-to-read strategies for analyzing primary and secondary documents and images that help students become more nuanced readers of history. Together, we explore how writing can enliven students’ curiosity about the past and help them appreciate different, and sometimes conflicting, interpretations of key moments in history. Most importantly, these practices help students see that the past is relevant to them personally—that we all operate within historical contexts and have the power and agency to make change.
Writing, Speaking, Listening: Empowering Class Discussions
How can discussion fuel writing? How can writing fuel discussion? This workshop offers teachers a variety of tools for integrating writing and discussion in order to give students more meaningful experiences in the classroom. We will draw on IWT’s foundational writing-based teaching practices, with a particular emphasis on sharing in-class writing as a way to foster lively discussion and include all students’ voices in the conversation. Through a balance of writing and free-flowing discussion, we will model practical tools to invigorate the discourse in our classrooms and create writing assignments that grow out of class discussions. As students discover and exercise their voice, both in writing and in speaking, they can learn to value their own ideas rather than turn to AI as a first step when encountering a difficult or challenging task or assignment.
Writing to Look, Looking to Write
In this workshop, we will practice guided close readings of photographs, paintings, films, sculptures, and other artifacts. We will write to look and look to write, finding connections and correlations between visual and written texts. We will also practice patience, taking the time to sharpen our skills of observation and interpretation as we work together in small groups. Applying writing-to-learn practices to images will help us to reconsider how we teach, and how the act of looking, collaboratively and in conversation, can change how students relate to each other and offer new entry points into classroom topics of all kinds. The practices in this workshop can be adapted to both middle and high school classrooms.
This workshop is supported in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.
Writing with AI
Generative AI like ChatGPT has already disrupted teaching and learning, most visibly in the humanities, but also in computer science and the natural sciences. In this four hour workshop, we will practice strategies to motivate and maintain students’ learning despite their access to a tool that can potentially complete their assignments. We will explore the power of generative AI by writing in collaboration with ChatGPT, consider how to revise assignments and teaching strategies in light of AI writing tools, and work together to develop new approaches that motivate students to do their own thinking on the page.
Friday, March 7, 2025
Writing and Thinking for Middle School Teachers
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.
This workshop is supported in part by the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.
Teaching for Transfer: Helping Students Remember What They Already Know
Teachers across disciplines spend tremendous energy developing lessons and assignments that will help students build new skills, only to find that students seem to “forget” much of what they were taught when confronted with tasks and ideas in new contexts—or even within the same course. This four-hour workshop will draw on current research on the field of learning transfer to help us increase the probability that students will be able to draw on knowledge and skills they have developed under new circumstances. We will explore three key dimensions of learning transfer: identifying key concepts; fostering metacognition, and helping students to develop their own theories of reading and writing. Participants will bring a unit from their curriculum that they would like to encourage transfer to or from. Together, we will find unexplored opportunities to enhance transfer across subjects, disciplines, or years of study.
Teaching the Video Essay
This workshop uses IWT writing-based teaching practices to frame activities and assignments that allow students to compose multimodally. We will focus on video essays, a form that can be exploratory, inquiry driven, or focused in argument. Working with short film essays, we will consider what opportunities they offer for critical and creative close reading, exploration, and storytelling. We will examine together the role of writing in these projects and explore how techniques of montage and collage enable comparison and analysis. Examples of student film essays will provide snapshots of how students are finding new and layered modes of representation that can create an immersive and impactful connection with their audiences.
Cancelled for 2025
Introduction to 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, reason through explanations, or carry out experiments.
Registration and Fees
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TuitionFee: $399
Early-Bird Fee: $350
Register one month prior to the workshop date to qualify for early-bird rates. Tuition must be paid in full prior to the workshop.
Cancellation policy: No refunds will be issued for cancellations made later than one week before the workshop. -
Credit and Scholarship OpportunitiesCTLE Credit
All Bard IWT workshops are Continuing Teacher and Leader Education approved in New York State. An NKOA workshop is 4 CTLE hours.
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 undergraduate or graduate program in education) and in-service teachers with limited professional development funds.
Hear it from our participants
—Writing with AI participant
—Thinking Historically through Writing participant