10 am – 2:30 pm EST
Registration is open! See the full list of workshops below.
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 7, February 27, and March 6, from 10 am – 2:30 pm EST, including a 30-minute break.
You can find the full list of workshops below.
Registration is open.
Friday, February 6, 2026
Empowering Class Discussions: Writing, Speaking, Listening
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 an emphasis on sharing in-class writing as a way to foster lively discussion that includes all students’ voices. 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 challenging task or assignment.
What Essays Teach
As concerns about the influence of generative AI on student writing increase, teachers have the opportunity to rethink what essays can do for learners, both individually and in community. This workshop starts from the belief that essays will continue to have crucial roles to play in education, less as demonstrations of what students already know, and more as sites of practice that let students play out what they would like to know or linger with what troubles and puzzles them. We will engage with the essay as a creative form; with “essaying” as a practice of inquiry for grappling with productive problems; and with “essayism” as a stance that we can cultivate across disciplines. By centering writing practices in how we gather ideas and materials, draft, revise, and share our work with others, we will consider the essay as an evolving space for thinking.
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 wondering 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 on 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.
Saturday, February 7, 2026 (new date!)
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.
Writing with AI
Generative AI has disrupted teaching and learning across disciplines. In this workshop, we will approach generative AI tools with intellectual curiosity as well as caution. How can generative AI be a powerful and playful partner in the classroom? We will write in collaboration with a range of AI tools and consider how to reimagine assignments and teaching strategies. Working together, we will develop approaches that help students to honor their own thinking while using AI thoughtfully, judiciously, and creatively.
Writing for Resilience and Joy
This workshop explores how reflective writing practices can cultivate joy as a form of resilience in our teaching lives and our students' learning lives. We will interrogate the story of educator burnout, exploring our teaching narratives through reflective prompts and short texts from resilience-focused writers such as Ada Limón, Ross Gay, Joy Harjo, and Naomi Shihab Nye. Incorporating moments of embodied learning, we will attend to the connections between joy, physical presence, and movement. We'll develop practical writing-centered teaching strategies for creating joy-centered classroom environments where our students engage in meaningful reflection, building authentic communities that honor the complexity of learning experiences while cultivating joy in both teaching and learning.
Friday, February 27, 2026
How to Respond to Student Writing
Responding to students’ writing is one of the most labor-intensive and often fraught dimensions of our work as teachers. After all, many of us were never taught what makes our responses meaningful and actionable. This workshop will explore how we can foster students’ ability not only to receive our feedback, but also to respond purposefully to one another’s writing. In the process, we will experiment with ways to reduce the volume and raise the quality of our comments so that students are more likely to engage with them in our courses and carry them forward into future writing.
Teaching with Podcasts
Podcasts can be understood as “auditory essays,” layered compositions in which voice and structure shape what listeners pay attention to and understand. Using a variety of writing practices, this workshop examines how podcast creators craft unique voices through their presentation, organization of information, and narrative and stylistic choices. Drawing on a variety of podcast episodes shared in advance, we will explore podcasters’ approaches to inquiry and attend to how they use speech, silence, music, pacing, and editing to tell stories. By the end of the workshop, participants will leave with tools to help students “read” podcasts as multilayered texts and to scaffold podcast assignments that foster close listening, media literacy, and recursive, student-centered composition.
Writing with AI
Generative AI has disrupted teaching and learning across disciplines. In this workshop, we will approach generative AI tools with intellectual curiosity as well as caution. How can generative AI be a powerful and playful partner in the classroom? We will write in collaboration with a range of AI tools such as ChatGPT and Notebook LM and consider how to reimagine assignments and teaching strategies. Working together, we will develop approaches that help students to honor their own thinking while using AI thoughtfully, judiciously, and creatively.
Neurodiverse Voices, Inclusive Classrooms: Writing and Thinking for All Learners
Students arrive in our classrooms with a wide range of cognitive profiles, emotional needs, and processing speeds. As educators committed to writing-based pedagogies, how do we create classrooms that not only include neurodivergent students but also center their strengths, voices, and ways of knowing? Drawing on principles of Universal Design for Learning, we will explore ways to adapt practices such as freewriting, text rendering, and collaborative writing to support varied learning needs and rhythms. The goal is to normalize difference as the very foundation of our teaching. Participants will leave with inclusive strategies and a more expansive understanding of what writing-based teaching can look like.
Friday, March 6, 2026
Introduction to Thinking Historically through Writing
This four-hour workshop will model thoughtful, playful ways to work with primary sources to enliven students’ curiosity and help them become more nuanced readers of history. Participants will explore writing-based practices that help students see the past as personally relevant to them, recognizing that we all operate within historical contexts and have the agency to make change. Finally, as Generative AI transforms the discipline and the teaching of history, the workshop will consider how teachers can lead honest, constructive conversations about using AI in historical research and learning.
Writing-to-Read for Emotional Awareness
Reading well and deeply is a matter not only of the head, but also of the heart. To understand another’s point of view—whether expressed in a work of fiction, a poem, or a historical document—requires emotional awareness: the ability to recognize, name, and work with one’s emotional states in real time. This workshop introduces a range of writing-to-read practices designed to cultivate emotionally attuned readers who not only understand their own feelings in response to a text, but can also use such feelings as starting points for both discussion and analytical writing. Our writing and dialogue will draw on Brené Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, as well as a range of other texts, including Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry and passages from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
The Art of Annotation: Cultivating Thinking on the Page
Annotation, the art of noticing and making meaning on the page, is an important reading and writing activity. In this workshop, we will explore creative annotation strategies that move beyond margin notes and underlining to invite students to think in writing as they read. These activities help build close reading skills, analytical thinking, and genuine engagement with texts. Working with both readings and images, participants will experiment with annotations as a bridge from informal writing to longer pieces of writing, including essays. In the age of AI, annotation is a way to build student confidence about reading and expand their thinking and writing about texts. Open to all disciplines, this four-hour workshop draws on IWT practices to explore a lively range of annotation strategies—collaborative, inventive, and playful—to help us support our students’ learning.
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.
REGISTER TODAY!
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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. NKOA scholarship applications will open in early November; please check back soon.
Hear it from our participants
—2025 New Kinds of Attention participants
"Great facilitator, great participants. I learned a lot about how AI use is impacting other schools and how we all are responding."
"It is clear to me that this style of teaching is all about encouraging students to think deeply about the world by themselves and in community."